A tap on the shoulder. I turned to the lady in the pew behind me. Howya, Primal. Tell me, is this woman any relation of Michael who lived in the last house on our row? Yes, Mrs. K, she was a sister. That’s grand then - I didn’t come over here for nothing then.

Nothing surprises me anymore about funerals. Not my own family ones anyway. A woman turning up at my aunt’s this week just on the off chance she knew her didn’t even raise a smile. We have a history incredulous internments.

The evening of my father’s we decided to take the hearse on a circuitous route so it could pause for a moment outside the house where he was born and reared. We were seconds too late. As we approached we could see a Hymac tear it down to make way for apartments. Someone mumbled, the feker, he’s gone now and he’s took the shaggin house with him.

As is compulsory in this country, there was a right royal session. The pub closed only when the last two mourners were left. Myself and a mate. Both full as ticks. We parted company and I rang for a taxi. Jayzez, before ya ask, I’m not working tonight. At the befores of a funeral. Primal’s auld lad. I’ve been on the tear with him all evening. I just left him there now.

I stumbled on and two sound young lads pulled up and offered me a lift. Never one to question a gift horse’s dental work I hopped in. We had a great chat. They commiserated with my loss. Wearing the black suit, pointed out one, I was a danger to myself and others on such a dark night. I was lucky they had picked me up. I agreed and thanked them wholeheartedly. Really sound lads as I said. Only when the were driving off did I see the blue lights atop the car.

The following day was relatively uneventful. Except when one of the druid’s little helper’s phone rang and she couldn’t extradite it from her pocket under the robes. We were treated to Com’on Barbie let’s go party for what seemed an age. The poor lassie was having a bad day. The top came off the stick used to ring the gong and rolled under the coffin. As she crawled beneath to retrieve it, Com’on Barbie let’s go party began again.

My mother’s is mostly a blur. We were very close and I was younger then. First of all, I was nearly late. The father had agreed at the last minute to bring proceedings forward by half an hour as there was to be a second service in the church that evening. Frantic phone calls were made to everyone except me. I was having a quick pint (the drink again, see) with the guy who was taking me when I did get the call. Luckily he had one of the unmarked cars (the cops again, see) from work that day and he hit the siren and lights and we sped down the N7 and up through the town. The prayers had begun and the stare I got from the druid for the noisy way I interrupted proceedings could have cut steel girders.

I must have looked as if I was about to completely break down later as I wheeled the coffin out of the funeral parlour with the undertakers and people rushed over to support me. Yes, I was upset, but mainly it was the painful and bloodied fingers from catching them on a bolt under the lid as it was being closed.

The following day I made sure I was on time. Others didn’t. Including a then government minister, now an EU commissioner (you can figure out who). He had to stand outside. It was a scorching hot day but just as the coffin was being brought out there was an unmerciful downpour and we paused in the hallway. Not being seemly to run for shelter, the minister commandeered his minder’s jacket (the cops again). Such a pity it wasn’t a different ceremony where cameras would have been plentiful. What a picture it was to see him there holding a coat over his head while his soaking Tonto tried to cover his holstered gun with both hands. I still don’t know whether that was out of respect or just to keep it dry.

To cap it all, there had been two druids officiating. The local one and one who introduced himself as being from the college. A cousin works there and had asked him to come along to make a big show I reckoned. He came up to me at the graveyard as we waited for the crowd to arrive and shook hands. He had only spoken to my mother a few times but said she was a wonderful woman and seldom missed his morning mass in the college. We came close to ordering a second grave when I told him she’d never went to mass there. Another woman of the same name always did though, and still does as far as I know. Once again I looked distraught and about to cave in. It is next to impossible to carry a coffin when your shoulders shake and tears well up trying to stifle the laughing.

If you think this is weird, wait ’til you hear about weddings in our clan. Or weirder still, my other encounters with the cops.

Ha! I knew that’d get your attention. Is there a queue to read this? With Old Knudsen at the front.

Well it’s not what you think. Well not really.

Sam, being the problem child she is, asked a question in the comments of my previous post.

“Tits and arse is all yee think about.”
What percentage of your attraction to a woman would you say was down to tits and arse, and what percentage personality? I’m not having a go - I don’t happen to believe all men are yahoos completely in thrall to their willies. I’m just interested is all. I think all we women want to know that.

Whether this is a battle of the sexes or a battle of the body parts is up to yourself. I’m just dragging it out in the open - her question may never be seen buried in comments, along with a reply from Eolaí (I’ve manually added it to this post’s comments).

For me it’s eyes. The eyes say it all. I’m not talking about deep brown ones, sparkling green ones, bright blue ones - I admit they can be like spanners and make my nuts tighten. I’m talking about reading they eyes. The spark. The life. One look into the eyes and you know if there’s interest and attraction. If there’s joy, wit, intelligence, caring. You name it. You can meet the best tits and arse genetics ever put together, but if the eyes are dead you run for your life.* Okay, an extreme example, but check out Paris Hilton’s eyes - they are soulless, lifeless, dead.

What do you think? Maybe Sam’s question can’t be answered. Maybe it’s just down to taste. The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter. Sorry, had to throw that in - today’s Bob Dylan’s birthday.

*Well, maybe a quick shag, then run for your life.

I always look forward to Sarah Carey’s column in the Sunday Times. Even more so I look forward to reading the full version on her blog. She wrote an excellent piece a couple of weeks back on how non-believing Irish parents are being forced to have their children baptised etc. You can read it here in all its unedited glory.

She points out that the majority of our primary schools are owned and managed by the catholic church. Religious education is part and parcel of the curriculum. Parents can opt to have their children excused from these lessons but come first communion time these children want to participate, simply because the other children are. Children usually have one burning wish – to be like all the other children, she wrote.

This is something which has been nagging at me for a long time now. I have friends who took their daughter to Euro Disney the week her classmates were having their first communion. They felt she had to be distracted from the peer pressure. She is an extremely bright individual and now that she’s older she is nonplussed that her pals are in confirmation mode.

Other friends, a Lutheran and a non-practising catholic, have had their kids baptised in a catholic church, partly to placate the paternal grandmother, but mainly, as they explained, to mark the occasion of the arrival of these new family members.

In both cases there was an occasion to be marked. The latter is obvious, the former less so. First communion is usually at the age of 7. This is when a baby becomes child. They know right from wrong at this stage. Again, at 12, confirmation time, another change takes place. They become teenagers. They reach puberty.

There are rites of passage here. All societies down through the ages have had these. A boy’s first hunt. A girl’s first period. More rites than you could shake an anthropologist at. Modern western society has some subtle ones too. First drink. First car. First sexual experience. Yet there isn’t a modern rite to mark passing from infancy to childhood and then through puberty. Perhaps first communion and confirmation fill this void. Perhaps there is a subconscious need in us all to mark these milestones and both parents and their young sense this. Perhaps my friends were marking an occasion by taking their daughter on her first foreign holiday rather than just avoiding peer pressure.

Sarah hit the nail on the head in her article. I’m just giving it another tap and hoping I’m not splitting the timber.

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.

Another week of doing the thing is over. The Time Thief was apprehended in the early hours of Saturday morning and has been detained under section 21 of the offences against normality act.

What a week. Each week doing the thing seems to hit me harder. Pure adrenalin keeps me going but when it stops it’s like being force fed twenty pints and then getting hit by the 7:30 bingo bus - being slowly rolled over by 30 fat auld wans all chattering at the top of their voices. The fatigue and headaches last two days.

Having said that, the last week was worth every pint and fat auld wan. I can now say that, given time, I am capable of building an industrial strength website. Like this WordPress thingy you are now looking at. Fair play to me!

This just in: The alleged Time Thief has been released on bail to appear again this day week. i.e. I have a major project to complete by 9:00 on Monday 19. Something I have successfully put out of my mind until now.