You would think that yesterday’s blog, on a
scale of one to ten, would be reaching at least eleven on the old Spinal Tap
amplifier. But no, can you believe that
some people were still not satisfied. They
say that as we get older we learn more and we get wiser, more understanding,
more tolerant, not me, I want a gun. I
could write the perfect blog, mind you, I seem to do that most days, but I am
sure I would still get complaints. I
even got a complaint yesterday from my daughter who tells me that she is home
on Thursday not Friday, as if that is important in the great scheme of things. But the line that caused most concern
yesterday was when I admitted that I wanted to attend and experience a bullfight. I found the response to this most interesting
as recently, last week in fact, another writer was in hot water over the death
of a rabbit.
When I say hot water and bunny rabbit, I’m not
talking bunnie boiler here, but real life blood, guts and gore, veins in my
teeth, I wanna kill, type violence. The
good sort. Jeanette Winterson, author of
the bestselling novel ‘Oranges are not the only fruit,’ found a rabbit eating
the parsley in her garden and murdered the little fecker. Not only did she murder the little fecker,
but she murdered it to death. Now,
unfortunately we live in a world where using social media is like having a
nervous tick, and I don’t mean a dog flea sitting on your arm worrying that he
might upset you if he bites you. She went
for a wander in her garden, as you do, well; as most writers do, just after the
mid-morning champagne and just before lunch time gin, and saw a rabbit. One is assuming that, like most writers, she
lived in a palatial mansion in the countryside and would have been carrying a
shotgun, broken, unloaded and carried in the crook of the arm, if you don’t mind.
The rabbit would have identified itself as a
rabbit, by being all brown and fluffy and she would have identified herself as
being the Lady of the house by loading her gun and blowing the feckers head
off. Now, nothing much out of the ordinary
there, not if you are a Lady of the manor, or indeed a rabbit. Jeannette then posted, on Twitter, a
photograph of the skinned rabbit on her kitchen counter stating that the rabbit
had eaten her parsley now she was about to eat the rabbit. I thought it quite clever, I mean in terms of
originality it’s leap years ahead of a photograph of someone’s dinner, saying
yum yum or nom, nom, nom. She then began
to issue more photographs as the rabbit progressed from carcass to meal. She even cut the choice bits out of the
entrails and fed them to her cat, again pictured. Unbelievably there now follows a long line of
attackers and abusers who threaten never to read another word Jeannette may ever
write.
People argued that she should be feeding her
cat, cat food, a statement that shows just how far we have moved from the realities
of life, where people pretend to care more about their pampered pooch than the
human beings next door. How sad. So yes, not only would I be happy to murder
rabbits to death and then prepare and eat them but like my great hero Hemmingway
I want to attend a bullfight. As Earnest
once said, not to me of course, I think he was talking to the barman, “Anything
capable of arousing passion in its favour will surely raise as much passion
against it.” So I understand that as
there will be people who are against me on this, there will be those beside me,
in favour of it, this is something we understand more and more as we get older. The oldest fellow on the ward was ninety five
years of age. A good innings you might
say, but he scared the bejesus out of me, like a bull charging at full pelt,
the first morning that I saw him.
It was six o clock in the morning. This old fellow didn’t really join in with
the rest of us, he would sometimes listen and I could see him smile and that
made me happy, but I think the banter was too fast for him and his hearing wasn’t
up to it. But at six o clock in the morning
he got himself out of bed, which I promise you appeared to be quite a struggle,
and then I thought was having an epileptic fit, standing up. I initially prepared myself to summon help
for the old fellow but as I watched, I saw that there was a certain routine or repetitiveness
to what he was doing and realised that he was running through his morning
exercises. He was ninety five years of
age and doing his morning exercises. I
was a lot younger and could hardly walk; you certainly start making promises to
yourself when you experience stuff like that.
There was a new fellow in the middle bed
opposite. He had very poor eyesight and
actually sat with the television screen right up to his nose, which he watched
constantly. He was complaining about bad
headaches, see, even most of you are now coming up with diagnosis and you’re
not even on the ward! Another old fellow
was escorted on to the ward, and he too was ninety five years old. Deaf as a post, dressed like Al Lewis’
character, Grandpa Munster, from the television series of the same name, he walked
proudly onto the ward in his bright red dressing gown and silk cravat. I knew I was okay as I didn’t have much blood
left in me but I worried about the others.
The staff were fussing about him, settling him in to his bed and
chatting away when he announced that he was a minister of the church. My heart sank.
For some reason I immediately placed him in a
negative position in my mind. You see
the previous week we had the big story about Pastor James McConnell, another
self-styled, self-appointed, clergyman, like dear old Ian Paisley, from some
tabernacle in Belfast, who claimed that Islam is satanic, Islam is heathen, and
Islam is a doctrine spawned in Hell. These
statements annoyed and embarrassed most people with a brain from Northern Ireland;
they also annoyed quite a lot of Muslims throughout the world. I wasn’t angry that idiots like Pastor
McConnell would make things up, week after week, just to keep his collection
plates full, like Paisley and his ‘silent collections.’ I was angry that people actually believed the
crap he came out with. So you can imagine
how many millions of Irish people covered their faces in embarrassment when
Peter Robinson, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, came out and defended
his words. Especially when he added insult
to injury by saying that he wouldn’t trust a Muslim but he might send one to
the local shop to buy him something.
This is the same First Minister, Peter Robinson,
who bought the land to the rear of his back garden for five pounds then sold it
to his property developer mate for three hundred and fifty thousand. The same fellow whose forty five year old wife was shagging a nineteen
year old, while arranging a suspect business loan of fifty thousand pounds for
him from the same property dealer, for which she charged her toy boy lover, ten
thousand for the privilege of doing, while stuffing as much cocaine up their
noses as they could find. Of course when
she was caught and charged, her psychiatrist said that she was so depressed
with the prospect of the court case that she might consider suicide so she was
never taken to court. Well, guess what, Pastor
James McConnell said that Jesus forgave them.
That for me sums up the whole world of these pastors, and I’m sure many
of you remember the stories about Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker. I really do want a gun.
So Pastors and Ministers all fall into the same
category for me now and one of them was now lying opposite me. I don’t mean he was preaching I mean that he
was reclining on his bed. I immediately
felt so sorry for the hundreds upon thousands of innocent people who are lied
to, week after week, in the name of Jesus.
I of course would never lie. Not unless
there was a very good reason for it. I didn’t
have to lie about anything anyway, the training I had received to enable me to
take up my rightful position as the High Chief of the Clan O Neill and
therefore the True King of Ireland, meant that I had powers beyond the wildest dreams
and aspirations of the normal man in the street. I already had Aoife, the ward pharmacist, on the
top of my new good friends list. Nurses
from the other wards, where I had been, were now unable to pass my bed, or
ward, without entering in to some form of banter with me.
From being the quiet fellow in the corner bed,
the one with the black and blue arms and the loveliest legs in Ireland, I was
now becoming the centre of attention on the ward. Not that I did anything to attract this sort
of attention. I hadn’t told anyone that I
was the King of Ireland, I didn’t want to worry any of them, but what I needed
was to get the head nurse on my side. Head
nurse on the night shift, the one with the pills; she was a key player in the politics
of the ward so I waited for the right moment and then made my move. Many of the nurses were young females, and by
young I mean thirty years of age or thereabouts. All very pleasant and all very nice and
professional. The head nurse was about
fifty years of age, a sturdy woman, with dirty blonde hair, who looked like a
smoker and reminded me of a young Peggy Mount.
It was that time of the evening, the one with the pills and the
question, yes that question. She glanced
at me as I opened my eyes and smiled at her.
“How are we this evening sir?” she asked, aware that her question the
previous evening had seen the whole ward in stitches of laughter for five
minutes. “I’m all right now I’ve got a
big leggy blonde at the end of my bed.”
I said, which I promise you saw a fifty year old woman giggle and squeal
like a twelve year old and me get the best medical attention a man has ever received
in that hospital from that moment on.
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