Five & Dime

I imagine you will be as surprised as I was to learn that there were only three records released throughout the entire nineteen eighties. They are “99 Red Balloons”, “Money for Nothing” and “Don’t You Want Me”. You may have thought that musicians such as REM, New Order, The Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout, Husker Du, Sonic Youth or The Stone Roses were around during the nineteen eighties but you would be mistaken. History will definitively record that there was only Nina, The Human League and Dire Straits.

One would expect our public representatives to be well turned out. They appear in the Dail on a daily basis in the presence of TV cameras and are always liable to be doorstepped by a crew anxious to glean their views on the issues of the day. So they should be well groomed and presentable, at a minimum. Joan Burton however does not seem to be a lady who is content to do things to the minimum standard required. Joan has taken the personal grooming ball and done a Forrest Gump with it. I don’t think I have seen her show up on any occasion with a head of hair that bears even the slightest resemblance to the previous day. And I’m not just talking about style here – I’m talking length, colour, shape, texture, footprint. It seems to me that Vidal Sassoon is doing a bit of moonlighting in Joan’s constituency office. We are all familiar with the tendency of women of a certain age to indulge in the daily wash and blow dry but this goes way beyond that. What is apparent here is a virtual quotidienne reinvention of the wheel. Auburn and long for an Oireachtas sub committee gives way to black and bobbed for a crucial Dail vote which in turn gives way to sandy and cropped for a bit of weekend slumming and low key constituency work. There’s regular multi tasking and then there’s Joan Burton style multi personality multi tasking. A different concept altogether, and the next big thing.

I recently went to a hardware store in the local town to buy a new hammer. The cashier told me it was €15 but I insisted upon giving him €25 for it on the basis that this is what it might be worth in ten years time. He seemed very happy with this arrangement. I was glad to help him out and be his friend.

It doesn’t take our friends in the Irish Farmers Association too long to apportion a monetary value to the odd meteorological anomaly. An IFA head by the name of Eddie Donnelly was on The Last Word last week in the early stages of the big freeze confidently predicting that this instalment of disagreeable weather would cost farmers €50 million. Eddie made no attempt to devise a figure which might imply that a shred of science had gone into its calculation. €50 million. Nice round number, easy enough for everyone to get their head around. At that stage about two inches of snow had fallen so presumably Eddie was basing his figures on the internationally accepted rule of thumb for when it’s a bit tricky to get silage to your livestock of a million per millimeter. A mill a mill. Lovely jubbly.

I recently opened a supplement to a daily newspaper and came across a feature on how the recession is affecting all of our kids. It was so enlightening and instructive that I found myself lamenting the fact that the editor hadn’t capitalised on the idea and turned it into a series chronicling the impact of the downturn on those we tend to overlook – “Badgers and the Bust”, “Cheyenne Dry”, “Rathkeale Rectitude”, “Insolvent Incas”, “Eskimonics”, “The Bankrupt Bedouin”. It could run and run.