Fandom

On June 12^th 1988 I was in Co Wicklow with the 47^th Cub Scout troop camping. Before twelve year old had a mobile phone, we pitched our tents on the floor of a river valley surrounded by the greenest woodland and with the exception of the occasional plane flying over head the outside world could not get near us. That was until Ian Corcoran took his contraband transistor radio out of his rucksack.

We were not supposed to bring such things on camp; it was all about getting back to basics. Anyone caught with such an illicit item would be punished by having their mother told. But ‘Corco’ was willing to risk it. He wanted to hear what was happening in the match.

“What match?” I naively asked.

“We are playing England in the Euros.”

This was news to me although I did twig that by we he meant Ireland and that by the Euros he meant soccer. I didn’t have much interest in sport back then. I occasionally played 5 a side football (not very well as I have mentioned previously,) but I had always assumed that Ireland weren’t very good.

“They’ll slaughter us,” I said both unpatriotically and insensitively, considering the violent history of both nations.

“Not necessarily,” his scorn barely concealed. “We’re much better now that Jack Charlton is the manager.”

I remembered my dad giving out about the disgrace of having an Englishman as manager. And there were few more English than Jack Charlton; he’d won the world cup with them and everything. To hear my friend sticking up and praising this guy now was very confusing. So with a mumbled “so what” I went about the business of taking down our camp while Ian listened to the match.

He screamed when Ray Houghton put the ball in the English net. He gasped at every save Packie Bonner made. As the match progressed more and more scouts, including me gathered around him to listen to what would be a famous win for the Republic of Ireland.  A victory I didn’t fully comprehend until we were driving back to Dublin later that day.

As we drove through towns and villages people were dancing on the street, waving their pints in the air. Cars beeped their horns in celebration. Irishmen kissed each other on the cheek in an outpouring of emotion that had never before been seen on Isle of Saints and Scholars. It was a party.

And so my interest was piqued. I made a point of watching the next Ireland game against the USSR. They were definitely much better than us, surely. The England game was a fluke. The Soviets would wipe the floor with us, wouldn’t they? They didn’t and when Ronnie Whelan scored one of the greatest goals ever (with his shin) my teenage love affair with football was concreted.

Sadly over the years, as is the way with life, I have allowed myself to become cynical about soccer. Millionaire footballers running around the pitch with impeccable hair and sculpted chests mean nothing to me. I have no connection to someone who just wants the ref to blow so that he can get out and pick up his latest wannabe WAG.

It didn’t help that Ireland became a horrible team to support. Poor results matched by poor performances meant that the joy I got from being a plucky underdog had dissipated. We could barely beat Wales.

Then came Giovanni Trapattoni. The Italian embraced negative football. If the other team can’t score we can’t lose was his thinking. Not necessarily the most attractive way to play the beautiful game but it has been effective.

Today for the first time in ten years, the Republic of Ireland takes to the field in a major football championship. So for the day that’s in it I will allow myself to to be the hopeful, cheering pre pubescent that I was in 1988.

Come On You Boys in Green.

Adolescent

It would appear that my fifteen year old brother is turning into something of fairly cool individual. He has started to form his own identity with hobbies and opinions of his own. Growing their hair and taking an interest in their appearance is probably standard for guys his age but is learning to play the banjo and a general interest in traditional music?

Shouldn’t he be playing computer games, planking (it’s an actual thing) in shopping centres and mugging grannies? I’ve been led to believe that the youth of today had been assimilated into text speaking dumbots who are willing to sacrifice any kind of dignity to become a YouTube meme.

From what I remember, it is far from easy being a teenage boy. Your body starts doing things you were not expecting at the most inopportune time. Hair begins to spurt on appendages and in orifices. You don’t know which way is up unless you use a seemingly constant erection as some sort of body compass because it’s always pointing that direction.

Yes, greasy hair, spots and loss of voice control make adolescence hard enough but body betrayal is only the start of your worries. Peer pressure and outside influence can be just as challenging. It takes a strong will to be your own man when you are still, for the most part, a boy.

It can be time in your life when the last thing you want to do is stand out so it can appear that the thing is to just blend in with the crowd. Wear the same clothes, do the same things, same is good, different is bad. You are still trying your personality out for size, so the more friends you have that approve of you the better.

With boys it can be hard to tell if your part of ‘the group.’ I’m don’t know if it’s just an Irish thing (I’m pretty sure it’s not) but boys make fun of everyone, whether they are friend or foe. They insult each other’s mother. They use cruel and mean nicknames. They highlight each other’s difference. It can be hard tell who is on your side and who wants to belittle you.

This was certainly the situation in my case. I was just about the most average teenager you could find. I wasn’t particularly gifted at anything, but neither was I rubbish at stuff. I was ok at sport, ok at school work, ok at being a teenager. I was made fun of and pranked but I would never claim to be bullied. But when I remember other kids and how they were treated, bullying is exactly how I would define it.

On a class trip, ‘the group’ once grabbed a boy, a guy I would have called a friend of mine, picked him up and threw him in a fountain. I knew it was going to happen, I’d been told earlier they were going to get him as soon as the teacher was distracted. I could have warned him or I could have tried to stop them. I didn’t. Maybe I thought if I stood up to ‘the group’ then I would be the one taking the swim.

I don’t think anyone in ‘the group’ turned out to be a mass murderer or corrupt politician. They are all probably decent people with families of their own now. But the pack mentality of teenage boys can lead to them doing some very horrible things.

Everyone wants to be the alpha male and the best way to show that is to force your way up the food chain and take out those weaker than you along the way, and if you can’t be the leader of the pack it’s better to be with him than against him. When you are trying to show the world that you are becoming a man, boys can behave like beasts.

I don’t think the mistakes of a teenager should be held against them. It’s a very confusing time and there are bound to me missteps along the way. But if you can be strong minded and try to stand up for what you believe, you will do just fine.

The important thing to remember is, that if it feels like life is hard at the moment, it changes, I promise. Whether that’s for better or worse is up to you. You’re at the start of a journey and you should have a good time figuring out who you are and if you need any help you can always ask.

Offensive

I once got in trouble in school for lashing out at someone who had said something derogatory about my mother. He wanted to fight me for the usual reasons boys fight and I suppose he thought he would provoke me with the kind of baseless slanders that boys will when looking for a reaction.

Not knowing then that words are only as powerful as the significance you allow them, I kicked out, catching him hard on the shin. So hard that I actually broke the skin and instead of a scrap taking place he hobbled off in pain. Unfortunately my actions had been viewed by a teacher and so I was sent to the Principals Office.

Brother Keegan, the headmaster, demanded an explanation for my actions. He knew I wasn’t a particularly aggressive child and wanted to know what had caused it. Not only was I not aggressive, I was incredibly timid and as such couldn’t bring myself to repeat what my antagonist had said about my sainted Mother. Instead, I lied.

“He called me a name sir.” My head was bowed to hide my lying eyes.

In his words, this was hardly an excuse to almost cripple a boy, (he was prone to exaggeration.) What could he have possibly called me that warranted such an attack? I wracked my brain to come up with something. I was too shy to curse in front of the head of the school so I went for something that I was occasionally called by my classmates but it never really bothered me.


“Hula Hoops, sir,” I said, still looking down.

At first he thought I was talking about the children’s toy and was confused why anybody would insult someone by calling them that. I explained that it was actually a slagging in relation to my name Holohan and that it was the crisps rather than the plaything.

“I’ve never heard of crisps being offensive,” he said

I wonder what if he’d still say that if he saw the Hunky Dory’s Rugby World Cup advertising campaign.

That might seem like a bit of a long set up for the punch line to a bad joke but I’m serious. The latest Hunky Dory’s bus shelter posters is without question one of the most offensive advertising campaigns ever. And I’m not even talking about its portrayal of women as objects of titillation and sexual entertainment. I can get past the fact that it flys in the face of any feminist who has ever stood up for herself and woman kind.

What bothers me is that it is so blatant in the fact that it has gone out of its way to be controversial and abhorrent. The marketing genius behind it wants you to be appalled. They want you to ring Joe Duffy to express your outrage. Oscar Wilde once said there is no such thing as bad publicity and in a world where this generations Ike Turner, Chris Brown, can have number one albums and Grammy nominations after pleading guilty to beating his girlfriend, he may have had a point.

The more people who complain about Hunky Dory’s the better because that means more people will recognise the name when they see it on the shelf of their supermarket and as more of us develop goldfish memories we forget the controversy and just remember the product name. You really have to wonder how much longer it is before we see this....

Knickers

Thus far ‘K’ has definitely been my least favourite stop on this alphabetical blogging odyssey. Up until this point I was loaded with a variety of options from my vernacular but with the eleventh letter I struggled to for a fitting word to headline my musings.

A Facebook plea offered up some hope. Kangaroo, Karma and Kaleidoscope were all possibilities. Kinky certainly had potential and when Ka-ching arrived courtesy of Sean Kennedy I was certain I had hit pay dirt.

Unfortunately it wasn’t just a title I needed. Usually I come up with a name based around the subject matter of the piece but sometimes I take the letter, find a word that I like and hope to get some spark from that. I was hoping this would be one of those times.

It wasn’t. Inspiration was not coming the way I needed it so Ka ching, while great was proving unusable at this point in time. This put me back to square one with this week’s blog. It was only after a conversation with an incredibly childish colleague did I come with this week’s bit.

“Knickers,” she said like an eight year old.

It was perfect. I already had a story that I told relating to underwear and it would fit rather nicely into the style that you have all become accustomed to.

I need to point out that this story is mostly true. I may have exaggerated some of the facts and added some dramatic flourishes but as some disreputable journalist may have once said, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

This tale takes place in my youth and like all good childhood stories it happened in one of those memory lane summers, where even in Ireland, glorious sunshine baked our young faces as we ran, skipped and jumped. The evenings lasted forever and there was a real sense of community.

To emphasise both of these facts, the local community council, or the Eight Roads committee as they were known, organised an evening football tournament for all of the kids who lived on the aforementioned eight roads.

Every child in the area signed up for the ‘road leagues.’ I say it as though we all volunteered but in my case it was more my mother wanted me out from under her feet so she put my name down. I would imagine there were one or two others like me.

I wasn’t very good at soccer and the organiser knew it. They knew who the kids that were rubbish were and they knew who the really good ball players were. Everyone else was in between. I wasn’t privy to the team selection process but it did seem that on each team of seven, there was one really good player, one woeful incompetent like myself and five others of varying ability. So it was pretty fair.

Split into divisions based on age, each team would play each other over three weeks and the top two teams would then play again on the final day. The games were played on a grass covered roundabout on Aughavannah Road and would usually be surrounded by parents and supporters of the kids involved in any of the five games played each night.

One such evening is when my story takes place. The sun was indeed shining and the roundabout was busier than normal. My team was playing and we were kitted out in red football jerseys, to which I added football shorts and socks, a very impressive ensemble indeed. Not that it really mattered because as I said, I wasn’t very good and my ‘manager’ had decided that I should stay as a substitute.

I was ok with that, I was maybe 10 at the time and while I’m sure puberty hadn’t started yet I do remember feeling somewhat self conscious about running around in shorts and looking stupid while the people on my time refused to pass to me. So I was doing my bit for the team from the sideline

That was until; one of my team mate’s mum called him in for his tea. I’m not sure if that was what actually happened but I was sent on to replace one of the other players. I looked over and saw my mum on the other side of the pitch. She seemed so proud. The manager told me to stick up front and if the ball came near me to kick it towards the opponent’s goal. That way I couldn’t do much harm.

For the first couple of minutes everything was going fine. I stayed clear of the action as it was mostly going on down near my teams goal. I ran around a bit up front, even though the ball was in the other half. People were shouting at me from the sideline to ‘chase back’ but I was following my coach’s instruction to the letter.

Eventually our goalkeeper caught the ball and kicked it as hard as he could up the field. There was no one near it except me and the opposition goalie. I ran for the ball and so did he. I was a bit closer but he was much faster than I was. I was almost at the ball when he came behind, knocking me over and kicking the football back down the field.

My possible moment of glory gone, I picked myself up and began to run around up front again. It seemed a little harder this time like I was running against something. It appeared that the elastic that held my shorts up had snapped in the tackle. My shorts felt looser and I was aware that they were slipping down. As was everyone in the crowd of about one hundred people.

One hundred people laughing at you because your shorts are falling down is the stuff nightmares are made of, especially to 10 year old. I tried to ignore it and play on holding them up with one hand but it wouldn’t work. If I held them at the front the back would slip down and vice versa. It definitely required two hands which made it even harder to run. The raucous laughter wasn’t helping either. I had never been so humiliated.

That is until at that very moment, my mother, feeling a million types of embarrassment for son with drooping draws, ran on to the pitch, while the game was still being played, grabbed my shorts and hoisted them up as high as they would go. She then turned the tops of them into my underwear so as they would stay up. She meant well but aside from the very painful wedgy she had just inflicted on me, she had managed to make my 10 year old mortification and the laughter of the braying audience a million times worse.

So there you have my knickers story. It’s something that has haunted me every day for the last twenty five years or so. I’ve tried to laugh it off. I tell it as an ice breaker when I’m sitting with strangers at a wedding or some such event. Some laugh, some creep away. It’s understandable.

I’m not sure how I’d react to a stranger revealing such intimate and traumatic details of their life. But I wanted to share it with you my loyal readers, mostly because, therapy is really expensive. Any psychiatrist who read this story will just see cash register signs. Ka ching.

Innuendo

“So you’re looking for a hard one is it?”

This question is one I directed a few weeks ago to a customer at my part time job. She was looking for a case for her sunglasses. We carry a nylon soft case but she was looking for something sturdier. I really was just looking to help her with her query.

I could feel her eyes bearing into me. I tried not to laugh, fighting the dirty chuckle that was building inside me. Resistance was futile, my cheeks were heating up and the tension on the shop floor was dense. I looked down at the floor. If I could avoid contact I might be able to suppress it.

The idea that she was ‘looking for a hard one,’ rolled around my infantile brain for what seemed like an eternity but was surely only seconds. I couldn’t hold it any longer. I snickered. Some of it came out through my pursed lips while the rest escaped through my nostrils.

Incredibly childish I know. I’m a thirty five year old man with Bevis and Butthead tendencies. I should know better but if something is delivered in the right tone or wrong context I revert to my giggling teenage phase. I can’t help it.

In this case I think it is a case of nurture over nature. When I was a child one of my favourite things to do was to sit down and watch Benny Hill or a Carry On movie with my Dad. If something made him laugh, it had to be funny, right? If my dad approved of Barbara Windsor’s Fanny or Benny Hill slapping the baldy man then it was comedy gold as far as I was concerned.

Of course as I grew, I tried to rally against this. Maybe I was rebelling against my Dad’s taste but I like to think that as I was exposed to more mature politically correct comedy and began to see Carry On for the crass sexist childish humour that it was. Have I Got News for You, Who’s Line Is It Anyway became more my cup of tea.

Ironically this cup of tea was laden with lascivious, juvenile frippery, but it seemed to be of a different kind. It wasn’t so blatant. It was insightful and intelligent, poking fun at the ludicrousness of society. At least that’s what I told myself.

But try as I might I could not deny my roots in smut. Once I started working full time my choice of viewing was dictated by what could be left on in the background without requiring too much attention. So banal cookie cutter comedy was my ideal early evening television. Scrubs, Friends and Two and a Half men each had at least one character whose job was to make stupid offensive, sexually loaded remarks. And I could not help but laugh.

It could be argued that the characters are often portrayed as idiots or actually infantile and as such this is not the same as being straight up offensive. We are laughing ‘at’ them rather than ‘with’ them. I’m not so sure my funny bone was making that connection.

In the interest of disclosure I need to point out I’m a big fan of Scrubs. It made me laugh regularly and not just in an infantile way but ‘The Todd’ is the perfect example of the kind of character I’m talking about. When The Todd points at his crotch and talks about Hot Italian Sausage, I know it’s not actually funny but I laugh. The same with Joey from Friends or Jake in Two and a Half Men.

I know it’s not big or clever; but as I’ve said before neither am I. I can’t help it if the whole point of this blog post is so I could tell you about all the sticky substances involved in getting ready for work in the morning (shower gel, Brylcreem, moisturiser.) But I have been trying to control it.

Working in Fighting Words I learned pretty quickly that eight year olds don’t mean anything suggestive by talking about a monkey who likes to ‘play toss the coconut’ or the chicken who wanted to win ‘The Cock of the Year Award.’ At least I hope they don’t. Somehow I’ve always managed to control my childish side in those situations. That must show some level of maturity.

So what’s your favourite Double Entendre? Please post them in the comment box below and you might win a prize....yea a prize....not an actual physical prize, more like a moral victory. But go on...you know you want to.
Of course some of you will have noticed that the title of this piece is out of sequence with my alphabet theme. Very observant, there is a reason for that. The ‘H’ will be delivered next but I just thought it would be more fitting if ‘Innuendo’ was 69th post.

Heehee 69.

Doggystizzle

There are two types of people in the world. Those who use trite sayings and inaccurate statistics to start of a blog and those that are dog people. I belong to the third group which is a little from column A and little from column B.

With my background, I’m most definitely a dog person, there was never going to be any question of that. In October 1975 when my parents married, they united two great cat hating families. On my mother’s side, the Tynan’s kept racing pigeons and as such viewed prowling felines as a threat to their loft. My dad, well he just hates cats.

Even when I tried, as the sane, reasonable member of my family, to break from tradition by bonding with some kitties, it never felt right. They always had air of superiority and entitlement. They would come to me when they wanted attention and when they were done they would jump out the window and saunter along the garden wall without so much as an “I’ll call you.” Frankly if I wanted to be treated like that I could go back to some of my previous romantic relationships.

Cat people are a strange bunch. They are kind of like the submissive in an S&M relationship. They put up with outlandish demands for the promise of some kind of affection which may or may not come. This doesn’t make them bad people, although the phrase is not “crazy cat lady” for nothing.

Having failed in attempts to reach out to cats, I have to accept that it’s me and dogs all the way. It’s been that way since I was a kid. One of my earliest memories is of having an Afghan hound named Max. I recently found out that my dad got Max from one of former Taoiseach, Charlie Haughey’s daughters in lieu of payment for some work he did for her. A different kind of under the counter payment if you will.

After Max was Queenie, a black and white Jack Russell. I don’t remember much about Queenie accept that the ground was covered in frost the morning she died. It made it harder for my Dad to bury her in the back garden while I sat indoors watching a Tom Sawyer movie on TV.

Queenie always gets promoted to my first pet when doing the “What’s your porn star name?” game. The idea being that you use the name of your first pet and your mother’s maiden name when deciding on suitable pseudonym for any appearance in X-rated movies. This is not a slight on Max’s position as my first pet but ‘Queenie Tynan’ always had a more comedic ring which I feel is imperative with an erotic alias.

Then, when I was in First Class in primary school, the biggest canine relationship of my life began. One November evening my father brought me out for a walk. We went up towards Mount Argus where he had been working that week. He wanted me to meet the lady who he was working for, an older lady whose house smelt funny.

This was hardly surprising considering she shared it with a cat and a dog. Having been told by countless cartoons that these creatures where natural enemies, I was stunned to see how they cohabited peacefully. I remember asking my dad about it and he laughed out loud. He sometimes still tells the story of my amazement at the cat and dog living happily together.

The dog, I was to discover, had recently given birth to a litter of pups that the lady of the house was eager to find good homes for. Again in lieu of cash we were going to get a dog. We wrapped him in a blanket and a hot water bottle that the lady wanted us to take for him and carried him home in a cardboard box. When we got him back to our house I named him Jock.

I remember getting the name from a book I had read shortly before getting him. I’ve always thought it was The Railway Children by E. Nesbit but having done some research there doesn’t seem to be any dog in that, called Jock or otherwise. Whatever the book was, this new mutt had literary ties. This is actually the second time I’ve committed his life story to paper. Sister. Mary, the Marist nun, was so impressed by my story of the little dog that used to live with a cat that she gave me a purple star on my homework copy.

Jock was the family dog, but I always felt, from the time I carried him hope in that King Crisp box, that we had a bond that meant more to him than the rest of the Holohans. A small two tone Jack Russell, white with a light brown stubby tail and saddle patch on his back, he was beautiful inside and out. He had a habit of tilting his tan head to one and looking me up and down, his deep black eyes half wondering where the food was and half asking if I was ok.

He was a real constant through my teenage years of confusion and self pity. Like Greta Garbo with acne and unpredictable erections, my adolescent self regularly just wanted to be alone. Sharing a small house with a family of five and room with two brothers, solitude was not always easy to come by. So I would retreat to our back garden, sitting either on the steps in front of the door or under the trees that grew wild there. Jock, sensing my anguish would come over to me, nuzzling my hand with his head to let me know he was there for me. He got me.

Without wanting to ruin the emotion of the article, in the interest of disclosure, I should point out that sometimes when I was sitting down in the garden, instead of trying to comfort me Jock would occasionally attempt to hump my leg. He was a dog, what can you expect. Don’t judge him for it.

The night Jock left us was hard on the entire family. I had just finished school so he would have been about thirteen years old. Something happened in his brain which meant it was kinder to let the vet stop his pain. As I sat on the steps of the vet’s surgery, with my friend tucked under my coat, I said goodbye. I’d been there to collect him when we got and I was there to try and make his last hours less scary. I never had to do anything as hard before or since. So far I’ve been fortunate not to experience the loss of a human family member but Jock was a member of my family and the grief felt was as powerful as anything I can imagine.

After Jock’s passing, I really didn’t feel like I would want another dog. It wouldn’t be right. But like I said at the top, we are a dog family and soon my dad wanted to get another dog. I wasn’t so sure I was ready so kept my distance from the new pup at first. Jackie, a black furred cross breed was cute but she wasn’t Jock. Eventually we bonded one night where I was up late reading and she came over and rested her head in my lap. She was alright.

I could keep talking about the dogs in my life but that would involve telling you about the deaths of two more beloved pets and frankly I don’t think I can take it. It’s been quite emotional writing this. Who knew I was such a big softie?

Dogs are fantastic; I think everyone should have them, even cat people. That said I would rather have an emotionally stunted cat the sort of dog that you pick up and carry around in handbags. They aren’t real dogs and if you have one you look ridiculous. But real dogs are, the clichéd best friend for mankind. Full of life and energy, compassionate and loyal, they will protect and care for their human companion. They will fill your life with joy and emotion. They might even try to hump your leg, show me a cat that does that.