Thursday, 28 Nov 2024

Billy Keane: 'Lookit, they are out to get me – from folk spitting gum into toilets to the people who watch me park'

Here is the list of 20 small things done by people especially to annoy me. It has to be a plot. Just has to be.

Everyone is out to get me, and if you are going to accuse me of being paranoid, well then you are a co-conspirator.

There I am getting on just grand, in the best of form, without a care in the world, when they strike, deliberately and without provocation.

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The They are killers and they should be charged with crimes against Ireland and her people. The upping of blood pressure is caused by The They. And blood pressure kills us. So it follows, as night follows day, that The They should be put away for a long time for killing Irish people incrementally.

The list isn’t in any order of importance.

1. People from the country who turn in to Dubchies.

The Dubchie is a lad or lady from the country who goes native in Dublin. They call their mothers Mummy, and Daddy is Pops. The Dubchies miss funerals, and never lose the head when the county is playing. They don’t eat spuds or drink tea. And their accent gives no clue as to where they come from.

The Dubchies look upon country people as quaint and haven’t the slightest idea what’s going on back home, nor do they care. They eat with chopsticks to show off, and wear no socks inside their shoes, and only visit the mother a couple of times a year and when they do come home, they give out to everyone for not minding her properly and then they rush back to Dublin early on Sunday morning in case they pick up the country accent they forsook.

2. There are men who throw chewing gum into the urinals in pubs.

The chewing gum does not go down through the narrow filter in the men’s urinal. It gets stuck and the only way to free it used to be by hand. Not a nice job, and not a job you could ever ask one of your staff to do. My mam was smart though. She came up with a plan. There are thousands of publicans reading this who will thank me for this handy and practical tip.

First of all you buy a knitting needle. There are several types but the one I suggest is the DPN, which is a double-pointed needle. Any good wool shop will have one.

But what sort of a low-type kind would spit chewing gum out into a urinal where it has to be harvested by the toilet cleaner? There are thousands of white splats on our pavements from spat out, stood upon, discarded chewing gums. Bad form it is. Very bad form indeed. And was anyone ever done in this country for spitting out gum?

The mother’s plan was to spear the chewing gum with the knitting needle. She got the idea from watching the Eskimo cut a hole in the ice. They stuck in a spear and caught a fish. That was on the telly mind. The mother never visited the North Pole.

3. People who say lookit.

Politicians use this non-word a lot as in “lookit I’m sure the government will fall in the fall”. What does lookit actually mean? The answer is nothing. I think the expression may well have come from some lad who was nearly gone broke from putting money in the curse jar. So instead of saying f***it he said lookit. And so a new and useless word was brought in to the English language. What’s the point in saying something unless it means something?

4. The next up are the lads whose mammies wouldn’t let them play football, or maybe they were too cute to play.

Now they are doing the long Camino, and going to Everest base camp while the rest of us who were getting bate up when we were young lads for the cause of club and county are bate up nowadays with bad backs and dodgy knees and porcelain hips, soon to be boiled for consommé, after they have been replaced.

5. The doggie people who say to you “our Spot, sure he wouldn’t hurt a fly”.

Well big, huge dogs don’t eat flies, do they? This one is about people who let big, mad dogs off the lead in public places.

6. People who watch you doing things.

I find it difficult to park in tight spaces but it’s 10 times worse when a watcher is having a deadly laugh at you trying to get the car aligned so the arse of it isn’t sticking halfway out the road. I got a puncture lately and I wouldn’t be the best at fixing things. The wrong nuts are in the nut box which is driving me nuts.

The smirky bystander is watching me. He thinks this is deadly sport. I know I’m going to have to call a garage but I will not make the call until the watcher goes away so as not to give it to say. He’s still there. So I say: “Have you anything better to do with your time?” He says: “This is much better than anything you’ve ever done on the television.”

I want to kill him on the spot, but I fake a desperate fit of laughing, so as not to give it to say for the second time.

The lad who was watching me park was worse. He was also a misogynist.

“You’re not great at the parking are you?”

“No,” says I.

And then he says: “You must have been a woman in a previous life.”

So I say: “You must have been a Neanderthal in a previous life.” I know that’s not great. Sometimes I only think of smart retorts hours after the event. If I wasn’t in such a temper, I would have told him I have three daughters and one wife, and all four are better at the parking than I am.

7. People who don’t read the papers. The professor who was very high up in history told me he never buys a paper. “I get what I’m interested in off the net.” So here’s a historian who reads only what he is interested in.

There is no broad view of the world. The algorithms control us and will give us the news they want us to read. He thinks he’s being smart and saving money, but the reality is the professor’s cop-on is in inverse proportion to the number of letters after his name. Smart people can be very thick.

I know I’m only at seven, but the thing about rants is they do they tend to go on a bit. That’s the difference between a rant and a fit.

I’m not sure either if I am in the better of all this. Maybe the best thing to do is to take plenty of no notice and then we will all live longer.

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