…anyway normally she’d ask for Cinderella or the Care Bears or some Godawful crud like that but tonight she impressed me no end;

“Mommy?” (shouted from the top of the stairs)

“Yes-see?”

“Wanna watch?”

“What you wanna watch?”

“King Arthur.  King of the Brittins!”

Now you’d expect a child of three years of age to produce many clear words relating to stuff she knows through endless practice, but these knocked me for six altogether - turns out she watches this film sometimes with her dad while I’m at work and is well impressed with the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.   I went to the bookshelf and found it - Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. 

She loves this film a little bit too much.

I’m waiting for that day though… that day when I find myself having to man-handle her in the supermarket for wanting to trolleyseat-surf, and for her to shout for all to hear…

“Help! Help! I’m being repressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system!”

Ahh.  It’s good to see the apple hasn’t fallen far from the nnNi.

The latest boo-boo I discovered relates to Bryan Adams.

You know that song ‘Summer of ‘69′?  Of course you do.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this song but I have only just discovered that I was drastically wrong about the lyrics.

I always thought it was a very kinky song with pretty shocking lyrics… I wondered how he got away with it, but hey, there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s worse.  It was only when I picked up a kid and his dad in my taxi yesterday that I realised my mistake.  Turns out this kid loves Bryan Adams, and sang me the first few lines of the song which was highly inappropriate I thought, given that he was singing it in front of his dad… that was, until his dad applauded the effort.  I was disgusted.

Here’s how I thought the lyrics went:

“Got my first real sex-dream, boy I had a fine old time.  Played until my fingers bled… etc.”

Apparently I was wrong.  Very, very wrong.

I knew my neighbour was the same breed of smartarse as myself from the minute I set eyes on her.  We knew that there would be a lot of unwanted information shared between us… our super thrifty local authority houses are separated only by a layer or two of plaster-covered polystyrene from the sounds of it, so we knew to keep the t.v. volume low and be aware of the decibel levels of our arguments.  There is something, however, that is very difficult to keep secret.

1.00am - Thump thump thump etc…

1.15am - Thumpthumpthumpthump *pause* thumpthumpthumpthump etc..

1.30am - Thump.  Thump.  Thump. *groan* Thump. *groan* etc…

… this would carry on for a surprisingly long time and we would try so hard not to listen but you know how it is… there’s always the part of us that didn’t mind listening at all, especially since it let us off the hook in the bedroom accoustics on our own side.  We listened to each other’s love-lives for a full month before anyone had the balls to say anything.

Then it happened.  We met each other on our front-door steps one morning and shared a shmoke, but said nothing.  The atmosphere was pregnant, each of us dying to take the piss.  It just needed one trigger… a badly timed pun would do… anything.

“Took a trip to Bargaintown yesterday and got meself a new three-piece…” my neighbour finally said.  “Got bunk-beds for the kids on order too!”

“Savage… gotta love the bunk beds!”  I said, teetering on the edge of a dirty grin.

“Yeah speaking of beds…” (here we go!) “… Ye wouldn’t push yours about a foot away from the wall, would ye?”

That was it.  We exploded in a torrent of filthy laughter and revelled in each other’s embarrassment and it was good.  The issue did eventually require that we both go out and buy sturdier beds (with obligatory celebratory pint!) and since then it’s been quite peaceful… until last night.

It started at about 3.30am and continued for two hours.  I won’t go into details except to say that it was graphic, and awakened a newfound respect in me for my neighbour’s husband.  He really is a trooper by the sounds of it.

She knew just from the look on my face this morning… that ‘HA!! I’m surprised you can walk!!’ face …that no apology was necessary.

I went into town for a few bits today and had a sudden goo for a burger and a portion of tasty-chips but when I dived into the shop to find my neighbour’s husband waiting to take my order I stopped in my tracks.  I nervously examined the menu for a few seconds and decided to go hungry instead and walked away, for the temptation to enquire after his battered sausage was far too great.

It’s from my Daddyo who at least has the good taste to only forward the good ones.

It’s called the ‘Getting Your Goat’ meme.

The Rules

1. List two things that irritate you for a reason (and list the reason!), and two things that irritate you for no apparent reason whatsoever!!
2. Give credit to the person who tagged you.
3. Link your answers to the original blog.
4. Tag four new people to participate.

YAY!  Everyone appreciates a good opportunity to whinge, well, Irish people do, anyway.

1. Two things that annoy the hell out of me for good reason:

Toy/Miniature dogs: I’m so delighted that I share this one with English Mum.  A Bichon Frise is not a dog.  It is a tampon with teeth.  Maltezers, especially the ones with the ponytails, look stupid and love to Yap into the wee small hours.  I know this because my next-door neighbour has one.  When TAT asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I said ‘a BB gun’ and so he bought me one.  I’m nearly out of bullets but at least I’m getting a lot more sleep!  The Shih-Tzu’s only redeeming feature is that occasionally one will walk over an up-draught ventilator a la Marylin Monroe which is a very entertaining sight indeed.

Stranger than fiction

Packaging:  Foundations that claim to contain ‘nano light-reflecting diamond-chips’ and ‘Micro-Collagen-Spheres’.  Shampoos with extracts of things like fig-leaf and Gogi-berries.  It’s all just the same mix of Cetearyl Alcohol, Benzyl Salicylate and Methylchloroisothiazolinone but with a different smell.  I wish they’d just scrap the bullshit and sell us re-cyclable plain containers instead.  Buggered if I’m paying for your adverstising costs!

Two things that irritate me for no real reason:

Over-acted radio voices/personalities: Mainly two:  Harvey Norman (at least the owner of the advertising voice), or should I scream ‘HAAAAAAVVVIE NOOOOOWWMAN!!!’ should be sacked and given the job of a cricket commentator instead.  Michael McMullen is a sports commentator on Today FM and starts every single bulletin with… ‘Hoooy, Oi’m Moich’l Mok Mulllll’n.’  His accent is a cross between Lloyd Grossman and that of a Blackrock College student and it makes my face feel like it needs to turn inside-out.

Ugg Boots: These are okay on their own, they’re warm and cosy.  I just hate it when they come with grey-hound-skirt wearing slappers.  A girl cakes herself in sparkly makeup, inserts the hair-extensions and breaks out the tiny dress with optimum bling and suddenly realises she’s sending out the wrong impression.  What does she do?  She dons Ugg Boots.  Now she thinks her legs look amazing and men will just think she’s a quirky cutie, but in reality she looks totally fucking ridiculous.  I would love to just walk over to these girls and slap them, I have no idea why.  

2. Credit to Squidward for the meme.

3. Linky hand-shakes to the dude who invented this meme: www.skillet.com

4. Meme dutifully passed to: Warrior, Jefferson Davis, Sam Problemchildbride and Kirk M who also gets my Dog’s Bollocks of the month award for being so constantly inconsistently entertaining lately.

I don’t like the circus.

Apart from the fact that they let clowns run around willy-nilly all un-restrained like that and the whipped animals that look like they could use a year’s timeout in St. John o’ Gods, it’s the lack of eye contact, the feeling that you’ve been robbed of something - part of your soul perhaps - as you walk out of the tent at the end.

So, thusfar in my kid’ses life, the circus is the Accidental Terrorist’s department.  I got a text earlier on today while I was skulking on the streets of Bray;

“We’re at d fossett circus rathnew.  Ringside for free!  Lovin it”

I called him up to find out what the craic was with the word ‘free’, and learned that TAT had tried to pay entrance for himself and the kids, only to be ushered through straight to the ring-side seats without any payment at all!  They spoiled my family rotten.  They dragged TAT into the ring with some other unsuspecting audience folk and performed a levitation trick that left Puppychild in awe of her daddy, and had excellent escapades with motorbikes in cages, apparently. 

Best of all?  Not an animal in sight, apart from one or two Shetland Ponies (which are only mythical creatures anyway…) so no animals harmed here then.

I was so impressed with the sound of it all. 

Fossett’s circus is run by an Irish family, who are now the proud recipients of a grant from the National Lottery and Arts or something like that, being that they’ve recently been bumped to the bonafide ‘artists’ category, so they’re the real deal and stuff.

They’re in Rathnew for a bit.  Might even pop in meself which would be a berry big deal for me.

Here’s a happy picture of some crazy people.  Please ignore the weird colouring, photoshop hates me.  Also please ignore the VPL.

I keep meaning to approach it but end up having to put it off until such a time as I know I’ve left it too long, by which stage it’s time to either launch into the knarliness until it’s done, or just cut the whole lot off altogether.

So, I get all my bits together and begin the job.  Roughly fifteen minutes in I then realise that it’s a bigger job than I thought and that it’ll be a long session, usually with much objection from the hardware in question which complicates matters even further.

Then I realise that my problems are probably due to length, at which point the scissors come out and the subject matter is shortened but not quite in the fashion I’d imagined… to avoid further damage I quit while the going’s good, knowing that I’m probably going to get some very strange comments indeed, but hey, maybe it’ll work out better the next time.

Most of the time I just sit and stare at it, wondering how other people manage to incorporate plaits and twists and pretty pink bows not just occassionally, but every single bloody day!

I pulled up at a taxi rank just after lunchtime and noticed that all the other cars were deserted, bar one - a people-carrier into which was crammed at least eight taxi drivers.  I knocked on the window and was let into the secret smoky underworld that is cabby conversation.  I sparked up a schmergel and listened.

They had the newspaper out and were reading about this rape incidence in Dublin, yet another excuse to be paranoid about foreigners.  I learned many interesting things (and heard much racial hatred which I won’t be repeating here) which blew my mind, to give examples…

Apparently forgeign nationals only need to get 30% of the Public Service Vehicle test correct, as opposed to the 70% us nationals need.  Also, foreign-nationals aren’t asked for a back-ground check before they enter the taxi-driving business, yet we Irish need full Gardee clearance.

They say that this is to give foreign nationals a hand-up, an easier way to score employment.  That’s all very nice and stuff, but these people aren’t thick… with a bit of practice and a year or two living in this country they’d have it down no problem.  It’s only the rules of the road and a rough knowledge of city layout… hardly astrophysics! 

Besides, isn’t this sort of stuff important?  I would have thought a knowledge of roadsigns would be rather helpful for driving?  And as for the back-ground check… are they kidding?  They’re asking the people of Ireland to just ‘trust’ their taxi driver?

Is it really true that complete foreigners can land in the country and just dive straight into the taxi-driving business, winging it the whole way?!?  I can’t imagine having the guts to go to say… Nigeria and start charging poor unsuspecting punters for trips to places I can’t even pronounce, let alone find.

Pure madness.

I feel so sorry for foreign national taxi drivers today.  Nobody’s going to want to use them now as they’ve all been tarred with the same pidgeon.  They’ve busted their chops trying to learn the ins and outs of the cabbying business so that they can feed their families in this God-forsaken economy of ours, and now they are to us what the Al Quaeda are to the Americans, just because of a stupid head-line and the usual short-comings of our Irish Big Brother.

I’m laughing though.  Who’d suspect an innocent looking female taxi driver of evil intent?  Nobody, that’s who. 

I could have fun with that…

I was driving to work on the N11 today and was roughly at the Greystones turn-off, when a convertible pulled out in front of me.  The roof was down despite ominous looking clouds above, and the car’s occupants were a middle-aged ‘chap’ in tweeds (complete with a poncy tweed fedora).  His passenger was a younger lady, immaculately preened and wearing ridiculously large Nicole Ritchie type sunglasses.  She was the sort of woman who was probably named ‘Totty’ at birth.

The temptation got the better of me.

I got in front of him, and from a safe distance began to wash my windows like a mad bitch.  The spray from a window washer travels amazingly well at 100kmph and I got to watch with glee as the lady in the car began to have a canary over my antics.  Every time she got her compact out to re-apply her mask, I did it again.  I turned her Elizabeth Arden ‘True Beige’ to Crayola and laughed an evil laugh.

Why be so cruel?  Maybe it’s because it’s good to mess up beautiful things because they aren’t really all that beautiful to start with.  Maybe I was just bored.  Maybe it was a bit of both.

I’m empowered.  I rule the bus lanes of Dublin City.  I read strange books and lurk in taxi-ranks and I am at your service.  I am not a sour taxi-driver, I’m quiet.  If you talk to me, I’ll talk back and agree with you, sympathise with you and be interested in what you have to say, as long as you keep popping those coins in the meter. 

I picked up a carpet-layer from Bargaintown yesterday, and forgot to turn on the meter until we were halfway there.  His tip made up for it because he was refreshed.  I let an old guy off two euros… he had the notes but I took his spare change instead even though it fell short.  He smiled and said it would come back around, and it did. 

—–

To all taxi drivers out there who might chance upon this post-

Be nice.  Provide a service that people want and the rewards will return.  Fuck the belligerence.  Write it down instead.  Blog, don’t bitch.

Read all those newspaper articles, listen to Joe Duffy or read countless blogs and you’ll know that we taxi-drivers are a hated breed.  They think we all guard our meters like we’re heroin-addicts and use every available opportunity to stiff the poor unsuspecting public.  They think we all talk too much about our miserable lives and darken their souls with our sordid opinions, but we don’t.  Not all of us.

So you’ve been burnt before eh?  Bitterness is a sink-hole whirlpool that sucks all the crud into oblivion.  Be careful, for you are the contact lens that’s fallen on the side of that sink bowl, and if you let the greed and the bitterness and the divil himself into your soul, you’re washed away. 

You have to cling.  You have to cling to the hope that you’ll be scooped up, washed clean and be appreciated for the vision you’ve created.

—–

‘Course it’s easy for me, I’ve just won the lottery.  All €18 million of it, but ssshh, don’t say anything.  I’m giving it all to an investor who’s just e-mailed me promising me he’ll double it within 24 hours.  Woohoo!  I just love money!  No I don’t.  It’s fake and I hate it.  I’m hoping that if I hate it enough, it’ll come to me easily and I hate that too.  It always has control, always has to be more. 

These days we forget the alternatives, the ‘I’ll scratch your back’s, the discounts, the open doors, the free eggs.  Bring the barter system back, I say!  Fuck the Department of Finance, the credit ratings and the drooping shares, it’s all just imaginary cash and it has us ruined.

It’s about time this country had a recession.  It takes a jolt to bring people back around to the right way of thinking again.  

It took me four hours to log on to the internet today.  ‘This program is not responding - end program?’… am I going to wait around until you pull your finger out?  Hell no. 

They should have a popup box for when the PC’s all buffered out and needs some time to think.  Something like ‘Don’t end it!  Give me a chance, I can do it!!!’

I’ve pulled the plug so many times now my computer is just running on faith alone.

My ‘puter is now officially discombobulated me thinks.  Either that or I am.