Eddie Hobbs and Other Stories

Around June and July, when the sun sits slightly higher in the sky, and the deluges of rain abate to the degree that a man can go out in the yard for a sod of turf to throw on the fire without getting drenched from his receding hairline right down to his knackers, most normal folk think about getting away from it all. Be it a charter flight-jam packed with little tins of beer, large bellies redolent in Celtic jerseys, and copious amount of B.O. and screaming babies, a week in Bundoran with the Americans and four Euro pints (I'll come back to that in a bit), or dodging lady boys in Phuket, the holliers are a brief respite from the joys of nine-to-fivedom.

At chez Mooney however, ordinary is not in the vocabulary, which is why we take our leave in September, or later.

We've just returned from the UK. Exotic 'innit? A pleasant few days was spent in the company of relatives, who, despite their genetic ties to your scribe here, are a refreshingly normal bunch.

Enough of all that.

I'm sure that anyone out there who, like me, partakes of a few pints of gut-rot, smokes a few coffin nails, and has a carbon footprint the size of Alaska, is all too aware of how much these old reliables hit one in the fucking pocket. With that in mind, I'd hate to be a Brit. Those poor bastards have to pay nine Euro for a box of Mr. Players finest, and with their fuel prices, I'm surprised they're not all pootling around on Honda 50s like Bombay at rush hour.

Britain is fucking expensive, boys and girls. Yes, Mrs. Mooney found herself a nice few frocks, for reasonable money, no doubt due to the vast variety of shops, and healthy competition, but the average householder pays in a month (for "Service Charges") what we pay in a year for refuse and water. Pensioners have only had free travel for a couple of years, are not exempt from said service charges, and have miniscule state pensions. Eating out is ridiculously expensive, unless you like Chinese/Indian all-you-can-eat buffets. They were lovely.

The only upside that I could see to the whole ball of wax is that the Roundymobile did not encounter so much as a pothole the entire time, and we were introduced to a brand new concept called progress, on the roads that is. The road network in the UK, despite their whinging about it, should be the envy of the world. People over there can actually drive too, and you can anticipate the movement of other cars about you as you barrel down the outside lane of the M4 at 90 mph. Despite indignant murmurings from Uncle Gaybo( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Byrne ), driving in Ireland at half that speed is a feverish activity as you attempt to gauge what the homicidal grandad in front of you is about to do next.

Eddie Hobbs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_hobbs ), while admirable in his crusade for lower prices, doesn't know how lucky we are.

I never thought I'd say it, but, bad and all as this place is, it could be worse...

Fuckin' Bebo...

Social Networking, they call it. "They" being the backroom boys and website creators who would like to think of people communicating through the internet as some sort of highbrow activity. Something like the new "staying in", perhaps.

Nah.

Maybe that was the intention. Bebo has now become the most popular site of its type in Ireland. Unlike http://www.hotornot.com, where you have to pay to indulge in the internet equivalent of blind dating, (well-soft focus glamour shot based dating), http://www.faceparty.com where the thong wearing teens of entire continents gather to be ogled by 40 year old married men, or http://www.myspace.com where said married men's wives and estranged long term partners hurriedly post their 20 year old party photos, complete with Dirty Dancing perms, leg warmers and accompanied by bright sparkly angels, dodgy dance music that their kids haven't heard of, and enough flashing gifs to send an epileptic to his eternal reward-the focus of Bebo appears to be just that. Social Networking. Talking to your platonic girlfriends without the short term probability of getting your end away, and your male buddies who would slag you endlessly for even entertaining such a preposterous idea in the first place.

Soooo, Bebo is good then? No. Not exactly. You see, there are a lot of vacuous people out there. People whose lives revolve around doing as little as possible while spending as much as possible, to look as good as possible, while getting more shitfaced than you thought possible. Oh, and they communicate using as few letters as possible in a coded dialect that the world has come to know as "txtspk".

None of this of course is the fault of Bebo, no more than Burberry www.burberry.com is at fault for being hijacked by a generation of feckless welfare suckling idiots who have made it a badge of petty crime, loud exhausts and fat screaming single mothers.

Your standard Bebo offender is sub 25 years old, mentally or physically, female but in many cases male, with a grossly overestimated sense of their own drinking capacity and a grossly underestimated sense of their own stature. They hog college pcs and their open plan office call centre workstations for hours on end, holding forth on topics such as "OMG! Mary u wre sooo fkin pished last nite, did u gt ur pntes off da taxi driver after???!!!???", and" Jeez man me Micra is fooked, stoopid pigs tuk da keys of me after I hit dat fookin skool bus!!!1!!!!1".

They post pictures too, but they generally defy description. Let's face it, you've seen one pub scene, you've seen 'em all.

As Granny Mooney used to say, "Ireland is still rearing them."

You might think from that little rant that Roundy here is somewhat opposed to Ireland's pub culture. No. If you lived here, you'd drink too. The problem I have with that whole mindset is not about Bebo, or binge drinking (although that doesn't help), it's with the fact that there are so many idiots out there. The drink isn't the problem, it's the fact that we're rearing a generation of feckless twats, who know nothing of two digit inflation, 300,000 unemployed, and open corruption in Irish society as opposed to the rampant incompetence that passes for beauracracy these days. We were delusional too, but in a different way. We used to go to Mass on Sunday, while they go to shopping centres. We queued for a living, they queue for ATM machines. We had housing lists, they have wedding lists.

They haven't a clue.

Oh by the way, did I mention I joined Bebo?

A tentative toe in the water. Fuck it, that's beautiful.

Well lads.

When I read about this blogging caper a while back, I though it would never catch on. You see, the idea of committing your most inward textual fondlings to paper (or HTML or whatever) for no one to ever see doesn't really have a whole lot of appeal. I mean whoever thought of such a waste of time that could be better spent clipping toenails (your own or whoever is convenient), shooting small animals with a double bore, bothering the Significant Other for a frenzied thirty second bout of hide the sausage while no ones looking, or getting slowly hammered on cheap German wine?

But, like the little fella who stuck his finger in the dyke, some things need to be done for the greater good.

Okay, she probably kicked the crap out of the poor little fucker, but at least he got his 5 minutes out of it.

Anyway, its not as if keeping a journal of some description is bad luck. Many illustrious folk kept a journal of sorts. Roger Casement, Adolf Hitler, Anne Frank, Kenneth Williams, Oscar Wilde.

They all turned out okay.