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May 24, 2005
Being Susceptible to Requests of a Certain Nature
I had another removal to attend yesterday evening. I walked to the church from work along the banks of the canal, taking a good forty-five minutes to get there. The weather had the meteorological equivalent of ADD, by fits soaking the place with fierce showers or towelling us off with a stiff breeze and steady sunshine. I stopped for shelter at one stage under some form of archway, which lead to an open yard of the type seen on television ads warning children of the dangers of slurry pits.
With my headphones in my ears I couldn’t hear the blustering conversation of a man on crutches, very slowly crossing the road behind me. I had turned so he was just visible out of the corner of my eye, hoping that I wasn’t the target of whatever it was he was saying. This isn’t because I’m generally mean to strangers talking to me on the street. It’s because I’m generally lovely to strangers on the street. I don’t mean to be, I just seem to default to extreme niceness when caught in situations where I’d rather be anywhere else. Why not try asking me for money some time?
Eventually he got close enough to where I had to take off my headphones and respond. His first question was, “Are you Irish?” which I suppose was reasonable given I’d been playing obliviousness up until that point, and being foreign is apparently a ready explanation for deliberately ignoring something.
He wanted me to carry his bag around the corner, as it had a two-litre carton of milk in it, which was hard to manage with the crutches. Especially in the wet; the crutches tended to slip very easily. He’d had a very bad fall last week, getting off the bus. His foot was the problem, it had an ulcer on the heel which was finally starting to heal now he had a home help to look after him two days a week. The diabetes was the other problem; he’d gotten it from eating too much fried food, just like Brendan Grace.
We made very slow progress along a route which I was acutely aware (in the sense of how impaired his movement was) would only have taken twenty seconds to cover on my own.
He thought I was about 17 or 18, which was nice. And then sympathised with my increasing baldiness. But he didn’t know how to get to the church I was headed for. So I deposited the bag in his porch as requested and set off again, guessing that a church in the distance was the right place to go to (it was), and arriving with a couple of minutes to spare.
Posted by Oliver at 04:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 19, 2005
Insulting thousands of satisfied Brown readers
Shattered from sleep-deprivation and prolonged exposure to crazy airport people, my girlfriend stumbled off the aircoach and promptly headed straight for work. I think there should be some sort of award for that kind of dedication, even if work was a relief after Stansted.
It turns out that the Dan Brown novel was actually a good choice for someone in such a state of sleep-deprivation: the short chapters and focus on plot to the exclusion of pretty much anything else kept it easy to read. You heard it here first: Dan Brown’s a good read, for SLEEP-DEPRIVED ZOMBIES.
Posted by Oliver at 12:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 16, 2005
Unfortunate ways to spend an evening
As you drift off to sleep tonight in your comfy bed, spare a thought for my stranded girlfriend, left to fend for herself in Stansted Airport owing to the Stansted Express not being quite as Express as they’d like you to believe. She missed her flight home, and was the first person to be told that the following (final) flight this evening was now full.
This means that she’s booked onto tomorrow morning’s 6.30 am flight, with a check-in time at the decidedly unpleasant time of 4.30 am.
We were somewhat relieved to discover that Stansted is actually the second-best airport in the world to spend the night in (after Heathrow). There are lots of sweet stories about strangers watching out for each other, and where to find the best places to sleep, over here. The internet to the rescue.
How will she spend the 8 hours before her flight leaves? Well, she managed to get a book, which would usually help; but the only one she could find was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Because clearly, reading the WORST BOOK ON EARTH will make the time go by more quickly. I am seriously concerned that she will claw out her eyes.
(come home safe, miss, preferably with your eyes still in their sockets x)
Posted by Oliver at 10:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 12, 2005
Avoiding Dave Eggers
Is it slightly irrational of me to distrust an author many of my well-read friends adore? Dervala has her own reasons for avoiding Dave Eggers’ work, and they’re somewhat more developed than mine. As, on reflection, my quite insubstantial reason for not reading him is that it’s only my female well-read friends who’ve recommended him.
Hmmm… this is a game I can play! You should all read Philippe Petit’s To Reach the Clouds immediately. It’s a beautifully written account of how he strung a high wire between New York’s Twin Towers, then ran back and forth along it to the delight of the onlookers below.
Also. It would be nice there was some mechanism for getting new words discovered via poor typing accepted into the lexicon. I originally typed ‘irrantional’ earlier and I’m now wishing it was a real word.
Posted by Oliver at 11:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2005
At the wake for my
At the wake for my oldest friend’s father we are sitting around the family computer, watching as my friend displays scans of photos taken by her father 25 odd years ago. His photography was fantastic, with many of the images being so perfectly shot that you could easily imagine them in magazines of the time, advertising idyllic family holidays or the ideal white Christmas.
When we were done she closed each open image in rapid succession, each photo flickering past before concluding with a grey, featureless screen.
“Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.” Walker Evans
Posted by Oliver at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 03, 2005
The Mistake
I’m a hands-on kind of guy. Which is why, rather than paying to get my iBook fixed, I thought I’d just crack it open and wiggle the connection that had to be the cause of the video signal not getting through. Just jiggling a loose connection. What could be easier, right?
Well, ‘cracking it open’ could be bloody easier, for a start. I couldn’t do it. I became very aware of how expensive the iBook was, and while bending the plastic case like that might be required (they had pictures of it and everything, in the maintenance manual I found on the internet), it’s also completely nerve-wracking. But, I should be happy, as I did succeed in a fashion: there’s a minute crack in the case now. That I put there. That’ll teach me to completely over-estimate my own abilities - or at least, it would do if I wasn’t so bloody obstinate.
Why did I think I could do it at all? Well, I was a handy boy with a screwdriver at one stage in my life. I took apart televisions and video recorders just to have a look at what was inside. I didn’t know that TVs have charged components that can seriously injure you if you touch them, even if the telly is plugged out - but then, I was smart enough not to touch any metal components for fear some static electricity might ruin the delicate electronic bits. I took apart my Commodore 64 too. It made putting together my own PC a few years later seem like a doddle.
And secondly, Apple are happy to fix your computer for you, but they erase your hard disk as a matter of routine. Even if that side of things is working perfectly. So I’d lose everything I’d put on there over the course of the two years I had the machine, including an insane amount of music, video lectures, email, and a bunch of other stuff. I have no room to store it anywhere else, and no patience for the hassle of copying it there, then copying it back over on the iBook’s return. I’m just that lazy!
Well, I’ve given up. I’ve ordered an external hard disk & software to back up the whole thing, which should get here in the next few days. Hopefully that’ll automate the awkward archiving process. Then I can wave goodbye as my computer gets sent off to the great repair shop in the sky Cork. And hey, when it comes back, I might have a shiny Tiger waiting for it…
PS: Wexford fans might be interested in breadortart.com, which sells Wexford-themed tshirts for fans of that county. I spent a few hours getting paid to put the site online over the weekend. Getting paid to do such work is a first for me, hurrah.
Posted by Oliver at 02:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack