Maybe it's just me getting older but kids these days have, like, no appreciation of history – they don't even remember the
genius of Seán FitzPatrick, writes
ROSS O'CARROLL KELLY
HAD, LIKE, A significant birthday recently? We’re talking the big three-one. And while knocking back a few celebratory pints of Responsibly in Kiely’s of Donnybrook Town, I have to admit, I found myself – I think the phrase is – taking stock? As in, thinking about the years and how quickly they go by.
It’s, like, one day, you’re young, good-looking and loaded and you’re working your way through the female population of south Dublin like a bad rumour. The next, you’re staring down the barrel of your forties and an age where pulling an all-nighter means getting a good night’s sleep without having to get up for a piss.
This is something I’m famous for, of course – thinking too deeply. But whenever the likes of Johnny Sexton and Luke Fitzgerald ring me for advice, the one thing I make sure to tell them is to enjoy it. Because today you’re listening to the adulation of the crowd. Tomorrow you’ll be listening to . . .
“Oh my God, what are you driving?”
That’s Honor, by the way – my five-year-old daughter, who I’m supposed to be bringing to Montessori. “It’s Seán FitzPatrick’s old Beamer,” I go. “The old man bought it for me in, like, an auction?”
She sort of, like, screws her face up, like she’s caught the whiff of bad plumbing. “Who’s Seán FitzPatrick?”
I laugh. Can’t help it. It’s the same dilemma that a lot parents are facing – as in, what do we tell our children?
“Seán FitzPatrick was a very clever man,” I go. “He actually played golf with your granddad.”
“Why does it say wanker on the side?”
“Honor, you shouldn’t even know that word. But it’s because a lot of people are very angry with him at the moment.”
“Well,” she goes, giving me the elevator eyes, “you should be one of them – if he sold you this piece of crap. It’s from, like, 92?”
“Yeah, no,” I go, helping her into the back seat, “like I said, he didn’t sell it to me? It was, like, repossessed and the old man stuck in a bid for it.”
She’s like, “Yeah, whatevs!”
She insists on sitting in the back – I don’t know if I mentioned – because she likes the feeling of being basically chauffeured.
I get in the front and stort the engine, while she whips out her phone and storts immediately texting someone.
I’m there, “See, the thing is, Honor, it’s not so much the cor as what it, like, symbolises?”
I watch her in the rear-view basically shrug. “Which is what exactly?”
“I suppose you could call them the olden days.”
She shakes her head. “Oh my God,” she goes, looking back down at her phone, “you are so lame.”
This is possibly me again showing my age, but I remember a time when kids only spoke to adults like that on the Late Late Toy Show. Remember you’d watch some little kid getting snippy with Pat Kenny, and the entire audience would laugh, and you’d laugh at home, and everyone you met for the next week would be laughing about it as well – but at the same time you were secretly thinking, if she was mine, I’d dangle her by the focking ankles from the top of the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre until she apologised.
Nowadays, as far as I can see, all kids talk to their parents like that – like they think adults are pretty much stupid? There’s nothing we can do about it, of course. All we can do is accept it. I just don’t know where it comes from. TV possibly.
My phone all of a sudden rings. It’s the old dear. I stick her on speaker. There’s no hello, how are you, or anything. She just goes, “Did you hear the wonderful news?”
I’m like, “Ireland has agreed an extradition treaty with Bolivia and the plastic surgeon who did that to your face might finally be brought to justice?”
She doesn’t respond to that. Wouldn’t give me the pleasure, see. Instead, she goes, “No, Ross, they’re turning my book into a movie.”
The book she's talking about, of course, is her recession-era misery-lit novel, Mom, They Said They'd Never Heard of Sundried Tomatoes,which people are actually buying, proving that this country isn't as hord-up for money as McWilliams and all that crowd claim.
“It’s been optioned by Warner Brothers,” she goes. “They said that the story of little Zara Mesbur and a country’s struggle – told through a child’s eyes – to come to terms with the current economic paradigm is a modern classic that recalls the works of Charles Dickens.”
I’m like, “Whatever.”
“And it’s a story that I hope will give people heart, Ross. Because there are terrible things happening out there. Did I tell you what they’re selling now in Marks Spencer?”
“I don’t know – reusable teabags?”
“Worse. Bread and jam sandwiches, Ross. Bread and bloody jam. Oh, it’s like something from Oliver Twist. Anyway, you and I must go out to dinner to celebrate.”
“I’d rather eat road-kill off a bus tyre than have a meal with you.” She goes, “Okay, I’ll book somewhere,” and then she just hangs up.
Honor’s still texting away merrily, by the way. I look in the rearview and go, “Who are you texting there?”
Except she doesn’t answer.
I’m like, “Who are you texting, Honor?”
She looks up again, madder than the Old Testament. “I said my friend Malorie. Are you deaf or something?”
“Sorry, babes, I mustn’t have heard you.”
“Er, try cleaning your ears out then? And park on the opposite side of Merrion Square. I don’t want anyone in Little Roedeans seeing me arriving in this piece of, like, junk.”
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