Recently, at the end of two announcements where boys were given relatively innocuous names (well, Riley and Zach, if you must know, my standards are slipping) the children’s thrilled etc. parents have seen fit to finish the announcements as follows: “A caddy for Daddy!!” In both cases, two exclamation marks were called for. What is this new and sinister development? Is it in some way related to the fact that you can now play straight through Ireland from North to South given that the greater part of the island of Ireland is now made up of golf courses?
Reading etc.
With age, possibly, comes wisdom
Many years ago, I used to drive from Dublin to Cork at Christmas with my friend M. When we were within sniffing distance of Cork city within the county bounds, in fact, he would insist on stopping for several hours in a college friend’s house. I see from the paper that said college friend’s firm is now sponsoring the Trevor/Bowen Literary Summer School. I wish now that I’d asked the friend about his reading habits rather than spending all my time there glumly nursing a cup of tea and desperate to get away. There’s a moral for young people there somewhere but I’m too tired to draw it.
Guilt 2.0
“Our house in the middle of the web”. In the Irish Times, Debbie Orme was concerned about Google street view. You may read her concerns here, if that’s your kind of thing. How does this sentence make your correspondent feel:
It would be lovely to think that our children could be featured on the internet and we could log on to share images with our friends. But we all know that we don’t live in a world like that.
Um, unnerved. That’s how.
Thoughts on growing-up
John Butler, in the Irish Times, hit the nail on the head with the following: “As time presses on, and the genetic prophecy is fulfilled, it feels as if we become more like our parents than our own selves, or the self-determined third person we thought we had been building all along.”
Regrettably accurate.
Bedside Table
The difficulty is that I may not have time to read all of these before I die. And the library just called to say that the two books I reserved have come in. Sigh.
Fair and balanced?
Driving home from my sister’s flat late one night I heard a programme on FM104. The idiot presenter had found two poor people (Liz and John) who were going to be spending a fortune (and I do mean a fortune) on their daughters’ first communions: stretch limos, 1,000 euro dresses, the lot.
He then found a number of middle class people to criticise Liz and John and how they chose to spend their money. [“I am from a very good family and I would never spend money in that way. Pictures of those communions circulate on the internet afterwards and people laugh at your children”] I thought that these people were patronising and deeply, deeply unpleasant. What I found disturbing was that the presenter did nothing to try to balance the coverage. John and Liz were a bit on the inarticulate side and the presenter joined right in, criticising their choices and mocking their spending. It was very nasty listening.
I suppose I’m not quite FM104’s target demographic but I won’t be going back there any time soon.
