- You shouldn’t do that. It’s not right to be winding up the poor girl like that.

- She asked for advice. I gave it. The best way to solve the problem of lipstick on glasses is to chip the tops. You won’t see women putting them to their gobs then.

- But what if he took you seriously? Her English isn’t great and she mightn’t get the joke.

- Blood is easier get off glasses than lipstick. Anyway, she’s not thick. Didn’t ya see her grin.

- Women always smile at you. Most of them just can’t help laughing. You’re a laughable looking feker. And what about the time in Woodies?

- What time in Woodies?

- The time I was buying a mousetrap and you asked the Polish girl if they did the mice to go with it. And she went off to ask a manager.

- But she got the joke in the end, didn’t she.

- How do would you know? You legged it and left me there to explain. The manager wasn’t impressed. Lucky I wasn’t barred for wasting Garda time, or whatever that’d be in a hardware. Oh yeah, and the soup thing yesterday with the Latvian fella in The Lamps.

- That was his own fault for speaking Latvian at me. He said the cream doojor was chicken & sweetcorn. I said I’d have the chicken. I don’t like sweetcorn - it repeats at both ends.

- Crème de jour is French not Latvian ya gobshite. We can’t go back there for a while. Here. Your twist.

- Hello! Sorry! Howya, eh, two pints there please. You’re from Kracow aren’t ya. It’s in the paper today, Kracow’s going to be twinned with Bargain Town.

- Ah fek this! I’m getting out of Dodge.

This week, Din-do ran an article by Kim Bielenberg about literacy levels amongst Irish students. He quoted economist Moore McDowell (yeah, yer man’s brother) who described some of his own students as barely semi-literate.

Dr. Martin O’Grady was also quoted: It is a big problem. Many students don’t even put capital letters at the start of sentences. They don’t know the difference between ‘their’ and ‘there’. They mix up ‘quiet’ with ‘quite’, and ‘being’ and ‘been’. (Sounds to me like Mr. Anonymous who comments regularly on all our blogs).

I am far from being a grammatical purist and don’t try to be, but I do try to use it’s-its, you’re-your and there-their correctly and I know where the shift key is.

As most of you know, I am a mature (read old) student. So I can bear witness to these poor standards. Luckily most of the group projects I have done have been with Chinese and Indian nationals, who write excellent English, so I have been spared the angst of having to collaborate on technical papers with illiterate Irish students.

However, I can also bear witness to another instance of illiteracy that Kim failed to mention. That of the lecturers. Of the six I had this academic year, only two knew the basics, such as the difference between there and their. If these lecturers were recently qualified Ph.D.’s or junior staff they could possibly be categorised as students, but they weren’t. Not that this would be an excuse.

So Kim, the next time you are interviewing Mr. McDowell and Dr. O’Grady, ask them about their colleagues too.

I won’t be around most of today. I had Charity pleading with me for hours yesterday. Pleading and begging for my body.

Now lads, before you go getting hot under the collar, this Charity is a real charity, not a pretty lady. But as with pretty ladies, I always end up giving into their demands. So today I’m off to deliver fixtures and fittings to a respite home two hours from here. Two hours in my little jalopy, Harrison*, loaded to the hilt with everything from clothes hangers to tablecloths to knives and forks, is not my idea of fun. It is at times like this I wish I had Eolaí’s bicycle.

There is also a reserve supply of coat hangers etc. in storage. These are replacements for when items are stolen. What, you cry! People availing of a respite home would steal from it?

Short answer, yes. I am running the risk of getting flamed for saying this. In much the same way that suggesting global warming is part of the earth’s natural cycle, some things seem no longer open to debate.

It was many years ago that I first gave my time to this charity. Like most, I started out with great enthusiasm. Not in a change-the-world way - I’m too long in the tooth to believe that - but nevertheless believing I could make some tangible difference. And like most, I had this belief that people struck down with a debilitating disease and indeed, those closest to them, develop a different view on life and by virtue of having to rely on others, for things we take for granted, become better people. That belief was quickly shattered.

At the first function I attended I phoned a wheelchair cab to take a lady home. The driver refused when he saw who it was. She had an account with this company which was three months overdue. I called another firm. Her account with them was overdue six months. She had been using one until they began to insist on their money then switched to the other. With great difficulty I got this large, inebriated lady and her chair into my little car and took her home. With even more difficulty I pushed her up the sloping drive with constant warnings not to scratch her husband’s new car.

At another, a man and his wife volunteered to sell raffle tickets. Hours later I found them at the bar. Not a single ticket sold. They bought one each to appease me. The wife won the grand prize - a holiday. And it fell to me to smile for the camera while presenting it. My friend, the photographer, kept singing Beautiful South’s Little Blue to me the rest of the evening: When most think that you’re holding back, I know you’re holding bile.

Then there was the guy who temporarily moved into the area because he figured this branch had more funds in the kitty than that in his own area. He applied for a grant for a treatment known even then to be experimental, ineffective and unapproved throughout the whole EU. He was refused on those grounds and ran a fundraising drive of his own. The treatment didn’t work and the clinic providing it was later closed down by the authorities. His allusion to the charity’s name in his campaign confused the public and regular donors gave to him thinking they were supporting the charity.

I became disillusioned and considered giving up. So many seemed to expect to be let away with things the able-bodied would not. But I stuck with it and came to realise that there are bad eggs in all walks of life. There are just as many wheelchair-wankers as walking-wankers. But for every bad egg there are so many more good ones. So that’s why Harrison is straining on his axles and I’m away for the day.

* Harrison because it’s a Ford and was used in the movie, Man about Dog. It got paid more than I did for that one.

Saturday mornings used be great. Let the dog out of his kennel. Throw him a few fresh kittens. A big bowl of Wheatibangs for myself. Brew up a pot of coffee. Then sit back from 6:30 to 9:00 and watch back-to-back documentaries on RTÉ1. Two and a half hours of pure heaven.

That’s all changed. RTÉ no longer show documentaries from 6:30 to 9:00. Now it’s 9:00 to 11:00, by which time it’s too late. I have other things to do. Trolley rage. Hoover the fridge. Do some charity work. Take a drive somewhere. Normal Saturday stuff.

Instead I’m subjected to Simple Painting. Simply fekin Painting with Frank fekin Clarke. The plastic Paddy who insists on sticking a big dirty H into Slán at the end of his show. As we say in Ireland, sHlán leat. No we don’t Frank. Fek off! Oh, and leat - well maybe you’re right - maybe you do have only one viewer. This morning it was me. Now, fek off, again!

Follow this with reruns of Bergerac and Magnum PI. The TV guides tag them with an (R). Yep, repeats alright. First screened in the ’80’s so RTÉ figures enough time has elapsed to slip them into the schedule again. Fek it lads, they were crap back then. L-shaped sheets don’t cut it in the noughties. Twenty years sitting a shelf won’t have made them any better. They aren’t whiskeys. Only my mother and my half-wit friend TJ liked them the first time. TJ joined the Guards, by the way.

I only have terrestrial TV so my options are limited. RTÉ2 - kids stuff. Fair play to them. TV3 - Emmer-fekin-dale and Best of Ireland AM. I didn’t know there was a best. I’m not even sure if there could be a Mediocre of Ireland AM. TG4 - A stream from Euronews. “The international community have called on Iran to halt their nuclear programme”. Imagine that. “Ah com’on, will yiz give up all that auld nuclear shite like good lads now”. The same stories repeated every 10 minutes. Gets boring after a while. Maybe there should be an (R) in the TV guide for this too.

Radio. Ah, the wireless. I do love the wireless. But not on Saturday morning. RTE2FM - Dave Redmond. Who? RTE Radio 1, Newstalk, RnG - all repeats of the week gone. I was there lads. I have the t-shirts. No use telling me about it. Lyric FM - No, too sleepy. I want mental stimulation. Today FM - normally my favourite but they have Martin King on. A part-time weatherman, part-time DJ, full-time plonker who goes on the national airwaves once a week and plays requests for John from Santry, Jason from Tallaght, Britney from Clondalkin, Jayo from Ballyier. If you’re Tom from Athenry and want something played for your granny’s 100th birthday you can fek off. This is a Dublin show.

I’m getting a dish.

The HSE are running ads encouraging hospital visitors to wash their hands as part of a drive to reduce the spread of infection, mainly by MRSA.

Now, forgive the pun, but there are a few things bugging me about this campaign:

There is a line slipped in at the end of the radio ad reminding hospital staff to wash their hands too. Is this not a given? Are they not the professionals? Did all those years of study and training teach them nothing about basic hygiene?

Perhaps it is aimed at staff other than doctors and nurses. I hope it is. Last year, when our father was in God’s waiting room there was an MRSA outbreak.  We, doctors and nurses included, wore gloves, masks and aprons, and washed our hands thoroughly going in and out of the ward. On one occasion we were there at lunch time. The caterer came in, distributed the trays and left for the next ward. No gloves. No mask. No apron. No hand washing. We freaked and complained to the ward sister that all our precautions were for nothing if this woman could be allowed to ramble throughout the hospital spreading infection. We were told she was an external contractor and they had no authority over her. (He died of MRSA. They put pneumonia on the death cert but that’s for another post on another day).

There are infection threats other than just MRSA in our hospitals: Clostridium difficile is a major one. You can read more about it here, or here if you have more time, but the basics are as follows. It is called C. difficile because it is extremely difficult to treat. The antibiotics which do work are among the most expensive. It is most prevalent where a patient is being treated with antibiotics for other infections. Catch 22. It can kill those who are weakened by age or serious ailments.

Why don’t we hear about it? Because the HSE are legally obliged to collect and publish statistics on MRSA but not C. difficile. For all we know it could be more common than MRSA.

This is yet another example of the lack of joined up thinking we have come to expect in our state services.

Just read this reply to one of my last mails to a State/Semi-State body:

Dear Mr. ******

Thank you for contacting the Road Safety Authority. Your e-mail will be forwarded to the

appropriate person dealing with this matter and a response will be issued in due course.

Regards
*******
-----Original Message-----

From: *******

Sent: 22 March 2007 07:56

To: Info

Subject: Enquiry_from_Website

Hi there

Why is there only a 'sample chapter' of the new Rules of the Road

available for download? Why not the whole document?

Le gach deá-mhéin
*******

A fairly simple query you’d agree. A fairly simple reply would have been along the lines of: “We will be making the full document available early next week”, or “We are sorry but we have no plans to do so at this time”.

Why do these bodies always reply with “your email will be forwarded … blah, blah, blah”? I get the impression this is Civil Service speak for “look, we’ve answered your mail. That’s the end of. Fek off!” Only once in a blue moon does a follow-up reply actually arrive. My interpretation of in due course is days or at max, a couple of weeks. Theirs seems to be months, years, or seemingly, never.

And why do they have to tell me the email has to be forwarded to the appropriate person? I assume it would be. Just forward the mail to that person and let them reply to me. If you, or they, are not going to reply properly don’t reply at all. Don’t clutter my inbox with trash.

Kildare County Council, I will admit, do actually action emails. Note the use of the word action as opposed to reply to. KCC send the standard Civil Service your email has been forwarded … reply. Usually this mentions the name or at least title of the recipient, and occasionally their email address and phone number. A follow-up mail will arrive within a couple of weeks if they can’t action what you’re requesting. If they can do it, it just gets done, and there is no follow-up.

That works for me. So what’s the snag? Well the replies come as attachments in MS Word format. No messing! It’s true. MS fekin Word. What if I am on a dial-up connection? What if I’m using Linux?

I’d mail the RSA, KCC and other bodies about this but my email would be forwarded to the …

Update: Still no reply, but the full text of the new Rules of the Road booklet is available for download here. No reply either to my mail to them in January asking for clarification on the rules for roundabouts.