Do you enjoy listening to the choons of Scooter emanating from some spotty youth’s car at traffic lights outside shopping centres? Are you disappointed when the souped-up Corsa, Punto or Saxo speeds off, leaving you hankering after more happy hardcore jumpstyle Eurobilge? Well, help is at hand, with the SCOOTER DELUXE SOUNDMASTER, which offers a proper, access-all-areas, non-stop sound for skangers on scooters and their many appreciative fans. According to the manufacturer: (more…)
This is a blog about a log. Sorry about this; I’m writing from Scotland, where the locals (including most members of my family) are utterly charmed by tales of excretion. Lots of non-Scots may think this is entirely to do with Billy Connolly and his jolly old japes about jobbies, but all he did was tap into a national obsession – not so much with our bowels themselves (that’s an Italian pastime) but with the end product.
This particular story concerns a photographer, who regaled some female relatives of mine with a particularly charming tale; to he’s now making a living taking pictures of nature and weddings but, once upon a time, he was a paparazzo. (more…)
Published in Dublin’s Evening Herald, 17th July 2009
In which your host takes his first-born on a grand tour of her city’s and nation’s glorious and bloodthirsty past…
‘Daddy, I’m bored.” Words which strike fear and temper into the hearts of even the most patient parent, especially during the seemingly endless summer holidays. Like many five-year-olds, my daughter Madeleine has a low boredom threshold, often requiring full parental interactivity to alleviate her perceived brain-rot.
As a parent, it’s too easy to be lazy about it. Just switching on the telly, or having her running riot in a leisure centre, with its ball pools, vending machines and fast-food/slow-metabolism outlets, may let us off the hook, but it can be pretty unedifying for children — and expensive for us. Could Dublin’s notoriously exorbitant city centre provide kids with a full, exciting, cultural and relatively cheap day out? Madeleine and I set out early to see if this was the case.
Our tour began at 10am, in Dublinia, an attraction which brings the city’s Viking and medieval histories to life. Its newly opened Viking World exhibition comes first, with all the sounds and fury invasion entails. (more…)
Waterford is having an indentity crisis. Of course, this may just be my opinion as viewed from the vantage point of Dublin, but it does seem that it’s not a city entirely at ease with its image. Take the poster to the left here. “Waterford – Summer City”, it states, colourfully. What great Waterford landmark have they chosen to illustrate this objective? A cartoon blue sky with fluffy clouds. As an enticing tourist-magnet, it’s quite possibly the worst, most ineffective poster I have ever seen. Another Waterford-centric pamphlet I saw yesterday features a photo of a giant hot air balloon, a tree top and a sea of raised hands, apparently praising this glorious vision. Again, not a Waterford landmark in sight. In fact, not a sight of anything that resembles the ground, giving anyone the impression that the best thing about Waterford is the skyward escape out of it.
All this could perhaps be partially explained by the lead story in this week’s Waterford News & Star. (more…)
JOHNNIE CRAIG GOES WITHOUT MODERN TECHNOLOGY
(From Evening Herald HQ article “Cheap Tricks”, 16th April 2009)
Day one: I wake up to my youngest daughter singing Barbie’s annoyingly catchy dirge (I Feel) Connected. Barbie is, of course, the ultimate consumer chick, but we’re having none of that this weekend.
Our challenge is to have three days connected to nature, away from mod cons and money grabbing. Back to basics, if you will. Children don’t need to understand recessions, you can’t moan that the Government’s emergency Budget was designed to screw us all into penury – it just requires a collective change of tactic. So, we’re at their grandmother’s isolated home in the [English] countryside. It’s the ideal place to experiment with frugality; no shops, no internet or mobile phone signal, and the telly and DVD player are conveniently “broken”. Daddy’s iPod is nowhere to be found either. All we have is the great outdoors and the limits of our imaginations. (more…)
Well, if this doesn’t put the Ross back in your Cromarty, you’re already immune. It appears my old country wants its ex-pats back. Well, if Connery fancies paying taxes there again, and Lulu is prepared to go on a hunt for her long-jettisoned accent, maybe I will go back. For a weekend. The song carries a similarly realistic call to patriotic duty as Ireland’s last budget, and I expect the campaign will be every bit as effective as the new anti-drink-driving song.
