There are some days where you just wish that you’d never gotten out of bed, days when you wish that instead of exiting your warm, quilted sanctuary at the harsh squawking of your alarm you’d instead thumbed the off button, rolled over and returned to peaceful slumber.  For me, today was one of those days not least because it was a Sunday and I’d forgotten to turn off my alarm last night but also because it started out badly and then just got worse.  There is a saying about not being able to see past the end of one’s nose which for me is quite literally true; I am very short-sighted and consequently can’t see more than about six inches from my face without the world around me turning into a blurry mush.   Thanks to the wonders of contact lenses, this doesn’t bother me too much however it does mean that before I’ve put said lenses in, I have to deal with some minor inconveniences such as not being able to pee standing up…actually that’s not entirely true, I can pee standing up, I just would rather not have to rely on sound alone to determine that it’s going in the bowl.  Another issue is that I rely on a tactile search of my bedside cabinet to locate my alarm when it goes off in the morning.  Most days this isn’t a problem however there is the odd occasion when the phone gets knocked on the floor along with my contact lens case and, this morning, a glass of water.

Fortunately, after not too much swearing and patting of random bits of sodden floor, I managed to locate the aforementioned objects and climbed back under the covers.  Alas, my peaceful repose was to be shortlived; before I could fall asleep I was faced with that question that has plagued mankind since time immemorial: to pee or not to pee?  Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the pangs and irritation of a small bladder or to give way to a Sea of troubles, and by acquiescing, end them.  You all know what it’s like, it’s cold outside, it’s warm under the covers yet if you don’t obey the call of nature, it might get quite a bit warmer.  Cursing quietly to myself, I took a deep breath and launched myself once more into the chilly air and padded towards the bathroom.  Having sat down and relieved myself, I was slightly alarmed to hear a dripping sound and feel a puddle underneath my heel.  I spent a few seconds trying to work out how I’d missed the bowl from point blank range before common sense made an all too rare foray into my consciousness and told me something wasn’t quite right with my plumbing….the toilet that is, not my….never mind.  I could hear the dripping sound coming from my left and took a punt that it might be the pipe which refills the cistern.  My hunch was confirmed when I gripped the pipe and felt the water leaking between my fingers.  Oh joy, oh rapture I thought as I grabbed my contact lens, popped them in and set about cleaning up the mess.

Several soaked towels and a closed valve later, I’d not fixed the leak but at least isolated the pipe and turned off its water supply. By this point however, I was very much wide awake and didn’t see the point in trying to go back to sleep.  I flicked on the TV only to find out that Sir Terry Wogan, a man who had made the Eurovision actually enjoyable to watch, whose breakfast show I had listened to every day when I worked in Belfast over five years ago, had become the latest high profile entertainer to succumb to cancer.  Yes, I know that amongst all the human suffering that has become such a staple of our daily news broadcasts but at the same time, I’m sorry he’s gone and back in the 70s and 80s when the Irish were getting a bad rep in the mainland UK thanks to the IRAs campaign of violence, he’d been the antithesis to the stereotype of Paddies being car-bombing terrorists, a sentiment which even today, following years of relative peace in Northern Ireland, I occasionally get slagged about.  Therefore, I’d like to end with one of his quips:

“So many things I miss. And, you know, I wouldn’t have missed them for anything.”

I always think it’s funny how something so small can be so deadly but alas, following key hole surgery just over two weeks ago to remove a cancerous growth (and then further surgery to determine why the first surgery had caused such massive complications), my dear Aunt M succumbed to sepsis yesterday leaving behind a husband and four daughters.

My Aunt M was a fantastic woman who never forgot a birthday and always sent a card even if it was something as minor as a driving test passed.  If ever family or a family friend needed somewhere to stay, Aunt M’s door was never closed and she always seemed happy to see you.  With her, my Uncle V and my four cousins, there was never a dull moment and she always had a sense of fun with any excuse for a party or celebration being seized and then some.

It’s a cliche but the world is most certainly a worse place without her however I know that following the ordeal of dialysis and respirators in intensive care, she is at the very least now at peace.

We’ll miss you, Aunt M.

Last Tuesday saw something quite unusual on the Guardian website; in fact, it has been nigh on unheard of for over six months now.  For the first time that I can recall when going to the webpage dealing with the paper’s UK headlines, to my utter amazement there were no articles about Jeremy Corbyn.  Surely this couldn’t be, I thought.  For those of you not au fait with UK politics, this is almost akin to ISIS deciding to promote pacifism and a secular state.  Not a day has gone by since JC’s election to the head of the British Labour Party that there hasn’t been a story or an opinion piece criticising him for being too much to the left, too much to the right, too hardline, too soft, too stubborn or too spineless (though given the sheer number of knives that have been stuck in his back by his own party, he can probably be forgiven for that last one).  Now I know that the guy strikes some as a beardo-weirdo and his opinions and proposed policies are very much to the left of the political spectrum, but that really doesn’t warrant the volume of vitriol that’s been sent his direction by his own party and the mainstream media.  I’m certainly not advocating giving the man a free-pass but I think a balance needs to be struck between coverage of the leader of the opposition and whaling on the nutter in the tweed jacket.

Speaking of nutters, we had yet another fantastic quote from Donald Trump last week when he complained that the NFL had become soft which is a metaphor for the US itself becoming soft.  I believe his complaint concerns the changing of the laws in the NFL to penalise head-on collisions and hence reduce the potential long-term brain injuries that these can cause.  Now to a relatively sane person, this seems like a reasonable proposition given that research on the brains of 165 (dead) people who had played football at high school, college, or professional level found that 131 (79%) of them showed signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease caused due to repeated concussive events.  Furthermore, of the original 165, 91 were former NFL players and 87 (97%) of those showed evidence of CTE.  You could argue that the results would be skewed as the people most likely to donate their brains to science would be the ones that suspected themselves of having CTE but even so…97%???  Donald may argue that no head-on collisions makes the NFL weak but I’d argue that a settlement between the NFL and retired players made in September 2015 which could potentially see $1bn in compensation payments by the NFL over the next 65 years is probably going to weaken it far more.  There’s one thing that isn’t a bit soft in the NFL, according to Donald, and that’s Tom Brady though it may be a different case for his balls *ahem*

Legal disclaimer: yes, I realise that Tom Brady’s suspension for using under-inflated balls was thrown out by the US federal court following a protracted legal dispute but….meh

Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong though.  Maybe Donald needs people to be soft in the head because I honestly don’t see otherwise how so many US republicans can see this demagogue as a credible future.president.  You can argue that he says what he believes and that’s great….however his beliefs seems to be propagating xenophobic and sectarian stereotypes to appeal to the lowest common denominator which isn’t (Personally, I think this line of reasoning is the same as the one for G W Bush which went that he was the kind of guy you could sit down and have a beer with – I know plenty of people I can sit down and have a beer with but I would trust none of them to run a country on that basis alone).  indeed, it was during a recent drunken stagger home that I started trying to come up with alternate lyrics to Danny Boy for Donald and though the result is fairly dismal, I’m still going to stick it in below:

Oh Donny boy, your rhetoric’s appalling,

Your far right stance, sends shivers down my spine,

Your racsim appears to know no boundaries,

Your sexist views, are from another time

But yet you still are top amongst the GOP,

Despite the slurs, the taunts and bigotry,

But it’s your hair, that is the thing that worries me,

Because it’s what controls your mind, I do believe.

Well here we are once again; the festivities are over, the credit card bills have arrived, your once snug fitting clothes are now chafing ever so slightly and on top of all this comes the crushing realisation that you have to back to work.  Happy New Year my arse….

I know that my ever sunny disposition would suggest otherwise, but I’ve never really felt like celebrating a “new” year because more often than not, it just ends up being quite like the old one.  Yes, you can resolve to do this, that and the other but let’s be honest with ourselves, how many of those resolutions actually succeed?  January and maybe even the first couple of weeks in February will likely see a new you as you quaff pints of pureed fruit instead of Guinness, buy Holland and Barrett instead of Benson and Hedges and bask in the warm glow of self-satisfaction that comes with knowing you’ve beaten your cravings and changed your life for the better.

But that’s not true, is it?  The warm glow isn’t self-satisfaction, it’s just your muscles screaming at you to stop as you stagger around the streets at some ungodly hour in the morning, sweating buckets and longing to be tucked up in your warm bed again.  Having given up the old coffin nails is great but now you’re sucking on an e-cigarette so hard you risk inhaling it and have more patches than a bloody quilt.  Finally, yes I’m sure the kumquat, kiwi and mango mush that you choke down is doing a power of good and cleaning out your colon (it’ll certainly be cleaning out your wallet) but you’d be getting the same anti-oxidant powers from chucking down orange juice at a fraction of the price.

It’s not even really a new year, is it?  It’s just a wholly arbitrary point in the Earth’s revolution around the sun.  Given how preoccupied our pagan ancestors were with regards the solstice and celebrating the harvest etc. how did we end up with New Year’s Day not being December 22^nd?  Surely it makes sense to have a new year where the days are now getting longer again and the evenings brighter?  This concept of a new year was very important to our predecessors, so much so that they built monuments to it.

There’s a Neolithic tomb in Ireland called Newgrange which was built over 5,000 years ago and pre-dates both the great pyramids and Stonehenge.  In this tomb (though tomb is probably underselling it – temple may be more appropriate) there is an opening above the main entrance through which sunlight only comes through between December 19^th and 23^rd and lights up the central chamber.  The logistics in gathering the materials for the structure, building it and aligning it so perfectly are phenomenal when you consider that this was done with just man power and the most basic of tools.  However, it was worth to those ancients because of what the new year signified.  Thinking about it, for them it was always going to be pretty similar.  Celebrate surviving the winter, rejoice at the coming of spring and warmer weather, sow the crops and set yourself up to survive to this point in 365 days’ time once more.

Anyway, I guess the same ol’ shit isn’t so bad.  2015 wasn’t an especially good year for me but I’m still here, still in good health and still employed.  That’s something to be thankful for though I’m also the miserable, grumpy bastard that I always have been.  So for 2016, I resolve to try and wear a smile more often than a frown, be more positive and try to have a bit more fun.  I only get one life, I may as well live it.