Old boys just don't want to play soldiers any more

So many of us middle- aged boys are hanging around all day with nothing to do, but it’s hard to work out what it is we should be doing

I WAS HAVING a breakfast sausage last week with a few of the boys, which is what they call each other, although most of them are either bald, overweight, or can barely read the text messages on their iPhones, because they always forget their glasses.

Someone remarked that there are a lot of men with nothing to do nowadays: middle-aged men, standing at the bookie’s door, or in the porch of some public house, worrying for hours about the possibility of rain. It’s hard to know where it will all end.

We were stuffing our faces with sausages, and staring out at the new bakery across the street, when someone said, “That’s what people need now: more cake shops, and coffee shops to pass the time.” And someone else said, “Don’t be stupid. It’s less cake and coffee shops we need, because nobody has the money to buy anything.” Someone else said, “The trick would be to find an activity that doesn’t cost any money,” and that’s when the General said, “We should start an army.” At first we thought he was joking, but he persisted.

“Military exercises would keep us fit, and in good health, and we could hop around the woods all afternoon, like when we were children, shooting each other.” Someone said, “There already is an army in the country,” and someone else said, “It wouldn’t be very pleasant to be shot.” The General explained that he meant we should have a club, and do military manoeuvres, and that there were shops all over the country selling guns that don’t shoot real bullets.

I thought he was talking about the little red plastic rifles that the supermarkets sell around Christmas time, for children, but he said, “I mean the real thing, real hardware; except they don’t shoot real bullets. They only fire little plastic pellets that wouldn’t harm the cat.”

“Real guns?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“There’s a shop in Galway that sells them. They’re called Airsoft weapons,” he explained.

Coincidentally I was heading for Galway on Thursday, so I got the job of doing some reconnaissance. I didn’t know where the shop was exactly, but it’s always pleasant to stroll around Galway. I went into the “Four Corners” music shop on Williams Street, to enquire. The shelves were stacked with bodhrans and banjos. A Japanese woman was buying a CD.

But I decided not to ask where the gun shop was, in case I sounded like a lunatic. And besides I was wearing a black woollen hat, which so resembles a balaclava that they might think I was a terrorist on a coffee break.

Eventually I found the gun shop, near the courthouse. Inside, the walls were covered with machine guns, rifles and pistols, although the only one I recognised was the AK47.

It was an astonishing arsenal, but there was no way I could figure out which one to buy, so I decided to take photographs with my phone, and bring them back to the General, and he, being of a military background, might be able to say which suited us best, for playing military games in the woods of Westmeath.

The man in the shop wasn’t happy with me; he came over and said I should stop taking photographs.

I asked him why? He said, “It’s my shop and I don’t want people taking photographs.” So then I asked him why he was selling guns? He said, “It’s my shop; I can do what I want.” I asked him did he know what guns were for? He didn’t answer. “They’re for killing people,” I declared.

He said, “So are knives.”

I said, “No. I can eat my dinner with a knife. I can’t eat it with an AK47.”

He said, “They only fire plastic pellets.”

“Oh well,” I said, “That’s a consolation. I suppose if I ever meet anyone wearing a balaclava and carrying a sniper rifle in future, I’ll just say, “Ah, come on now, I know that yoke only fires plastic pellets.”

When I got back to Mullingar on Friday I told the boys that the guns were far too expensive, and someone suggested we all get bicycles and pedal out along the canal, and watch the ducks, and forget about shooting anything, and everyone immediately agreed, and started discussing where we might rent bikes.

That’s what I like about boys: they’re so decisive.

mharding@irishtimes.com