Now I’m not knocking the guy’s profession. Everyone has to make a living. He just didn’t strike me as having an aptitude for that particular line of work. I mean, we hadn’t even been introduced yet. I could have been anyone. Last weekend at the Electric Picnic though, Sharon found true love. The guy was called Derek and she reckoned Derek was the business.

“Whatcha make of the guy guy?” Aidan asked me at the bar.

“I dunno,” I shrugged. “Nice guy. He tried to sell me pills when Sharon was at the jacks but.”

“Me too,” Aidan nodded. “D’you take any off him?”

“Fucker was looking for a tenner a go.”

“Cheeky bastard,” repeats Aidan. “Still, nice fella,”

A week later the big romance has bitten the dust. Derek hasn’t returned any of Sharon’s calls. In fact, the number he gave her doesn’t seems to be out of order. Needless to say, her friends are rallying around.

“You know, he could be a secret agent, called away on a case?”

“Maybe another hash dealer has a beef with him and they’ve gone to the mattresses.”

“Fuck off lads.”

“Do you know where he works?” Sean ask.

“He said he works for the E.S.B.,” Sharon snorts. “But that was probably a lie too.”

(You know, the more I hear about this Derek guy, the more I secretly admire him…)

“Well I for one refuse to stand in judgement,” I tell them. “I mean, when you’re trying to get a girl to sleep with you, who has pretended to work for the E.S.B. at one stage or another?”

“Send one of his mates a text,” suggests Paula. “Tell them you’re pregnant. That’ll flush the fucker out.”

Sharon shakes her head.

“Wouldn’t work…”

“Why not?”

“Ah, you know, it was a small tent.”

(Aidan and I exchange glances. Derek’s borderline folk hero status is evaporating fast…)

“He didn’t seal the deal?”

“I’m so disillusioned…”

“I don’t believe in anything anymore…”

“Just tell us though,” says Brendan. “Would it have made any difference if he’d said he worked for An Post?”

“Bus Eireann? Grand pensionable jobs there…”

She tells us to feck off.

“I never expected any sympathy from ye bollockses.”

“Irish Rail… Would you have slept with him if he was a train driver? Ah come on, I bet you would have…?”

A version of this article appeared in the Evening Herald, September 6 2008

Now all you have to do is find yourself somewhere to sit down and you can stuff your face. Chances are, though, that if you haven’t been to a Mongolian restaurant before, you won’t necessarily figure all of this out on your own. You won’t want to look like an idiot, so you’ll have no alternative but to just stare at what everyone else is doing and pretty much copy that. Which is fine. Copying what everyone else is doing in a Mongolian restaurant is fine.

But life is not a Mongolian restaurant. That’s what I’m here to tell you. Okay, it is to a certain extent. There is, I will concede, a “correct” way of doing things. If you’re an adult this will mean a lot of fake smiling, making polite conversation, talking about getting on the property ladder and fake smiling while making polite conversation with someone who is talking about getting on the property ladder.

Which is fine if that’s what you want to do. But if you don’t, I have some alternative which I would strongly recommend. They are messing, pricking, acting the bollocks, acting the eejit, acting the cunt, jig-acting, play-acting, playing fuck, acting up, skipping, lepping and/or jumping.

My point is that, in life, you only get to play one hand of cards. So is there really any point in caring too much about what people think about you? I don’t think there is. There are worse things that could happen to you than being pointed at and stared at by a bunch of outraged Mongolians.

[Published as part of 'Mongrel Magazine Guide to Life', circa 2005. I don't remember when exactly this was written. Certainly, the trip to the Mongolian restaurant which inspired it happened the same day in 2005 that this story was on the cover of Village magazine. I remember it because that was the day my parents took me out to celebrate my birthday.]

Two days ago, we crossed the shimmering Bosphorus and finally set foot on Asian soil. We were sunburnt. We weren’t all speaking to each other. And we’d actually done the final leg of the trip by airplane because of flooding in Bulgaria. But fuck it. We’d gotten crazy drunk and had a shitload of fun in about a million different countries. For the full spellbinding account of our 3,000km journey, you’ll have to wait until Christmas. And move to Mayo. Because I’m writing about it exclusively about it for Annagh, the parish magazine in Ballyhaunis. But if they don’t break my legs for breach of copyright – it has happened apparently – I might just post it on here afterwards.

The other bit of news I have is that I also quit the column I was doing for The Dubliner. It was a pain in the hole decision to make. I loved being allowed to write about whatever the hell I wanted to each week for such a wide audience. It was a bit of a challenge at first, but I’d really started to enjoy myself there. (The underpants column was a particular triumph.)

Unfortunately, a couple of things came up and – yadda yadda – I decided not to do it any more. But if there are any editors out there reading this, who pay their writers semi-regularly and tolerate the occasional mild profanity, you know where I am. Annagh Magazine – are you listening?

The BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons list in 2002 included personages as august as Churchill, Shakespeare and Darwin. Our list runs to only forty names. But it still finds room to indulge the preposterous candidatures of Mssrs. Daniel O’Donnell, Michael O’Leary and fully three (three!) members of the Boyzone camp: Ronan, Stephen and Louis Walsh. That’s the same as the total number of women who made the list, incidentally. But fuck that. My sympathies here are with Keith Duffy. This can only be construed as a personal snub. What the fuck, like?

Of course, there are some names there whose greatness no one could dispute: Yeats, Wilde and Paul McGrath among them. But there’s one name in particular that I’m really aggrieved to find missing. One man more deserving of the accolade Ireland’s Greatest Person than any other.

That man is John Rocha.

Now I’ll be honest with you, folks. I have no idea what John Rocha actually does. I think he designs shoes or something. I’m sure he’s very good at it. But I’m more interested in his sideline as the nation’s all-purpose esoteric guru-in-chief.

Let me explain what I’m talking about here. About five years ago, I was shopping for a present for some American friends when I came across something called the Kilkenny Book of Irish Cooking. Prominently featured below the title were the words “with an introduction by John Rocha.” Well, I opened it up and had a flick through it.

In his introduction Rocha had written, basically, that Irish people have a long relationship with food and food-preparation, and that recent socio-economic and cultural changes were reflected in our diet. It was riveted to the spot. I could not believe what I was reading.

This was like something I’d have written in my Leaving Cert, who I’d already answered every question I actually had a clue about, but still had one more left to get through. It was a master class in waffle, in other words. And better still, he’d probably been paid a small fortune to write it. That was it. This man was my new God.

He reminded me a bit, in fact, of Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. You remember, Cruise was an American soldier who went to Japan in the 19th century and ended up becoming the greatest samurai in the empire. The way I saw it, that was kind of what John Rocha had done in Ireland. Think about it. The Irish are a nation of bullshitters. But this guy had just come in and beaten us at our own game.

Some time later, I caught an interview with him on one of the chat shows. He told the host that, each spring, he likes to wash his hair in the lakes and rivers of the west of Ireland. I think he said it was a cleansing ritual or something like that. The audience were lapping it up. The interviewer practically achieved orgasm.

Well my father and I sat on our couch and we laughed and laughed. You had to hand it to the guy. He just did not give a damn.

On this occasion, however, there was to be an interesting postscript. The following April, my father, as was his wont, went out swimming in Urlar Lake one evening. He was on his own, threading water in the middle of the lake, when he saw a rather flashy car pull up and stop. A small rotund Chinese man jumped out, ran down to the water and stuck his head in. He then jumped back into the car and drove away.

The whole thing was over in about thirty seconds.

Now I wasn’t there to witness this myself at the time. And I’ll admit my father didn’t tend to use this type of expression. But I like to think my father whistled to himself and exclaimed “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… your greatest living Irishman!

[This would have been my final column for The Dubliner, but they spiked it. They reckoned it was libellous. Fuck it. They might have been right. I have no idea. I'd already decided to quit at that point and for totally unrelated reasons.]