Joe the Plumber Part three.

I am beginning to think Joe's ears are burning with all this talk about him, but then if you are an entertainer I think it goes with the territory.

The elevating story of the raisins which could raise machines.

Joe's mother used to cook rice -pudding and put a few raisins in it to sweeten it up. As all children like to do he then ate the rest of the raisins from the bag. Not long after, the cooker began rising up into the air and nearly fell on top of him.
Later in life he went to work in London.
One day he was outside on the street and he had a similar experience with a car. Another time he was in a house fixing a washing machine and it began rising up and again he thought it was going to fall on him. He didn't feel well at all, so he went to the doctor. After some questioning about what he had been eating it turned out that the connection was raisins. I couldn't figure out how a simple thing like raisins could cause hallucinations, as they are meant to be a healthy snack. My children used to bring them to school as part of their packed lunch. So it turned out that it wasn't the raisins themselves that were causing the machines to rise up. You know that they can last months, even years in storage. Well, it is no accident. There is a preservative put into them to make them last, and Joe was having a reaction to it every time he ate anything containing raisins. I found it hilarious that the hallucinations came in the form of menacing machines, considering that he is a plumber.

A joke as he was walking out the door with his tool bag.

Two Kerry men were talking over the phone.
"My business isn't going well at all. I haven't sold a thing in over three months."
"Is that so?"
"T'is man. I am thinking of giving it up and opening a brothel."
"Is that so? How are you going to be able to sell soup, if you can't even run your old business properly?"

How someone could cram all these stories plus some, into an hour and simultaneously fix on some new taps is beyond me. Next time I lave a leak, I will get out my dictaphone, because he told them way better than I ever could. He even used props as illustration. Kitchen paper, junk mail, the pepper pot and other items were all introduced at selected moments when words were starting to fail him. At one point he did a kind of shuffle across the floor in his boots to illustrate how he had to walk when going through the woods in the dark at night. This was the story about the heron which he thought was a banshee. And how you had to be careful not to have your ankles bitten by the badgers who live a night-life on the forest floor. I remember my 'nanny' telling me a similar story about badgers, and how you should carry a stick and snap it in half if they sunk their teeth into your leg. They would hear the snap and let go, thinking they had broken your leg. Which obviously was their main aim. True or not, I always used to carry a stick if I found myself alone in the woods in the dark. This wasn't very often, let it be said. Although there is nothing nicer that a walk in the woods at night in the remote country-side of Ireland, especially if there is a lake nearby. We don't have to contend with snakes or bears. Badgers are the only real danger. But then if you are sure to carry a stick for snapping, all you have to worry about after that is the banshees. That is another story.

Joe the Plumber part two

The labels on the bottles of stout

As a young lad Joe's brother worked in his uncle's bar in Inch, Co.Wexford. He was only about seven years old, and had to drop out of school to work because the family needed the extra money.
The stout was delivered in big barrels and had to be transferred to bottles. Before they did this the stout was to be tested for freshness. Joe's brother had the job of tasting the beer before it went into the bottles.
He also had to wash out the bottles so they could be used again for the next time. At seven years of age this was a mighty task. There used to be a law that whenever a man got hit by a car on his way home from the bar, the pub would be held liable. However evidence was needed. It was usual for a bottle to be found in the pocket of these unfortunates which they had bought to drink when they got home.
The pub's label on the bottle was the give-away. So to get around this, one of Joe's jobs was to remove the labels off the bottles before they were sold for take-away.
Perhaps the punch-line to this story is that things have changed since the fifties. People got up to antics that they would never get away with today, and as for seven year olds working in bars, well, it simply wouldn't happen now, but it did then and it was accepted.

The story of the dead baby.

Joe and his brother slept in the room next to their parents. Late one evening they heard the mother telling her husband that she had heard of a girl who had given birth to a baby outside of wedlock and it had died. She had buried it but nobody knew where.
The next day Joe had been sent off on his own to collect the kindling for the fire in the woods at the back of the house. It was an old landlords estate, the large house had been abandoned and the grounds had been left an unattended wasteland.
As he was bending down to pick up some twigs, he saw the shadow of a face peeking up out of the earth beneath him. The face of a baby. It was covered in green moss and was definitely not living, the glassy staring eyes and pale almost white complexion being the give-away. He stood there in a state of horror for a moment and then ran home as fast as his legs could carry him to tell his mother what he had found. She went back to investigate with a possy of locals. It turned out to be the face of a marble statue that had once belonged to the big house. It was too late for young Joe though, he had already been traumatised by his find. This showed in his demeanor as he animatedly related the saga. As I laughed with the shock of hearing the punch-line I realised by the look on his face that these stories were not invented, they had really happened, to him. What amazed me though was it triggered my own memory of finding a dead baby on the steps of a church in Limerick as I walked past one day with my Grandmother. I can't have been older than about six, about the same age as Joe had found the statue.
I love the synchronicity in this and was possibly why Joe and I got along so well. The sixties weren't so different to the fifties back then. Maybe a little more advanced technologically, and men had landed on the moon by '63, but he was talking of an era that I can relate to well.

The stories in themselves seem fairly straightforward, but Joe breathed an animosity into them, which could only be instilled by a natural born shanchai. Joe is one for certain.

Tales of Joe the Plumber - part one.

Joe is a local man who must be about sixty something considering he remembers the days when radios were powered by large batteries that had to be charged and only had a very short playing time til the next recharge. He is very technically minded and gave me a detailed description, of the workings of the old transistor radios.
not only this but an an account of what life was like back in his day. They could only listen to the news in his house once a day and that was it. Their neighbours had a slightly more advanced radio and once a week the whole neighbourhood would cram into their kitchen and watch a football match. This was the highlight of their week. The rest of the time he spent running such errands such as collecting kindle for the fire, on which his mother cooked the bread.
He told a story of how when a landlord wanted to evict a tenant for not paying the rent on time, instead of bringing them to court like they might today, they sent bailifs around to physically turf the families out. Sometimes a family would barricade themselves in. So the bailifs would put a torch to the thatched roof and set the whole thing alight. Not very pleasant. This is one of the reasons the Irish hated the English so vehemently. The Landlords were settlers sent by the King (or Queen) to occupy the land. I had heard stories like that before.

This was as dark as he got. Most of the stories were funnier and the more he talked the more animated he became. A true entertainer in spirit.

Here is the first one as I remember it.:

The Money-Maker
Joe told me that his uncle used to make money. I raised my eye-brows. "ok..."
"No, he really used to make money."
This is how he did it.
He photographed two sides of five or ten pound notes, but not fifties, because he didn't have any.
He would do this on special paper from a lady who worked in the chemist down the town. She would be getting her share. Then he cut them out and glued the two sides together with a certain glue which was made of rubber. I remember this glue from my childhood. It was the only glue available at the time. I don't think it is made any more.
There was one problem. He got caught and here's how.
In the old days the shops had a particular system for payment. There was a large long wooded counter in the front of the shop and at the end of this there was a dark corner, where there was a hatch. In this hatch stood a lady who took the money and wrote everything into a notebook in pencil. Those were the days when people were given credit and could pay their bill on the Friday. In the hatch there were holes where the notes would be stored. First the notes were scrunched up into a ball, I suppose for quicker access when needed, then placed in the holes. Joe's uncle went in to make a purchase. It might have been a new frying pan his grand- mother needed or something similar. His five pound note was sent down to the hatch-lady. When she dropped it into the hole, it bounced back up. That's how she knew it was a fake note. Joe's uncle was sent to prison. When he got there he found out where he had gone wrong. He was told by another inmate that he should have used egg-white to stick the two sides of the note together. Rubber glue bounces. Fortunately he wasn't in for very long as it was a minor crime. He passed on a couple of years ago, so I won't be getting him into any kind of trouble by writing this.
Though I do wonder of he is not the originator of the expression 'to bounce a cheque (check)'. If he had made cheques using rubber glue that might well have been the story.



stay tuned for part two of the Tales of Joe the Plumber...

Twice locked out

Today was the first time I have locked myself out of the house in a long time. I had gone down to the library to collect a couple of books I'd ordered and on the way back up the street I saw the murmuration of starlings over the river. They were out-doing themselves this evening. As if in recognition of me the murmur came across the town and flew right over my head. I was astounded by how beautiful they were and was cursing myself for not having my camera with me. They looked like little black stars against the fading light. I raced home and since Louis was due for a walk, dashed back out in a hurry to try and catch them again before the light failed. By the time we'd gotten there they had gone. Never mind, so continued the walk and headed home. No keys.

To cut a long story short, I eventually got in via a series of calls and visits to various neighbours to locate my spare key.

Anyone would think it wouldn't happen again for a while, but it did. I hadn't smoked at all during the day and had a sudden 11pm craving for one and decided to brave the all night market, besides I had a hankering to go for a walk since it was a cloudless night and the stars were bright.

There is one particularly scary man in my hood and it was just my luck that he happened to be walking back to his house just as I walked out of my front gate. I thought he would turn into his house, but he kept on walking, towards me. That is when I stepped up my pace and practically legged it all the way to the market. I knew my son would be awake so I called him and we entered into our usual philosophical discussions. He likes those. You know, life and the meaning of it all etc. In fact I don't think is is capable of any other type of discussion, but I don't mind, it's all good. It distracted me from the idea I might be being stalked by scary guy. I did the evil deed and bought the roll ups and got some more credit for my phone, all the while talking to Leo, or rather listening to his musings mainly. He has interesting things to say so I didn't mind at all. I checked my pockets as I was leaving the market and, you've guessed it, no keys to be found. I called my neighbour who has my spare and he said he would be home in an hour after his darts game. An hour! It was by now about midnight. In true thanksgiving spirit I thanked the powers that be for the all-night market. There was no way I was going to wait outside my house after seeing scary man.  Reaching for something to talk about with my son I mentioned that I had written a half-decent haiku today. This reminded him of a haiku that he had been thinking about today which he had remembered from Fight Club.

" Worker bees can leave

Even the drones can fly away

the queen is their slave"

We discussed the meaning of this and other things. I narrated to him the story about the young bull and the old bull who were looking into a field of attractive heifers one day. The young bull said to the old bull: "Lets go through the gate and woo ourselves a heifer each." The old bull replied: " I have a better idea. We should go through the gate and walk slowly to the pond and take a drink. Then we will take all the heifers in the field."

I decided to brave the imaginary (or not) stalker and raced back to the house. Neighbour''s light was on so I collected the key and went in. As I sat back down at my table, I remembered that I had already read something about the film Fight Club today. No, it was a radio programme I had listened to which was on a friend's Facebook wall, an interview with the author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk. This series of events could be seen as coincidences or seen as synchronicity. I mean really, what are the chances of every thing happening in double all day. Between the twice locking myself out of the house, the two haiku stories and the double connection with Fight Club and Palahniuk, either the universe is trying to tell me something, or I am beginning to tune into something which is already there but I wasn't spiritual enough to notice before. What ever the reason for these occurrences, one thing is clear to me, and that is, I like when it happens.

11-11-11 - An off the track memory,

It would have been an unforgettable date and time to smoke the last one and I could have answered the question impressively fast, : "So how long have you been off them?"
"Since eleven times five." I'd say forcing some return thinking time back onto the interrogator.
Anyway I am on cigarette number four which is great going for this time of day.

It is really veteran's day, not 'me giving up smoking day' so I want to put out a few words.

My friend Nancy, an artist, died five years ago at the age of eigthy. Her husband Conor had allocated me the job of giving her lunch several times a week while he took some time to go off and do things elsewhere. She needed someone with her all the time, as she was suffering from Parkinson's. To me, it wasn't so much a job as a privilege. They were the two most wonderful people I had met in a long time. I was allowed to write and study in the dining room and she would call if she needed me. I also sat with her while she watched TV, always an interesting documentary.

One day she told me about her brothers. They were both killed in North Africa during the second world war.  She had been very close to them and she said that she had never gotten over it.
She then handed me her biography. It was strange reading details of her life with her right there beside me. She told me that she had to make a choice between music and art as a career, and it was difficult because she loved them both equally. I asked her why couldn't she have done both. The answer was that if you are going to do something, it is important to put your all into it. I have been trying ever since to live by that. It is easier said than done in my case.
One day I fell asleep reading in the chair. Nancy woke me up and told me to go and take a walk. I went out into the chilly December air, walked around the pond and found myself in a wooded clearing. I was focusing at the ground careful not to trip on something, and on looking up saw two of the most enormous deer standing there right in front of me. When they saw me they bolted and jumped over an immense fence. It was an incredible sight.
I thought about it afterwards for days and weeks. Then one day I took my dog to the woods and came across a beautiful sculpture of a young buck. As I put my hand up to touch it, guess what, it bolted. Louis, the dog, ran straight after him and when he came back an hour later, he was totally covered in mud. I can only guess at where he'd been.
Deer seemed to go hand in hand with this couple. She was an artist of landscapes, abstract and earthy and he a sculptor of wild animals. Both were extremely talented at their respective crafts. It made me feel very strongly that when you're in the company of certain types of people, the experiences become entwined. My experiences with Conor and Nancy were very magical. They were both very warm and loving, and I took something away from both of them and that was to have witnessed a couple truly in love. Conor died within a year of Nancy even though he was 20 years younger. He had lung cancer but was diagnosed too late.
Even though I am sad that I only had a relatively short time knowing them, I would have had a greater loss having never known them at all.

This is what veteran's day has conjured up for me. A remembrance of two very special people.