A hurl of a contest

The Lasst Strw: I don't know much about Irish cricket, but I was thrilled to read the Daily Telegraph's report of events in Dublin last week. A "Boy's Own story", the paper's cricket writer called it, describing how "over a couple of damp days, the Irish national team proved that Guinness is good for you, by hurling Surrey out of the Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy".

Sounds like Boy's Own, right enough. Unlike the Telegraph, though, I'm not surprised by the result. I've always thought cricketers would make good hurlers: same wrist skills, hand-eye co-ordination, etc. And the Irish would have had a big advantage over the Surrey lads, who'd probably never seen hurling before, let alone played.

It must have been a hell of a game - although surely the claim that it lasted two days is exaggerated? The home team's star hurler, apparently, was Jason Mollins, "who has led Ireland to 10 successive victories while simultaneously holding down a full-time job in London". Again, I suspect exaggeration here: can you really hold down something and simultaneously hurl (or even play cricket)? Occasionally you might see a player holding down a spectator during a pitch invasion, but the game would be stopped for that. Mollins himself seemed to confirm that sport and the office are mutually exclusive.

"It's quite a surreal experience," he's quoted as saying, "tidying your stuff up at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, and thinking that at 10.30 the next morning you're going to be facing Shaun Pollock or Makhaya Ntini."

I don't know if that's surreal, but I'll tell you what is. Browsing the Bewleys website this week I noticed that, among its achievements, the café company claims to be "educating the Irish pallet". That's what it said! Now, it's a good few years since I worked in a job where my duties included driving a forklift, but I think I can still safely say that, if it's trying to educate pallets, Bewleys has its work cut out. Not only are they not very responsive: it would be no exaggeration to say that the average pallet is as thick as two planks (more typically three, with another five across the top).

I would guess that, having warehouses, all Bewleys meant to say was that it was helping to make the Irish pallet more sophisticated. As a former forklift driver, I applaud all efforts in this direction. Yes, the hard-woods traditionally favoured by manufacturers are functional enough. But they tend to chip and even crack, and where you're stacking them seven or eight high, with heavy loads, there can be stability issues. I always thought plastics were the way to go myself.

Language is a treacherous business, as we've noted before. I read in our own sports supplement on Monday the following sentence: "Chris Sutton curled home a superb injury-time winner to give champions Celtic a sixth straight Old Firm derby win against Rangers for the first time since 1915 on Saturday."

Now, you and I understand that. But imagine someone in the habit of using the 24-hour clock, and knowing nothing about soccer, and you see the potential for confusion here. In his sublime ignorance, such a reader might conclude that Celtic and Rangers had spent the weekend in a marathon series of matches, beside which the Ireland-Surrey hurling epic pales. I know, I know: if he was that big a gobshite, he had no right to be reading the sports supplement in the first place. But still.

This leads me somehow to Alanis Morissette, whose concert in London was also reviewed in Thursday's Telegraph. As you'll know, Morissette is an angst-ridden Canadian songwriter, many of whose songs have been "spiteful attacks on former lovers" (Daily Telegraph quote), and whose biggest hit, Ironic, has been widely lampooned for lack of irony.

Ironic was an apparent attempt to illustrate the dictionary definition, "ill-timed or perverse arrival of event or circumstance in itself desirable, due to the feigned goodwill and actual malice of fate". But most of Morissette's examples were not remotely ironic, merely unfortunate (for example, "rain on your wedding day", "a black fly in your Chardonnay", etc). So notorious has the song become that in London, says the Telegraph, "she wisely let the audience sing for her".

This was a cunning move, in more ways than one. According to my dictionary, another definition of irony is "use of language with an inner meaning for a privileged audience and an outer meaning for the persons addressed". In this case, the person addressed was the singer herself. I'm not saying that the audience was privileged, and you could argue that the lyrics aren't capable of supporting one meaning, never mind two. But there's at least a basis for irony here, and maybe her case should be reopened.