Jimmy Page’s Trousers

Here’s a tip. Don’t leave an empty can of Red Bull in your car while you go to work. It makes your car smell like sour rubbish by the time you leave and then you have to drive home with the window open even though it’s freezing.

From political punditry to this.  What a breadth of information you get here.  What a window on the world.

I’m off to put Baby Trousers to bed so I can drink beer.  Sometimes I love being Irish.

Oddly enough, from the searches that are finding me in the last day or two, it seems that if you Google the words “Mary Harney” on the ‘pages from Ireland’ option I appear on the first page*. Yep, at number nine in the Google results for Mary is a post where I call her an awful bastard.

Who’d have thought it? Not me, that’s for sure.

I also got a pingback thing from being quoted on www.irishelection.com. And they’re a ‘proper’ site. Among their other, proper, articles and links is a quote from me calling Harney a horrible harridan (and more).

Look at me. Political pundit.

She is an awful bastard though. And she didn’t resign (quelle surprise). Bertox said that she “is not the one to blame and not the one who will be found blameworthy” once investigations are finished. He went on to say that “HSE management are accountable for their direct management of the system. Individual clinicians, and health managers, are also accountable for the actions which they took, or did not take. In the case of the HSE, they are accountable to the Minister, and thus to the Government, and in addition to Dáil Éireann”.

Well, now we know where the buck actually stops - just before it gets to Mary. “The Minister Responsible” is just a phrase. They can’t possibly be responsible. How could they be? That’d be silly.

At least I don’t have to eat her foot.

.

* UPDATE: I should really have saved off this page rather than just linking to it as, and such is the transient nature of search engine results, I’m no longer in the top ten. Trust me though, for one glorious week, a search for Mary Harney would have found my abuse in the top ten. Hurrah for fleeting triumph.

It came and went, unmarked. The 23rd of this month (a few days ago) saw the first anniversary of my first post here. It was a simpler, albeit more angry, time. I think I probably ranted more, insecure and unsure that anyone would want to read anything other than my rants. I’m now pretty sure that people don’t even want to read my rants, but I’ve grown to care less what people want and to just post my various ramblings anyway.

Many blogs, I’ve noticed, seem to post some sort of retrospective look at their year’s postings to mark their anniversary. A sort of ‘clip-show’ where the only new content consists of links to fill between the clips. “Ha ha… Who can forget that one, and do you remember when…” That sort of thing. Not me though. I’m more high-brow than that and even if I weren’t, I probably wouldn’t be arsed.

The first anniversary is traditionally marked by a gift of paper I believe. Why this is, I’m afraid I don’t know. All I know is first anniversary: paper. I think the second is stick or muck or something.

I’ve had a nasty cough and a cold for the last couple of weeks.  Bit bunged up and I’ve snorted enough Vicks Sinex that I’m sure my nostrils resemble Amy Winehouse’s.  In an effort to get rid of this nasty ailment, I’ve taken to drinking a considerable amount of beer every evening for the last four days.  My reasoning is that I’ll make my body so inhospitable a place to live that the cold germs will hitch their little wagons and move on to some tea-total bloke.

So far it seems to be working.  I’m feeling less bunged up and coughing less. A further bout of intensive research over the next few days will confirm my initial, empirical findings, but I think you can expect to see me published in the next issue of The Lancet.

No cure for the common cold indeed.

Mary Harney. I hate Harney with a vitriolic passion that is difficult to put into words. This horrible harridan is, in my opinion, one of the worst and most despicable of the mange-ridden curs that inhabit the halls of power in this country. It’s the hypocrisy, you see. All that shite about voting for the PD’s so they could keep an eye on Fianna Fail to make sure they weren’t being crooks? Yeah, good job Mary.

The cancer balls-up that she’s currently overseeing is awful beyond words, but she continues to squirm her greasy way out of it. Calls to resign? Ha? That vicious bitch will never resign. Never. It’s not in her nature to resign because it’s not in her nature to accept some modicum of responsibility for the pathetic mess that is our health service.

Now, I know that it’s not just Harney that’s responsible for the Irish Health Service being in such a shambles. Bock has explained one of the other issues here and that’s just one of them. However, Harney asked for the job of being the minister ‘responsible’ for Health and Children and talked tough about sorting things out. She was the woman for the job. She was going to get things on track. Allow me to begin to sum-up my debate argument by saying “bollocks”. She’s sorted arse-all, the great bint.

It may be straying into the realms of ad hominem argument if I go on to say that she appears to have been devouring here own body, yet paradoxically growing larger on it, for twenty years but I’m going to say it anyway. Her arsehole and her mouth now seem to be effectively the same thing. Bugger to ad hominem anyway.

If she resigns, I’ll eat one of her feet.

Anyone that reads this from time to time will know that I recently fitted a snazzy new kitchen. You may also remember that, although I had originally intended to just buy a B&Q kitchen to make life easier for me, the rudeness of the kitchen-design team person who, eventually, deigned to speak to me (when she could rearrange the pieces of paper on her desk no longer) made me vote with my feet and buy my kitchen somewhere else (horrible, run-on sentence there - sorry). The fact that B&Q were going to make me wait six to eight weeks for flat-packed stuff and the others could deliver ready made units in a week was a deciding factor.

Anyway, my non-B&Q kitchen looks great now. Except, however, for the omission of a splash-back behind the hob. Not without some trepidation, I headed back to B&Q yesterday. It’s a glass splash-back, I reasoned. No need to think it’ll cause any problems.

Oh dear.

No glass splash-backs on the shelf. I asked a hovering member of their kitchen crew who, turned out to be pleasant and helpful. She must be new.

“Oh, there are none in stock. We’ll need to order one”, she said and led me to the computer. She took my name and address and we noted the part number and keyed it in. At this point, she said, “There’s a €50 delivery charge on this.”

“That’s ok,” I said, “I don’t want it delivered. I’ll collect it here.”

“No. sorry. As it’s not in stock here, we need to order it from the UK. It’s €50 to get it delivered to the store.”

“Riiiiiiggghhht,” I said, “so what you’re telling me is that I need to pay €50 so that you restock this and I can then drive here to buy it?”

That was what she was telling me. She at least seemed somewhat embarrassed to have to tell me, but that didn’t really help me.

“You know that I’m not going to buy this now?” I said. She knew. I am, therefore, still in need of a frosted glass splash-back (600×750mm) if anyone knows where I might get one.

Let me close by saying that B&Q are an awful shower of horrible bastards. How can they justify making me pay what amounts to a restocking fee because they don’t have something, advertised for sale, in stock? Because B&Q are awful bastards, that’s how. Every B&Q experience that I’ve had has left me leaving the store angry. For the benefit of the search engines then, let me just restate; B&Q are awful bastards.

I have a very peculiar mental block that prevents me from remembering the name of the actor that is Christopher Walken. Except that time obviously.

Flicking through the channels last night, I came upon the (fairly abysmal, yet strangely entertaining in a weird way) Sleepy Hollow. The Headless Horseman was abroad, looking all camp and not even slightly scary, and I remarked to Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers, “there’s that bloke whose name I can never remember.”
“Who?” she asked.
“Him. The Headless Horseman bloke.”
“Who is he though?” she enquired.
“I don’t know. I told you, I can’t remember his name. I always forget it for some reason, even though I quite like him.”
“Well, he’s no head so I can’t help you out,” she said.
“Nah. It’ll come to me, it always does. Have you noticed how Christina Ricci’s forehead is getting bigger? Soon it’ll look like that bird’s from American Beauty.”
“Hmmm.”

We went about our televisual business for about twenty minutes or so before I surprised her by shouting “Christopher Walken!” She jumped. Silly old thing. You’d think she’d be used to it by now.

If you pop to here, you can hear Whatshisname recite The Raven while a picture of Poe gets a bit bigger. I don’t know why - just go look.

What little pinpricks of light that existed last week as I returned to the day job, have begun to dim as the gleam on the barely-polished turd that is Perdition Inc. fades. Week one - not much happened. Chatted with old friends and colleagues, caught up on office gossip (nothing happened) and ‘processed’ six months worth of emails (deleted - if it’s important, they’ll mail again). Week two - things are getting a bit more worky.

As I mentioned, my boss, Dolphin Skin, had a new assignment for me and it actually sounds interesting. I met the person supposed to explain what’s required and that didn’t really enlighten me. To make matters worse, he then scheduled a conference call for 4PM on Friday afternoon. Doesn’t he know what Fridays are for? He then sent me about forty emails, each with snippets of information that may help decipher what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s not looking good so far though. Still, even being the boy that oils the general manager’s collection of gimp masks is preferable to the wasteful tedium of my previous assignment so things could be worse.

They could be better though. I realised last night that, for the last six months, I’ve actually looked forward to Mondays. I didn’t realise that such an odd thing had occurred until it had passed. While I was on my sabbatical, Mondays meant that Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers popped Baby Trousers in the creche and proceeded to her place of work leaving me completely free to do my own thing. Five days of doing my own thing lay before me. It was great.

No longer though. Sundays are back to being a slow grind into inevitable gloom as the day progresses and Monday inexorably approaches. I hereby name this feeling, ‘Songs Of Praise Syndrome’ as it puts me in mind of miserably scrabbling to do my homework on a Sunday evening as some God-fearing congregation sang Protestant hymns on the telly in the background and I anticipated drudging to school on Monday.
Shit.

Working from home today. First week back, it felt a little cheeky but what the hell. Dolphin Skin has told me that my new assignment means that I can work from home as much as I want so I’m getting into practice. Hurrah.

I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a good idea though. This soon after my sabbatical, my mind is still in the non-working mode that it has occupied for the last six months. I keep thinking that I’m still on a career break and that I can just sit down and have a cuppa and read a book. And, while I could do that, I suppose that I should try to pay some sort of lip service to actual work.

I’ve also got a few things to finish in my new kitchen that I could sneak off and do instead of working. I won’t though. I’m being diligent - at least until somebody in the company does something to annoy me. Give it another week. For anyone that’s interested (i.e. only my mother really and she doesn’t read this), my kitchen is all but finished. Kitchen/dining room wall is no more and we’ve now got a nice big room. I fitted the kitchen, which was a complete nightmare. Apparently, when building houses these days, right angles and straight walls are considered something of an outdated concept. Instead, shoddy workmanship and laziness seem to be the order of the day. Were I a wandering kitchen fitter, fitting kitchens for people other than myself, I might have just shoved everything into it’s approximate position and hammered a few crooked nails into them. As it was my own kitchen though, I took some considerable time to modify and adjust things so that they actually sat snugly in their oddly angled, bellied walled places. And I swore. A lot. And cursed the cowboys that had built my house in the first place. And their children and so on. For four generations. I am a vengeful kitchen fitter.

The irony of stating that I am a diligent worker while posting blog entries is not lost on me. Nobody’s perfect.

Back to work that is. It remains to be seen if I’ll renew my previous posting regime or whether I’ll lazily coast along with a blog post every three or four weeks as I did for much of my, now sadly ended, career break.

Here I am, though. Back at my little section of desk in Perdition Inc. (our desks are like the little pie shaped things that you get in Trivial Pursuit games). Nothing’s changed - not that I thought it would have. As much as I hate to use a cliché, I can honestly say that it doesn’t feel like I’ve been away at all. I could have left last Friday and returned Monday for all the difference six months has made. Still, at least it sounds like I might have an interesting job to do for the next month or two. My boss, Dolphin Skin, has sorted me out with something more taxing than my previous role - he’s a good egg really.

Before I left for my first day back last Monday, Baby Trousers asked me why I was going back to work.
“Because I have to”, I replied.
“You don’t like work”, she said. She’s an astute little thing.
“Not really”, I said.

She handed me her blankie to make me feel better. I’d have brought it to work if she had let me.

Please feel free to leave messages of condolence or offers to pay my mortgage below.