Madam, - On my way to work the other day, while strolling through Harold's Cross Park, I passed a workman busily blowing leaves from one place to another with one of those leaf-blowing contraptions which appear to have become popular lately.
It set me thinking, what's the point of these things? They have to be one of the most utterly, laughably, senseless devices ever and the epitome of utter laziness. I mean, why move leaves from one place to another with some type of inverted vacuum cleaner when it would actually be easier and more effective to gather them up for proper disposal in the first place? It's absurd. I can't fully dispel a feeling that the whole idea is some type of elaborate, ironic, post-modern joke!
In all seriousness, though, when they were deciding to go about things in this way, wouldn't it have been far more sensible to have produced an actual vacuum cleaner designed for this purpose, which would suck the leaves up and store them for disposal? Or what about the simple old-fashioned brush and shovel? Apart from the virtues of simplicity and effectiveness, it actually serves the dual purpose of giving the user some modicum of exercise in the process.
Maybe, though, there are some analogies that could be made here about our Celtic Tiger Ireland; the seemingly wasteful pointlessness of so much, failure to tackle matters properly, futile manoeuvring from place to place, and a tendency to brush inconvenient issues to somewhere else in the hope that this will make them disappear!
- Yours, etc,
DAVID MARLBOROUGH, Kenilworth Park, Dublin 6W.