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It's hord to get your head around the fact that it's, like, 12 months now since the world changed. Hord to believe that an actual year has passed since that crazy time last spring, when we spent our evenings eating banana bread that we didn't even like, while watching full-frontal shots of Paul Mescal with his mickey slung over his leg like an empty sock puppet.
The zombie apocalypse has morked us all in different ways – and no family more than the O’Carroll-Kelly’s. Honor says she will never give up wearing a mask, since it allows her to mouth the words “Fock you!” at people who displease her. Although I have to say, I don’t remember the fact of no mask ever holding her back in the previous 10 years of her life.
My old man hasn't coped at all well – and he's getting worse? I've noticed a serious decline in him since they closed the golf courses, with the fate of the Frank Keane BMW Blackrock Over-70s Championship in Elm Pork hanging delicately in the balance.
"It's an attack on our personal liberty!" he goes to me on the phone. "They've taken away all of the things that make life tolerable for the ordinary man! Friday afternoon drinks in the Horseshoe Bor! Wandering around the humidor in James J Fox in the company of the estimable Hennessy Coghlan-O'Hara while we choose our Cubans for the month! A side of John Shanahan's wonderful Angus beef with something from the Loire Valley to ease its passage down!"
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I’m there, “Is this about them possibly voiding the golf with you top of the leaderboard?”
"The only man capable of catching me is Harry Haugh! " he goes. "Right now, our friend is in the Blackrock Clinic having a new hip fitted – titanium, Kicker! – which will place him at distinct advantage to me, if and when the championship resumes! I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Government knew this when they closed the courses!"
I see they're using pina coladas as an anaesthetic over in Lanzarote now
"Everything doesn't have to be about you, you know?"
“I’m well aware of that! There’s also your mother, Ross!”
“What about her – the scabrous horse-beast?”
“Well, she went to Lanzarote to, em, have her teeth done.”
“Can they not file her fangs in the Beacon anymore?”
“It was just some vital bridgework that they couldn’t perform here and, well, one or two other procedures.”
“She sent Honor some of her photographs. I see they’re using pina coladas as an anaesthetic over there now, are they?”
"As soon as the procedures were done, she flew back to Ireland, only to be told by a chap at the airport – listen to this, Ross! – that she'd have to stay home for two bloody well weeks!"
"Yeah, it's not personal?"
“Of course it’s bloody well personal! Day by day, they’re taking away the freedoms for which the chaps in 1916 died – even though you know my position on that one, Ross! We’d have been a lot better off if we’d remained port of Britain! Credit where it’s due, they just know how to organise things better than we do!”
“Dude, I’m hanging up on you now.”
There's a lab in Buswells Hotel where they're creating suggestible people to read the news on RTÉ and write for The Irish Times
"And then there's the aforementioned Hennessy! He was taking his 1929 Duesenberg Model J out for a spin on the Naas Road – important to keep the engine ticking over! – when he was stopped by a member of An Garda Síochána and asked if he considered his journey necessary. Quote, unquote, Kicker! And your godfather – well, you know what he's like for the repartee, Ross – shot back with, 'Would you consider yourself necessary, you ginger pr*ck?' Of course now he's chorged with some, oh, trumped up nonsense."
"Could you not just get Netflix and wait this thing out like the rest of the world?"
He sort of, like, chuckles in, like, a knowing way?
“Netflix?” he goes. “Netflix is port of the conspiracy, Ross! It’s a form of methadone maintenance designed to turn us all into dazed supplicants, content to live within the social parameters set by the architects of this conspiracy against democracy.”
"You'd want to watch Tiger King. The dude reminds me a lot of you."
"Well, you'd want to read your internet, Ross – educate yourself! There's a laboratory in the basement of Buswells Hotel where they're using somatic cell nuclear transfer technology to create a new generation of suggestible people to read the news on RTÉ and write columns for The Irish Times that advance the interests of those who would curtail our personal freedoms!"
"Joe Exotic - he's a focking headbanger like you."
Next weekend, Ross, with the help of some wonderful people I've met on this famous internet, I intend to hold a No Mask Rally in Dún Laoghaire
"Just Google 'George Soros Molesworth Street' and it's all there – chapter and verse! We have all been had, Ross! They created this moral panic – just as they created the virus itself – to usher in a whole new series of normative controls! Stalin had to kill 20 million people to bring about what these people have achieved in a year! A society where it's an offence to show your face in public, to worship your God in the company of others, to be tactile towards the people you love! They have attached a guilt complex to all of our social interactions! They have restricted our movements to within 5km of our homes while they decide on a whim what we can and can't buy!"
“Can you not get your cigors online?”
"Only Orwell could have written it, Kicker! In less than 12 months, they have created a police state and they have done it with our happy acquiescence! But no more!"
“What are you bullsh**ting on about now?”
"Next weekend, Ross, with the help of some wonderful people I've met on this famous internet, I intend to hold a No Mask Rally in the town of Dún Laoghaire! We will take back our lives! Fittingly, it will take place in the People's Pork! And as a lover of democracy, Ross, I would expect to see you there!"