Everything Else

That’s what it’s called.

I was reading BBC News Online last week (I see it when I sleep now) and a serious news story used the phrase “playing catch up”. This got me thinking, where did this actually originate? I can remember in the late 80s coming home from school and “Going for Gold” would be on BBC, and Henry Kelly (above) would constantly say “Hans you’re playing catch-up” or “Patrick you’re playing catch-up”, with the bland European feel of the show making it some kind of EU wet dream.

Thing is, I don’t really think this stupid phrase was invented by Henry Kelly on “Going For Gold”, but I’d love to know when it first began to be used. I can’t say I’m a big fan.

“Dear Sir,

In Stuart Jeffries piece “What lies beneath Austria’s surface” he refers to Robert Musil’s classic novel as “A Man Without Qualities”.

The novel is in fact called “The Man Without Qualities”.

Thanks a lot,
Ronan Fitzgerald”

Liverpool may be out of the Champions League, but I predict “A REAL PUSH” for the title next season.

1. Transport: Good for short trips, can also be intensely depressing, but it’s a bland depression. I mean, when I travel on the tube and think, as one inevitably does: “humanity shouldn’t live like this” or “this is a grim post millennial existence” I chastise myself. Thinking this on the tube is like thinking “I am getting wet” in the rain. These are the moments that spawned a million awful articles, albums, and ideas. The blandest resistance imaginable. Plus the tube is convenient!
2. Food: Supermarkets are cheaper than Dublin, crap sausages though. Marks and Spencers is pleasantly everywhere, things like sandwiches and lunches are about a third of Dublin prices here.
3. Multicultural cities: I trained for my job with a group from very different backgrounds. It might paint a falsely backward picture of Ireland to say that I’ve very rarely spent time with people from other religious or racial backgrounds, but it’s true. I suspect it’s true for many Irish people. What’s interesting is after discussing this at a really big training event one guy, a Londoner with Indian parents turned to me and said “don’t think you’re not a minority too, you’re the fucking Paddy!”That felt very odd as I’d kind of self identified as being exactly the same as the English people, but of course I’m not, in whatever sense race matters or differentiates.
4. Work: I’ve never done a job before where I worked this hard, I am completely shattered already.
5. Alcohol: 3 weeks in a hotel means you drink so much that you then have to swear to go off booze for a month.
6. Dublin: I am missing it already! Not the places by any means, but the comfort zone I had there, my friends and family and the ease of not really doing anything with my life that mattered.
7. Bertie Ahern: The first person I thought of when I read this was my mother, who absolutely fucking hates Bertie. I mean just point blank despises him to the point where other members of the family would say “He seems a good guy really” just to wind her up. My mum is staunchly Fine Gael and she thinks of Fianna Fáil in the same partisan way a football fan might hate their local rivals. So when I heard Bertie was set to go I was more interested in what my mum had to say than Gerry Adams, Tony Blair and the rest. Her take: “I’m so pleased!”
8. Uniqlo: I love this shop, it surely will be in Ireland soon.

That’s all for now, hopefully I’m back on the blogging train now, but it’s never easy to be sure at the moment!

“When I remember as far back as I can, I’d say that there was hardly any separation between inside and outside. When I crawled towards something, it came on wings to meet me; when something important happened, the excitement was not just in us, but the things themselves came to a boil. I won’t claim that we were happier then than we were later on. After all, we hadn’t yet taken charge of ourselves.

In fact, we didn’t really yet exist; our physical condition was not yet separated from the world’s.  It sounds strange, but it’s true: our feeling, our desires, our very selves, were not yet quite inside ourselves. What’s even stranger is that I might as easily say: they were not yet quite taken away from us.

If you should sometime happen to ask yourself today, when you think you’re entirely in possession of yourself, who you really are, you will discover that you always see yourself from the outside, as an object. You’ll notice that one time you get angry, another time you get sad, just as your coat will sometimes be wet and sometimes too warm.

No matter how intensely you try to look at yourself, you may at most find something about the outside, but you’ll never get inside yourself. Whatever you do you remain outside yourself, with the possible exception of those rare moments when a friend might say that you’re beside yourself.

It’s true that as adults we’ve made up for this by being able to think at any time that ‘I am’- if you think that’s fun. You see a car and somehow in a shadowy way you also see ‘I am seeing a car’. You’re in love, or sad, and see that it’s you. But neither the car, nor your sadness, nor your love, nor even yourself, is quite fully there.

Nothing is as completely there as it once was in childhood; everything you touch, including your inmost self, is more or less congealed from the moment you have achieved your ‘personality’ and what’s left is a ghostly hanging thread of self awareness and murky self regard, wrapped up in a wholly external existence.

What goes wrong? There’s a feeling that something might still be salvaged. Surely you can’t claim that a child’s experience is all that different from a man’s? I don’t know any real answer, even if there may be this or that idea about it. But for a long time I’ve responded by having lost my love for this kind of ‘being myself’ and for this kind of world.”

Isn’t that the most incredible description of growing up you’ve ever read?

From Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” which still captivates me like no other work of art. Maybe I should make this blog entirely about Musil.

I found myself ordering Guinness for the last two nights in London. I like Guinness but I don’t drink it as a rule. This has taught me two things. Firstly, Guinness in London is potentially just as good as Guinness in Dublin. A pub near where I am right now, in Kensington, had better Guinness than many places back home.

The second thing I’ve learned is more disturbing. It seems I drink Guinness more in London than I would in Dublin as some desperate statement of identity. My current programme is very multi-cultural and I guess it sort of makes being Irish seem less of a burden. It’s really interesting how even the least nationalist or patriotic person can still feel conscious of their birthplace like this once they no longer live there.

It’s blatantly clear that soon I’ll be at every one of Christy Moore’s London gigs in an aran sweater, all the while munching on blight infested potatoes.

Here are some things I’ve noted about London and since I moved there.

1. Queuing: You have to queue for everything, there are more people here than you could possibly imagine.
2. Yuppie Shame Redux: I now have a Muji bedsheet, mirror, and hand towel.
3. London has gloriously resisted the cancer of Centra and Spar that has spread throughout Dublin. It’s a joy to have choice.
4. Pub closing times are annoyingly early.
5. Nu-rave still very big, judging by people you see around.
6. I have zero idea what I want to do for a living anymore, even if I know I want to be a journalist.
7. Living in a hotel is intensely boring.
8. Moving from the city you grew up in after 25 years is a pretty euphoric experience.

If you Google “hard working band”, it’s no surprise that two of the first 10 results are Irish. We are a Catholic country, and it’s a Catholic meme.

Don’t you dislike it though? Personally I can’t stand this romantic idea of “the hard working band” or “the hard working artist”. Firstly, it is not actually “hard work” to be in a band. Not relatively. If anyone thinks so, try being a nurse, or a doctor, or cleaning toilets, or driving buses, or flipping burgers. What job do you do? Maybe you’re there right now. I’d wager whatever it is, it’s probably harder than being in a band.

Now don’t get me wrong, a band on the up may indeed be working hard, just as anyone who is trying to succeed at their career is. Indeed many bands or artists may rehearse a great deal and put in a lot of work. In fact, every band probably does. That’s why it’s irrelevant.  If a band or artist doesn’t give you a creative output you enjoy, then who cares how hard they work? You don’t hear hard work when you press play, nor should you.

The reality is that for a band or artist to really move us, they must create something we love or feel strongly about. That creative process does not necessarily include any “work” whatsoever. It may do, but it’s not a key component. I mean, if Paul McCartney had decided to add a long rapidfire guitar solo to “Yesterday” it may have been harder work, but would it actually have made the record sound better?

Creativity is what matters. Ideas are what matter. Work is just the realisation of both. Can we end this fetish once and for all?