POSTCARDS FROM THE DREDGE
St.Patrick's Day is a day celebrating a Welshman, celebrated chiefly by Americans, celebrated chiefly in a shade of luminous tropical green that is outside the forty-shades found lapping the hillsides of even the John-Hindiest of sunny days, celebrated in the most morally-lapsed unsaintly manner possible. In fact the only Irish people who celebrate it to the fullest is Diageo, owners of Guiness and Baileys. But wait - that's actually an English-owned company and all.
Who cares though? St. paddy's day is sanctified drunkeness, seemingly religion-sanctioned debauchery, trying to combine the Irish penchant for brew and a symbol of our clerical distinctiveness. All philosophies are a million miles away though when you're standing watching the carnivalised parade trumpeting past you on a damp and unseasonably frigid Friday afteroon. I bumped into the American 'troops'from the Little America area of Cork who live near the shop I'm spending all my time in these days. Any by sweet Jesus did they look ridulous: war paint, wigs, all this bright green shite that made me look down on my pissy browning shamrock shame-faced like the man with the tiny willy in a row of occupied urinals. I realised that in order to convery my Irishness I had to be content with the fact that I was Irish. I found myself wandering the stands with two them, Jodi-with-an-I and Kristine-with-a-K (for a nation that can't spell they sure are particular about their misspellings). Kristine-with-a-K was already sozzled with a capital S, and wandered down the road singing The Divinyls' "I Touch Myself" much to the wonderment of the four-year-old in front of her. I wandered away from the Americans and met up with fellow scholar Sarah for a bit, where we delighted in taking some bawdy pictures. Unfortunately at last report this picture was the screensaver to one of the computers in the English department:
Oh dear. But that's exactly the sort of thing all those John Hindeists should be taking pictures of to capture the spirit of the St. Patricks day of modern Ireland. Just look at some of these postcards that supposedly entice people to the Emerald Isle...
John Hinde. He must wait for that one sunny day in Ireland and then go mental with his camera. What a deceptive bastard.
(One other point about this photo: There's obviously a house on fire in the distance, why don't that badly-dressed couple DO something?)
The fact that this postcard has the words "industial estate" at the bottom of it should have been a clue that they were doing something fundamentally wrong. But that's not the only problem: It's a bloody pre-fab in the foreground. A big dirty prefab. Not only that but this postcard includes a car-park. And it looks like the Trotters' have parked their three-wheeler there.
It's field. And it looks pretty brown to me. The skanky umkempt bit of my back garden where my dog does her Mr.Whippies would get more tourists than that obvious land-fill.
It's a road in Skibbereen. Nothing more. Probably a tourist attraction for it's pot-holes. "Gee Maureen, that must be where Leprechauns live!"
H
ow to take a picture for a postcard in Waterford: Wait for the grimmest, wettest day of the year, then wait 'til twilight. Oh and ensure you have half-obscured the only building of historical interest with a lamp-post.
Don't be fooled: That sun in the top left-hand corner has been cleverly photoshopped in. It doesn't matter how much colourdy sh*te ya border the picture with, it's BRAY. It's still got pebbles that would rip the verucas off ya, and a sea that'll bleach your pubes for free.
