At the stroke of midnight, South Sudan becomes the world’s 192nd independent nation. In the new capital, joy is unconfined. In the mud huts that stretch for miles in every direction, residents can be heard singing and ululating well into the night.

By 7am, the BBC World Service reports a crowd of a hundred thousand already gathered at the Dr. John Garang Mausoleum. The speeches here will last late into the afternoon. But despite a complete lack of respite from the sun, the people never once cease to sing, sway and chant… Read the rest of this article here.

#3 The anatomy of a Twitter gaffe (June 11th)
I went with this headline about a millisecond before every second article you read started being called ‘The Anatomy of…’ something or other. I’d actually just seen an exhibition of illustrations from The Anatomy of Melancholy. Perhaps all the other headline writers had seen it too. We may never know.

#2 The funniest thing I’ve ever seen (January 30th)
I’m still a (relatively) young man. But if I watch this one more time, there is a real possibility I will keel over and die laughing.

#1 The Lonesome Boatman (August 20th)
Very early one summer morning, myself, a photographer and an affable fisherman named Shane Murphy went on a gallivant off the coast of Kinsale. We didn’t catch much. We didn’t see much. We didn’t reach any profound conclusions. But it’s still my most clicked story of 2011.

Walk on Walsh’s hill
Look up at the stars
The town is full of lights and there are people in the bars

The nights are made of nothing
And the mornings are so cold
The television talks to you like you were four years oldTake your life on Friday night
And dream when you’re alone
The people will still curse and kiss when you’re here on your own

The people will still curse and kiss
And dance and drink and screw
While you’re wandering the perimeter and you haven’t got a clue.

[N.B. Chanced upon this juvenilia when I was home for my father's anniversary mass earlier this month. It was folded, appropriately enough, inside a copy of Johnny Rogan's Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance. I guess I must have written it when I was thirteen or fourteen years old.]

But this was no summer holiday. As a journalist, I visited the Gaza Strip during the Israeli blockade in the summer of 2008. But Gaza was a holiday camp compared to this place. South Sudan is one of the poorest, hottest, most remote and dangerous places on earth. A place where there are guns on every street corner. A place where a 15 year old girl is more likely to die in childbirth than she is to have finished primary school. Still, it isn’t a bad spot all the same.

Stepping off the plane in Juba was quite a culture shock. Everyone was so tall. The Dinka and Nuer tribes are the tallest on earth. And their skin was so dark. This was something a Nigerian taxi driver back in Dublin had mentioned to me. But I didn’t appreciate what he meant until I actually met a few South Sudanese in the flesh.

But by far my most vivid first impression of South Sudan was the smell. It turned out I had accidentally set my bag down outside a malfunctioning toilet. But for a while I figured I’d stumbled upon a terrible secret generations of missionaries were too polite ever to mention: That is, that all of Sub-Saharan Africa smells like wee. Well it doesn’t, thanks be to God.

There was a huge baggage scanner in the Arrivals hall, into which passengers were queuing to feed their suitcases. On the far side, these same bags were being dumped to the floor. Since I was under strict instructions (from a homesick Irishman with a thirst) to bring two bottles of Powers Irish whiskey along in my bag, I decided to walk around the whole thing entirely. No one noticed.

The gift shop was selling loose raw eggs and salt. This was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most foreign place I’d been to in my entire life.

Our mission in South Sudan was to track down a renegade Irish priest, turned gunrunner, called Dan Eiffe. I’d read a short piece about him in London’s Spectator magazine and was interested in doing a story for the Irish Times. He’d come to Africa in the late 1970s as a Missionary of the Sacred Heart. At first he’d simply distributed aid to the victims of the Sudanese civil war. But over time, he came to identify with the rebels aims and began running guns to them from Uganda.

He later married a local woman, the sister-in-law of the rebel leader Salva Kiir (now president of South Sudan), and had two children with her. I was, I suppose, secretly hoping to meet some Colonel Kurtz-type, who had gone out into the jungle, gone mad and turned native. But the person I met was nothing like that. Dan is a sincere, honourable man whose actions, however drastic, may well have helped to avert genocide in the region.

And of course, like any two Irish men, anywhere in the world, once we sat down and sank a couple of glasses together, it turned out we had acquaintances in common. Two of Dan’s sisters had gone to school in Tubbercurry with my aunt Mary Butler from Kilkelly. The three ladies later shared a flat together in Dublin. It is indeed a small world.

Although South Sudan is officially at peace, continuing violence in the countryside made travel overland too dangerous to attempt. (Besides, in a country the size of France, there are less than 50km of paved roads.) So we took to hitching lifts on rickety old aircraft operated by Christian missionaries. These flights were gas altogether. Before we took off, the pilot would come on the intercom saying all the usual stuff. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard… Now if you’ll just join me in a quick Hail Mary.”

It wasn’t the Hail Marys I minded, so much as the suspicion that maybe the Hail Mary was in lieu of an actual safety check by qualified engineers. So were we really flying on two wings and a prayer? Well, the missionaries never asked us for airfare. So it seemed a bit rude to ask.

One of the highlights of the trip was the Independence Day football friendly between South Sudan and Kenya. There are no soccer clubs in South Sudan, so the home team was chosen from trials. The Kenyans were highly trained professional athletes. The South Sudanese team, meanwhile, looked like eleven guys who’d just walked out of MacSuirtans. (No disrespect to Macs, you get what I mean!)

On the face of it then, it should have been a total mismatch. But with enormous home support behind them, South Sudan were a goal up within five minutes. On the ten minute mark they went two ahead. If a third goal had gone in, I swear, the stand might have collapsed, so ecstatic were the home crowd. But it couldn’t last. After twenty minutes, the home side were knackered. In the end, Kenya ran out easy 6-2 winners.

There were other highlights too: The young men of the SPLA marching band whose enormous red uniforms looked like they were designed to be grown into. The delirious happiness of the ordinary people at midnight, when their homeland officially became the world’s 192nd independent nation. (It reminded me a lot of Packie Bonner’s famous penalty save in Italia ‘90, when my mother packed her four small children into the back of the car and drove down the town beeping the car horn!)

There are, of course, some other not so happy memories. There were things I saw in South Sudan that I wish I didn’t see. Things that really should not exist in the world in the year 2011: extreme poverty, malnutrition and (as the poet wrote) “guns and sharp swords in the hands of small children.” We are going through some tough times at the moment here in Ireland, no doubt about that. But as our thoughts turn towards Christmas, consider this: as long as we have security, a clean water supply and the occasional rasher, have we really all that much to complain about?

[This article appears in the current issue of my local parish magazine, Annagh, hence some of the rather awkwardly shoehorned-in local references. A longer account of my visit to South Sudan will appear in the Irish Times this coming Saturday, December 17th.]

The mushrooms go straight into the bin. I’m sorry but that’s non-negotiable. Mushrooms are fungus. As a child, I once dreamt they were growing out of my scalp. And an ex-girlfriend of mine once cheated on me with a guy who ran a mushroom house. (In restaurants, I usually just say I’m allergic.)

The remaining mix gets chopped, sliced, chucked in a pot and served up as moderately tasty gloop with tagliatelle and a salad. A cinch. Roll on Tuesday.

TUESDAY
Tonight’s recipe – salmon, green beans, lemon garlic butter and baby potatoes – proves slightly trickier. The Ireland v Estonia game is starting at 7.45pm and some of the things being demanded of me here seem more like party tricks than cooking instructions. (Know how to grate lemon rind onto a teaspoon anyone?)

The green beans take ages to top and tail. There are about a hundred of them and they all keep wobbling about on the chopping board. Do decent, hard-working people really need this kind of hassle when they come home at night? I doubt it. I don’t even work that hard and I can hardly be bothered.

Despite being in the oven for the requisite twenty five minutes, the salmon turns out not to be fully cooked. My dinner companion insists on hers putting back in.
- You can eat salmon raw, I protest.
- No you can’t.
- Smoked salmon is raw.
- Smoked salmon is smoked!

The match begins in five minutes. I eat my partially cooked salmon and, at the time of writing, appear still to be alive.

WEDNESDAY
If there’s a flaw in the Dineasy dinner plan it’s that the five dinners provided have a shelf life of five days. Therefore, one missed dinner can throw the entire operation in a spin. Tonight a friend has invited me to a gig. It begins in half an hour. So either I cook this now or I have pork teriyaki stir fry for lunch tomorrow. This will need to be quick.

Some of the ingredients are unfamiliar to me. Ginger looks like a cross between a potato and a clove of garlic. I have no idea how much to use, so I email Marie Claire. She advises me to throw in the lot. This may have be a calculated attempt to sabotage my dinner, because the result is almost inedible. So far, the half cooked salmon is still way out in the lead.

THURSDAY
By and large, Ciara’s recipes have been easy to follow. But there has been the occasional blip. On Tuesday, a missing comma left me wondering what a “heat drain” was and how I was supposed to remove the carrots from it. In preparing today’s stuffed chicken wrapped in smoked bacon, meanwhile, I’m asked to place a chicken fillet on a casserole dish and “slice down the middle making sure not to cut all the way through.”

I make a short incision across the face of the chicken breast. But the pocket created proves wholly inadequate to accommodate the stuffing of garlic, spring onions, sundried tomatoes and mozzarella. I’m in my sister’s house and she rather testily suggests that the fillet should instead have been carved open like a book from side to side.
- If that’s what they meant, why didn’t they say that?
- Some basic level of cop-on was probably assumed…

While she steps in to salvage the situation, I’m banished to the next room to play with my niece. Served with a generous helping of baby potatoes and a less generous helping of carrots, this ends up being my second favourite meal of the week.

FRIDAY
Friday is supposed to be reheated spaghetti bolognaise night. But it’s the weekend and I’m going out. Now I’m no Paul the Octopus or anything, but I suspect I may be seeing the inside of a kebab house before long.

On the far side of the room, a third boyband clone is filming the pair on a digital camcorder.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what this hotel worker is thinking. But I’d be very surprised if the words “gay porn” aren’t high up there in the mix. Read the rest of this article here.

“No two groups encapsulate the essence of Celtic Tiger Ireland so much as yuppie arseholes and homeless alcohol and drug addicts”, commented one experienced industry analyst. “Both are edgy, controversial and totally now. Advertisers lap that shit up. And yet, to date, no brand has succeeded in spanning these two disparate markets. Mongrel already has the vacuous, urban sophisticate types in its pocket. If they could bring the winos on board the crossover potential would be huge. We’re talking big time synergy and, yes, advertisers really lap that shit up.”

WHY THE PUBLIC ARE MAKING MONGREL THEIR NO. 1

Bands they’ve never heard of, revealing interviews with (37%)

Sordid sexual fantasies, arty photoshoots provide personnel and scenarios for (29%)

Baffling in-jokes, can’t get enough of (13%)

Working class people, patronising interviews with “a real eye-opener” (12%)

Invasion of Iraq, magazine’s unflinching editorial support for (9%)

Hector, single oddball reader living in unending hope that we’ll do another feature on (0.001%)

MONGREL CEO: “I’M LOVING THESE NUMBERS”
Good morning sport, good to see ya. How’s the family? Great! Listen, I was just looking through some of these reports and, ah… I gotta tell you, I’m loving these numbers. I mean, I’m really lovin’ ‘em. There’ve been other numbers, sure. But it’s almost… Well, this is gonna sound crazy, but it’s almost as if these ones unnerstand me and unnerstand a bit of what I’ve been going through lately… What’s that, my pretties? You crazy little handfuls a’ nuthin’! You wild, beautiful angels! You think I’m gonna let them hurt you? You think I’m gonna let them destroy you? Well, I am NOT gonna let them hurt you! And I am NOT gonna let them destroy you the way they destroyed me. Turnin’ my fuckin’ wife against me. Takin’ my kids away. That’s not gonna happen this time. No, siree!

You unnerstand that, don’t you? Of course you do. Why, I’ll tell ya a little secret. We’re sittin’ right here on near a hunnerd thousand rounds a ammunition, and enough plastic explosives take out an entire city block. Right here in this very office! So take it slow n’ easy my pretties, cos we’re goin’ give ‘em a run for their money. Just you wait n’ see…

Mongrel CEO Rick Superburger
(in conversation with Eoin Butler)

[Published: Mongrel Magazine, April 2005]

The Nightshade looks dangerously close to The Hitler, I suggest. “Oh no, no,” he furrows his brow and flicks forward a few pages until he finds what he is looking for. “That would be The Adolph.” Christ. How old is the book? He shrugs his shoulders. “Old.” Finnegan has been running the Waldorf since 1969, when he took the business over from his father. As he lathers me up for a hot towel shave, I notice a fluffy white caterpillar sneaking across his own upper lip. What’s that one called, I inquire? He tuts softly. “I wouldn’t normally wear the moustache this long,” he says. “But they persuaded me to grow it out. You know, for this Movember thing.”

Ah, yes. Today is the first day of “Movember”: the annual charity drive to raise funds and awareness for men’s health issues, specifically for prostate cancer, by undertaking the arduous task of growing a moustache. Since it debuted in Ireland in 2008, Movember (the word is a clumsy portmanteau of “moustache” and “November”) has grown exponentially. Last year, it raised a record €1.6m for the Irish Cancer Society.

For participants, the rules are simple. Each “Mo Bro” (as volunteers are rather cringingly referred to) begins November 1st with a clean shaven face. For the duration of the month, he must grow and groom a moustache. Growing a full beard and then shaving it down to a moustache at the end of the month is prohibited. Thus most “Mo Bros” will spend at least a fortnight with embarrassing piece of bum fluff hovering below their nose.

Not to worry, promise the organisers. Even the worst moustache makes for an interesting conversation piece. (Unless one opts for the Adolph, of course, in which case I imagine it makes for a heated conversation piece.)

Beyond that the world of the “Mo Bro” becomes slightly more opaque. “Each Mo Bro must conduct himself like a country gentleman,” is another rule. “The Mo Bro is dedicated to the cause of fine moustachery. He is aware of his responsibility to honour the moustache.” The website is filled with bizarre slow motion videos of moustachioed men standing in the fields staring solemnly at the camera, while slogans like “The Pride” and “The Craft” flash past. It’s all nonsense, of course, but it helps fosters a sense of camaraderie among participants.

The genius of Movember, it seems, is not an ability to attract donations, but rather an ability to attract recruits. Last year, the average Irish “Mo Bro” raised a relatively modest €133 per tache. But because 12,700 signed up, that amounted to a very respectable €1.6m for charity. Anecdotal evidence, meanwhile, suggests that others took part in growing their moustaches for the month but never signed up to the campaign and never raised any donations.

This in turn leads to an enormous amount of free publicity for the cause (this article included.)

Yet for all the positives to be celebrated, there are reasons to feel ambivalent about Movember. The problem, obviously, is not that it raises lots of money for a very good cause. Donating to charity is something we all should do as often as we can, for any excuse or none at all. Nor do is there anything objectionable about facial hair. (The month hasn’t even started yet and already my face is a living monument to the possibilities of the art form!)

What’s troubling about Movember is what it seems to say about our generation. In Ireland, this is a generation who jumped onto the property ladder because that’s what we were told to do. Who are trapped in negative equity, but deign to raise a word in protest as the banks responsible for the crisis are bailed out. And even on the silliest, most asinine level, this is a generation that quite clearly yearns to experiment with facial hair. But somehow we require the sanction of participation in Movember.

There is something very sad and Prufrockian about this: Movember is a fashion form letter for a generation too timid to make a fashion statement.

So here’s my pitch… If one intends to solicit charitable donations from strangers, one should be prepared to endure, if not great physical exertion or privation, then at the very least inconvenience and mild discomfort. Other “mo bros” who come looking for your cash this month will be doing something easy that they fancy doing any anyway. It might as well be a sponsored lie-in. They do make love to their employment.

But I find everything about Movember embarrassing in the extreme. I would rather claw my eyes out than be mistaken for someone who is dedicated to the cause of fine moustachery. I would rather re-sit my Leaving Cert than engage in moustache-related small talk on the Luas. Anyone kind enough to donate at the link below, therefore, can be therefore assured that I am resenting, and feeling demeaned by, every single minute of it.

Oh, and it’s all for a very good cause!

http://mobro.co/EoinButler

THE BOXCAR
Celebrity exponents: Tom Selleck, Ian Botham, Willie Joe Padden
Pro: Requires zero grooming.
Con: Loses a certain cachet when referred to as The Willie O’Dea.

In its 1970s heyday, the boxcar was redolent of a certain breed of tough guy. This was the moustache favoured by firemen, lumberjacks and sportsmen. Indeed, of the famous Liverpool side of the early 1980, five first team members were aficionados. (Go on, have a go if you think you can name them all…) So synonymous with machismo was this iconic piece of face furniture, in fact, that it was eventually appropriated as a symbol of the gay rights movement. Gay or straight though, it’s long overdue a comeback.

THE POIROT
Celebrity exponents: Diego Velasquez, Salvadore Dali, Snidely Whiplash
Con: Denotes vanity, eccentricity and fastidiousness.
Pro: And how!

“It has always been my weakness to desire to show off,” confessed Hercule Poirot in Mrs McGinty’s Dead. “Indeed it is necessary for a man of my abilities to admire himself.” For Agatha Christie, this ludicrous lip toupee was intended to signify a forensic attention to detail on the part of her hero. The more outlandish variant sported by Salvador Dali, meanwhile, suggested flamboyance and a desire to be noticed. Today, the organisers of Movember are trying to plot a comeback for this most derided style. But it looks to be a bridge too far.

THE PENCIL
Celebrity exponents: Errol Flynn, Frida Kahlo, filmmaker John Waters
Pro: Brad Pitt pulled this look off in Inglorious Bastards.
Con: Breaking news… You’re not Brad Pitt.

Sported most recently by Bob Dylan, the Pencil is a sort of low maintenance, utilitarian alternative to the Poirot. This is a moustache that says “I’m a cad, I’m a bounder, I cheat at cards and I’m not to be trusted around men or women… But can I really be bothered with all that waxing?”

THE WALRUS
Celebrity exponents: Mark Twain, 1916 leader Tom Clarke, Sam Elliot
Con: Surprisingly absorbent.
Pro: Renders you impervious to lip readers. Possibly.

Unless you’re auditioning for the role of innkeeper in an upcoming Western, there really is nothing to recommend the Walrus. I speak from personal experience here. The problem with having hair hanging down over your lip is that it absorbs pretty much everything you attempt to eat or drink. If your whiskers fall into a pint of Guinness, for example, then you won’t need a napkin, you’ll need a bathroom towel. The following morning you’ll be wandering around the house wondering, why does everything smell of curry chips?

THE TOOTHBRUSH
Celebrity exponents: Charlie Chaplin, Oliver Hardy, er…
Pro: Technically, this moustache was never an accessory to any crime.
Con: …but even still.

Ironically, for a moustache now synonymous with the worst excesses of totalitarianism, this aerodynamic effort was conceived in the early twentieth century as a way of thumbing one’s nose at authority. (The great and good, in those days, tended to sport very elaborate moustaches.) Throughout the 1910s, and 1920s, The Toothbush the rode the crest of a wave of popularity, boosted by its associationg with loved funny men like Charlie Chaplin and Oliver Hardy. But Hitler came along and the Toothbrush became a pariah moustache.