A Different View
What hard luck stories will the next generation dine out on?
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The easiest way to bore the heads off your children – and in fairness most parents will agree they can do this in a variety of ways and with consummate ease – is to start telling them stories about how bad we had things in the old days.
Sometimes they walk into the ‘bad old days’ trap themselves when they ask you what sort of remote control you had for the telly – just so you can dive straight in to point out that we didn’t need remotes because we only had one channel and even then it didn’t come on until three o’clock.
We can anaesthetise the heads off them with sob stories about cold and damp mornings – the world before central heating where pupils brought sods of turf to school – corporal punishment, single-glazed windows, perhaps even outdoor toilets, when breakfast was a choice between lumpy porridge and no breakfast at all.
We will point out that the way to combat the cold was to put on an extra jumper or to actually get up off the couch and walk to the sink with their dishes.
We can drone on ad nauseum over the long summers we spent, effectively locked out of our own homes, playing football from dawn until dusk with jumpers for goalposts, and going home only because it was time for your dinner and this was an era when the only floodlights we knew were on the telly at Wembley.
And Wembley once a year for the FA Cup Final was about the extent of our live football unless it was a World Cup year – outside of that we might have had Match of the Day, although RTE had an inexplicable predilection for horse racing on Sports Stadium, with Brendan O’Reilly and his magic hair anchoring things back in studio.
We got the rugby of course, but it was the Five Nations and none of your Heineken or Rabo – and the closest we came to sky was standing under it whether or not it was raining.
We tell them that three in a bed was the reality for children in a big family and a small house – it wasn’t a sleazy story from the Sunday World.
And in a bizarre way like generations before us, we get off on recycling our misery memories, our version of Angela’s Ashes – only without the incessant rain.
Then we wonder – what stories will they bore their children with, because from our perspective these little buggers have never had it so good?
Will they drone on about the fact that they only had Sky Sports but were brutally denied access to Sky Movies; that they only had an original Playstation model when all of their friends were on the newer version; that they had to share an indoor bathroom with other members of the family because not every bedroom was en suite?
They will cry that they’ve never been to Manhattan for Thanksgiving or South America on their summer holidays, in the way that we moan on about a time when heading south for your summer break meant a few days in Lahinch.
The crew from Monty Python, back in the news these days as they creak out of retirement, had a famous sketch on competitive misery first time round, where the boys worked to outdo each other in terms of their awful childhoods – and it goes like this:
Graham Chapman: “We were evicted from ‘our’ hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!”
Terry Gilliam: “You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.”
Michael Palin: “Cardboard box?”
Terry Gilliam: “Aye.”
Michael Palin: “You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!”
Graham Chapman: “Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!”
And on it goes – each Python with a tougher childhood than the other.
By comparison, the first world problems of today’s teenagers seem like they’d scarcely raise an eyebrow – but then we have to see what the future brings to really know.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The only time in your life that you should ever utter the words: “Do you know who I am?” are if you’ve just had a bang on the head or you are unfortunately suffering from dementia.
Because, otherwise, the phrase ‘do you know who I am’ only serves to make things a whole lot worse.
Normally, the phrase is unleashed towards late night door staff on a wave of alcohol – and never once in the history of time has it produced the result the utterer had intended.
The doorman may well know who you are which is often the very reason you’re not getting into the place in the first instance – or if he doesn’t know who you are, he won’t be unduly influenced when he does, unless you’re a famous movie star or his long-lost cousin.
‘Do you know where I am?’ might often be closer to the phrase you’re looking for, because that would serve you well when you’re looking for a taxi.
‘Do you know who I am?’ is a threatening phrase that in truth wouldn’t frighten the cat. But if you’re anxious to dig the hole a few shovels deeper, you should follow up with ‘I’d like to speak to your manager.’
Managers can be elusive at the best of times, but they’re normally rarer than hen’s teeth when it comes to the small hours of the morning – and even if they’re there, they are most likely watching proceedings on CCTV…just so they know who you are, in case you yourself can’t remember.
‘I’d like to speak to your manager’ suggests that you and he or she are from the one social sphere which is several strata north of the one occupied by door staff.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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A Different View with Dave O’Connell
As it turned out, we were much closer to a Eurovision win than we could ever have imagined – not Ireland, of course, because we’ve now mastered the art of just sending cannon fodder to be blown out in the semi-final.
No, this was just two of us – myself and our eldest – who were lucky enough to be at Anfield for the Reds’ recent win over Brentford, where positioned in the seat right in front of us were four happy lads from Finland.
One of them, we now know, was Käärijä, the singer of the catchiest song at Eurovision, Cha Cha Cha.
But just a week before 7,000 people sung his catchphrase at the Eurovision Arena, he and two his mates – accompanied by an older bloke who had to be either his dad or from the national broadcaster – sat anonymously in the same corner of the lower level of Anfield’s Main Stand.
He was utterly unknown to us as well of course, and the only thing that saw him stand out was his green nail varnish. Live and let live, of course, but it still ensures that you make an impression even if it looks like you were just very late for St Patrick’s Day.
Käärijä may well be Liverpool’s greatest Scandinavian fan, although the bar for that is set fairly high, given that they invade the city in greater numbers every two weeks than the Vikings did just once during the first millennium.
Equally, he may not be a football fan at all – although, as the rest of the week proved, he sure loves a crowd.
Positioned as we were in the corner of the Main Stand, the next section to us, around the corner in the Anfield Road Stand – currently adding a top layer – was occupied by the visiting Brentford supporters.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
Contactless payments reached a record €17.9 billion in Ireland last year – up by 31 per cent on 2021, as people came out from under their Covid shell and appear to have left their cash behind them.
Figures from the Banking & Payments Federation found that – despite the cost-of-living increases – the Irish public made three million contactless payments a day, worth an average of €53 million in the final quarter of 2022.
Given that there are 3.8 million people in Ireland over the age of 18, that means that almost every single one of us tapped the card every day last year.
And again, on the presumption that there are a few who still prefer peeling a fifty off a wad of notes, the true figure may be even higher, as we eschew actual money every time we go into a restaurant, bar or shop.
Then comes the monthly morning of reckoning when you open your statement – electronic of course because, like paper money, banks don’t deal in paper statements anymore either – and your guilty secrets unfurl like a rap sheet before your very eyes.
Five taps of a Friday night in the local, followed by a five-ounce burger meal on the way home.
And just why did you need a family-pack of crisps when a small bag would have done? Was all that beer and wine really for a party, or a night in just for one?
Cash provided plenty of dark corners to ignore your profligacy, but there are no hiding places in the contactless world.
Worse still, until that morning of reckoning arrives, you’ve no clue how much you’ve spent, and handing over the card doesn’t hurt half as much as parting with hard cash.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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