Wee Ah Fam-il-y

Mrs O and I are off to a family wedding reception this evening.  It's a London one, this.  Usually my family weddings are in the west of Ireland.  There, hopping over the broom and the subsequent celebratory necking takes two full days.  Try as I might over the years, I have never been able to get to grips with the day B itinerary of these affairs.  It's torturous.  

You shamble down to breakfast in the hotel at about 10.30, nudge some baked beans around the plate for 10 minutes and then join everyone in the lounge.  At this point all I want to do is to stare into the middle distance and sweat.  But, no.  Once the last rasher has been dispatched, the Irish yard arm is considered to be behind you and the pints start piling up.

Apart from the real old soaks, who you suspect would be doing this at twenty to eleven on a Sunday morning wedding or not, no-one who starts drinking this early could be said to be enjoying himself.  And it is always only the men at this stage.  Everyone looks like he's drinking cod liver oil.  It's joyless stuff.  One of my cousins, who really really cannot drink, always joins in the fray.  Christ alone knows why.  It's just the done thing I suppose.

So at least I'm being spared that indignity with tonight's shindig.  Mind you, that said, it's still a London-Irish wedding, so the turps will be getting a titanic nudge for all that.

Have A3 boarding pass, will travel

Mrs O and I are off for a long weekend in southern Spain tomorrow.  We're doing a greatest-hits tour of the places we know well - Jerez and Cadiz.  I adore Andalusia; it's so vital and so brutal.  We've never been there this early in the year, and it's going to be bastard-hot.

We normally head down to Al-Andalus in late September at the earliest.  Even then it's generally scorching.  I've a photo from Jerez of one of those giant thermometers you get outside pharmacies (pharmacists, why?).  It reads 39 degrees.  So presumably in August it's like sitting in an inglenook fireplace whilst dressed like a Norwegian trawler man.  Oh, well, the hotel has a pool, and Cadiz is on the Atlantic, so what's the worst that can happen to a pasty London Irish weed, comme moi?

The greatest pleasure on Earth has to be cowering from the relentless heat of an Andalusian day until the sun begins its descent and then heading off to a sheltered bar somewhere that has a view of the sea or a river and sipping a freezing-cold fino sherry.  The astringent quality slakes the thirst no nothing else I've ever quaffed.  Suddenly, the limbs lighten and the brain springs back into life for a few hours.  Colours appear more vivid and you just want to embrace life.  Necking Guinness whilst listening to sean nos in a dark pub in the west of Ireland is fantastic, but it doesn't get close to this.  Nosirree.

Begorrah, which way to the station?

The wife and I have just returned from a weekend in Dublin.  It's been a few years since we darkened its door, and, as I was there on Friday for work anyhoos, we decided to extend the visit.

Dublin has a special place in my heart.  I spent a lot of time there in my late teens and early twenties - an impressionable time for anyone of course.  But Dublin is an easy city for a easily-led fop to become enamoured of.  It delights in its artists rather than its buildings, which is unusual for a capital city.  This is probably a function of its having been built by the British.  It is *full* of striking Georgian terraces, making it look very unlike the rest of Ireland.  Dubliners, therefore, don't take massive pride in the city's aesthetic qualities.  No, it's their wordsmiths that get the praise.

Take for example Davy Byrne's pub.  Leopold Bloom stopped for his lunch there in Joyce's Ulysses, and acolytes still call in to replicate the scene with a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy.  Compare this with The Grapes in London's Limehouse.  As a child, Dickens used regularly to visit Limehouse to call on his uncle who lived there.  His uncle would take the boy to the pub and place him on a table in to sing ballads for the entertainment of the regulars.  The pub is still largely as it was in Dickens' age.  It's a wonderfully atmospheric place, with its dark smoke-stained wood panelling and the sound of The Thames lapping up outside the rear windows.  But how many Londoners are aware of this place?  Hundreds maybe.  London is so busy hoicking-up its petticoats to attract tourists with a bit of architectural leg that it rather overlooks its gems like this.

Eye Tea

I'm on the cust of developing a tumour in my anguish and frustration at the IT in my new job. The main thrust of my role (if I might dignify my labours with that term) is to analyse sales data for a national newspaper. To do this, it's traditional to mine huge gobs of data (stop me if I'm getting too technical for you), and spin it into an array of bewildering, scarcely plausible graphs. Unfortunately, the reporting system I've been tasked with operating cannot spit out more that two lines of sales data at any one time. I am literally spending my days sitting in front of a computer twiddling my thumbs. Is it any wonder I go home and drink? What would you do, dear reader?

If it gets any facking slower, I'm going to be forced to bring four cans of Guinness to work each day and drink them at my desk. I *refuse* to spend what's left of my wretched tenure on this planet being defied by a laptop. I simply won't have it.