An Irishman's Diary

DRIVING ON the M50 yesterday, oppressed by both the gloomy December weather and the even gloomier Budget coverage, I saw sign on a warehouse advertising “Self Storage” and thought: What a great idea.

Unfortunately, when I logged onto the website later to get a quote on how much it would cost to store myself until next April, it emerged that the company in question offered no such service. It was just another of these places where you can put excess furniture and stuff until you get a bigger house. I think “Do-it-yourself storage” was the phrase they really needed.

Despite which, there may be the germ of an exciting new business concept here. Because actual self-storage might be popular with a whole range of people: from those allergic to winter, via mere Christmas haters, to conscientious environmentalists who worry about their high energy use at this time of year.

Then there’s the Government’s four-year austerity plan. Not only does the thought of another three such budgets make you want to undergo voluntary hibernation. But if a viable self-storage service were to become available in the interim, I could foresee the Government introducing grants for it next December, to encourage take-up among selected groups.

In fact, throughout history, a kind of hibernation has occasionally been practised by humans. They used to do in the north of Russia during winter – whole families going to sleep around the stove for months on end, rousing occasionally to eat some bread or when taking turns to watch the fire and keep it lit.

In parts of 19th-century France, they didn’t even need the excuse of cold. People just retired indoors after the grape harvest and stayed there for months, deliberately lowering their metabolic activity to conserve food. No it wasn’t hibernation, exactly. Not of the kind practised by bears, or indeed by scientists in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film: 2001 A Space Odyssey.

And 43 years later, real-life scientists still haven’t mastered that technique. So for now, monastic life is probably the closest you can get to self-storage. But I’m sure there’ll be a breakthrough soon. Then, come winter-time or an austerity budget, or both, you’ll be able to go up to the Longmile Road, check yourself into a warehouse, and tell them to wake you up when it’s over.

SPEAKING OFscience (fiction), maybe you saw that amusing correction in the New York Times last week, wherein they had to explain that an Irish city referred to in a previous article was "Cork, not Quark".

No doubt this was another example of the perils of predictive text. Or perhaps the typo arose from American difficulties in understanding someone’s accent. But putting our amusement at the howler aside, I’m not sure the NYT wasn’t onto something, in rebranding the Leeside city.

After all, as we know, “Cork” is a meaningless anglicisation of the real name. Besides which, if there was any logic involved, it would be “Corky”, or “Curky”. So why shouldn’t the city restyle itself as Quark – much as Peking became Beijing – thereby simultaneously rejecting the colonial spelling while making a bold statement about itself.

Quark would immediately render the city much edgier, more in tune with the Zeitgeist. Plus, in sharing its name (courtesy of James Joyce, the Dublin-born son of a Quarkonian) with an elementary particle and fundamental constituent of matter, it would benefit from all the publicity surrounding the experiments in CERN: which in attempting to explain life, the universe, and everything, are likely to reverberate for years to come.

I myself think of Cork as a city of hills and delightfully eccentric people. This being so, and remembering from school physics that there are six types or “flavours” of quark – “up”, “down”, “strange”, “charm”, “bottom”, and “top” – I can foresee the basis of a marketing campaign. Even without prompting, many of those same terms would feature in a first-word-impression survey of tourists flying out of Cork Airport.

And while we’re on the subject of air travel, the city is already promoting itself as an alternative destination. I refer to its three-letter international airport code – ORK. It was an unwitting choice, admittedly, COR having already been allocated to Cordoba, in Argentina.

Even so, it has already made the city a cult destination for fans of the 1980s sitcom Mork and Mindy (now blamed, a little harshly, for launching the career of Robin Williams). Yes, ORK was the Williams’s character’s home planet. Thus Cork shares its international flight code with an advanced but weird civilisation whose people were hatched from eggs and aged backwards. That’s plenty for marketeers to work with, surely.

Incidentally, that New York Times story concerned a couple who met in Galway and, from there, were said to have made a “five-hour drive to Quark”. In correcting which name, the paper might also have corrected the implied slander on Irish roads. For the record, if there are any Americans reading this, you can make drive from Galway to Cork/Quark in about two hours 45 minutes, and that’s even allowing for the intense gravitational pull exerted on bodies passing around Limerick.