December 30th

Context is everything. A couple of weeks ago the eight year old was messing about on the roof of my car. I was standing right there, overseeing every move. He’s not doing any harm, he’s not liable to break anything or injure himself; he’s just hanging out on the roof of the car. Yet the overriding compulsion is not to leave him at it; something about a kid on the roof of a car does not fit and the impulse is to move to correct it, to make him come down. The situation is perfectly reasonable and controlled, yet it does not appear that way when you are parked outside the school waiting to pick up the older kids. If we were on holiday parked at a beach it would look more rational and normal, it would acquire an appropriate level of frivolity from its setting. The child wearing only a swimming shorts would take it to another level of whimsy, would reinforce its harmlessness. What’s harmless at a beach is anarchy outside a school.

December 29th

Ar a leath uair tar éis a cuig tá sé in ám don Nuacht a léamh anocht ag Samuel L. Jackson.

There are grants available from the Department of Health for setting up support groups. I’m on the lookout for an appropriate trauma and qualified candidates; on average per week how many hours do you spend putting together IKEA furniture?

What's the collective noun for rakes? What ever happened the butter mountain and the wine lake? The Greeks must have got their hands on the latter, that would explain a few things. What the fuck is propane?

Twenty eleven, two thousand and eleven, two eleven. Twelve years in and no closer to a consensus. No wonder we're all fucked.

6% of ants are actually lazy bastards.

Do not enter. Scientists only.

Get In Line

Ron Sexsmith on Songwriter's Circle a few years ago

Grow Your Own Way

Growth is the mantra. Growth we are told is the key to everything. When economies stop growing through consecutive quarters we get recession and all the attendant shrinkage and hardship. Growth they say will make everything good again.

There are now seven billion people on the planet, unchecked growth can no longer be sustained. Growth implies spiraling demand for everything. For food, for consumer goods, for machinery, for housing, for infrastructure and the impact of all of that on the finite resources of the planet is not pretty. You can fill all the green bins in the world with cornflake boxes but deep down we all know, whether we acknowledge it or not, that this cannot possibly end well. With all the emerging territories the growth we can expect henceforth isn’t like the gentle, polite arc we have become used to in the western world. When the Chinese really get going they’re going to rage, consuming everything in their path. And they are not the only ones just getting started.

Then there’s the micro level, the human cost of insurmountable debt and misery that seems to be the only tangible legacy of the last growth spurt. What did this country really come away from the party with; a few new stretches of tarmac, a tram in Dublin, countless monuments to bad architecture and a million tales of overwhelming debt and desperation.

Essentially we are mired in a mindset whereby a person’s worth or usefulness is measured by how much shit they consume. A mindset which has been successfully created by latter day Don Drapers cheerled by politicians and big business. How often have you heard it said “we need to get people back into the shops and spending, that’s the only route to recovery” For who? As long as we collectively have a perception of each other as being inadequate if we don’t spend money we don’t have on crap we don’t need then this cycle never changes.

So how do we reconcile these two apparently opposing realities? We need growth to live comfortably but the same growth will kill us all quicker. It’s all a bit rock n’ roll really.

Growth is the only way forward. Spot on. Winter cabbage; below ground baby, below ground.

Pirate's Life

A track accompanied by hand drawn video from We Cut Corners