Pudsey, Enda and violence

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At the start of a day of pain,  when the Fine Gael and Labour parties in the south of Ireland are busy lighting blessed candles in the hope that the public will soften and accept their drastically reduced water charges, it seems unfeeling to even mention another topic, but I can’t help it. Would somebody please kill that bear?

I’m referring  to Pudsy, who wears a handkerchief over one eye to show that there are Children in Need (note caps) throughout Britain. Most of us don’t need a one-eyed stuffed bear to tell us that – of course there are, some in dire need. But must the answer to that need  be a bunch of broadcasters descending and condescending from their radio or TV thrones to show us they’re really just regular humans like ourselves and confronting us with a very long evening of half-competent, totally embarrassing singing, prancing and  godawful  smarm about how generous the British public is?

If the BBC feels so strongly about the need to help distressed children, here’s a suggestion: take 1p off the licence fee each year and pass it on for the support of those children. My maths was always shaky but I’d guess that’d produce an annual sum somewhere around £1 billion. It’d be quicker, involve less self-congratulation  (it’s our money, after all) and most definitely less painful. Ideally they could announce this new strategy  next year by publicly dismembering Pudsy and throwing his entrails to the four winds.

As to the southern business of the day: it’s maybe time people were reminded what violence is. Violence is people with guns and bombs and bazookas and suchlike weapons of death,  which they then unload in the direction of other people. As in Gaza, for example  (The Israeli prime minister has promised us an example very soon, so watch this space). To claim that someone throwing a balloon full of water  or a raw egg at you is engaged in violence  is total twaddle. It’s intended to make you look stupid, especially if you’re someone who’s used to being driven around, guest of honour at every function, and who  wouldn’t dream of living the kind of poverty forced on the egg-throwers.

What about the brick, you ask, Virginia? I can’t tell you much about it, I’m afraid. I’m guessing it didn’t hit anyone or Enda or one of his many lackeys would have been wringing their hands about it publicly even more than they’ve done. What Enda and Joan are upset by  is the notion that ordinary people have dared to come out of their houses and tell the government leaders that they’ve reached financial breaking point. Demonstrations like that destabilise politicians, act like a bucket of  cold water upended over them. Switch on  your TV this evening and you’ll see some of them still gasping for air in the Dail debate.

19 Responses to Pudsey, Enda and violence

  1. paddykool November 19, 2014 at 9:42 am #

    Hi Jude , …You covered quite some ground in this one . I have to agree about Pudsey and company . It’s more of that awful “entertainment” TV that’s trying to re-live a lost “Crackerjack” memory….A TV turn-off for me anyway. .TV is bad enough without this annual mugfest. As you say…the money is already there .We’ve contributed it to the public purse already .Stop wasting it on dreck like “i’m a celebrity, get me out of X-Factor so that I can dance like Come Dancing. and bake cakes every night”.. Just send us the bloody money !!!. There’s no need for all that booming back-slapping and self-congratulations. There is a finite amount of money for everything It goes around and around and most of it lands in the pockets of the liveried few..It’s always about how much of it is wasted on garbage and how much of it is used to provide clean drinking water.
    We probably spend more on our weekly groceries than some children see in a year and yet if we haven’t got the latest i -phone we’re all crying poverty.. Poverty could be eradicated overnight if we really wanted it to happen.

  2. giordanobruno November 19, 2014 at 10:11 am #

    Jude
    Yes your maths is shaky.
    Based on 25,000,000 households in the uk, 1 penny from each household would give 250,000 not 1 billion. What line of work did you say you were in?

    • Jude Collins November 19, 2014 at 2:50 pm #

      You naughty little boy you, gio…£250,000? I’d sell my children into slavery and pay the shortfall if we could be guaranteed an absence of the TV puke-fest

    • Jude Collins November 19, 2014 at 3:13 pm #

      I’ve had a rethink, gio – Let’s make it 40p from licence fee to make up the shortfall, but sell you into slavery anyway…

      • giordanobruno November 19, 2014 at 6:41 pm #

        Jude
        C-
        40P times 25,000,000 would give you £10 million. You need 100 times that to get 1 billion, meaning £40 off the tv licence, or roughly halving it (which may be closer to its value).
        It’s a good job you aren’t chancellor!

        • Jude Collins November 19, 2014 at 6:59 pm #

          But you haven’t factored in your value as a slave, gio…

          • giordanobruno November 19, 2014 at 7:52 pm #

            Jude
            I’m already in slavery to a 2 year old.
            I don’t think she plans to give me my freedom anytime soon.

  3. neill November 19, 2014 at 10:38 am #

    Ah good to see Jude you have become the voice of the poor and oppressed and the hammerer of privilege and rank lets get on the barricades and let the Revolution begin hurrah!

  4. Perkin Warbeck November 19, 2014 at 12:39 pm #

    The mention of Pudsey, Esteemed Blogmeister, was like the proverbial bucket of cold water upended over the head of Perkie’s inner retro geek.

    For it brought to m. a publication entitled ‘Our Boys’ which used to feature – if memory is not doing a Paul Daniels – a character called Pudsey Ryan who was an imaginary school boy who wrote letters in his own take on the Q’s English:

    ‘Deer Sur. Eye am verry pleezed to right to u to tell u about my hollydays which were in Dunnygall this sumer etc’. That sort of thing.

    It also featured the bad-hair-day Kitty the Hare stories by the late, lamentable Victor O’D. Power.

    Being a Christian Brothers’ publication (with a title like ‘Our Boys’ what else would you expect – nudge, n., wink, w.) it has, of course, long since ceased to be. Confined to the bosca bruscair (Londonderry leprechaun for ‘ trash can’) of hysteria. And not before time, so say all of us right-minded readers.

    Thankfully James A. Joyce, author, was not exposed to this abomination of the printed word, His concerned Corkonian saviour of a father, wrenched him by the left lug out of the CBS school of O’Connell’s after one long, long week and deposited him in the civilised charge of the sophisticated SJs of Belvedere College.

    No way was any loin-fruit of his going to be ‘educated’ alongside the ‘Paddy Stinks and the Mickey Muds’ of dear old dirty Dublin . Illiteracy’s loss was literature’s gain. Just imagine if James A. Joyce had been exposed at an impressionable age to the scripted barbarisms of Pudsey Ryan ! Why, he might well have gone on to scramble such glorified gick as (gulp) Finnegans Wake: ‘Soles they sighdid at Fillagian;s chrissormis wake, all the hoolivans of the nation, prostrated in their consternation and their duodismimally…’

    Phew ! as the Dowager Lady Trouser-Cough might have put it, ‘but that was a near hiss’.

    It goes without saying that James A. Joyce, son of a Corkonian, and John A. Murphy, son of a Corkonian, both share a common middle name: A for Augustine. It may be, perhaps, not the only ‘A for’ they have in common.

    Consternation is right, or rather Consternation once again: what with water balloons and bollard butting and brickbacks (of the verbal variety), the Free Southern S. is in a terrible stateen of chassis. Not least the chassises of sleek black chauffeured ministerial mechanically-propelled motor cars.

    You mention the l-word, Esteemed Blogmeister, as in ‘Enda and his lackeys’.

    Now there are those sourfaced sleeveens of Sinn Fein and other such like cults who might disingenously read into that plain phrase of fact that numbered among the l for lackeys are the independently minded laptop warriors and other truthie turds of the Fourth Estate.

    Exclude the perspicacious Perkie from those s. sleeveens. He knows nothing could be further than the truthiness. Take the Enda-bending Prime Minister’s latest outburst of hiss-prissiness in Sinister House when he insisted: ‘S.F..are at work behind the scenes and this agi-tation is not about watermelons, watermarks, water bottles, watercress, watersheds or watercolours either’.

    For S.F., read ‘Sinister Forces’.

    Agi-tation is right: if one had a tune to it one could even attempt to warble it: ‘Agi pale moon was rising above the green mountain’.

    This brave and bold statement is proof, if p. is needed, that Enda’s endgame is not about chief-whipping the media into line: they will always follow their own, erm, independent instincts.

    For example: what better spot to start than at the v. top: the fifth column of the Fourth Estate, Fintan O’ Toole’s. After whose stratospheric IQ Caraountoole is named in the County of Yerra, not unadjacent to the high pressure Hose of Tralee (see above).

    Thus, it was that Perkie’s inner pseudo-imbecile and card-carrying member of Densa, had an awe-filled gawk at what Mensa Man has been writing about of late. Why, not watercolours at all, at all, but rather…. oils.

    Specifically, Sean Keating’s oil painting of 1917 entitled ‘Men of the West’. (Note: not ‘wesht’ as Endgame Enda might say). This is the second in a series entitled ‘Modern Ireland in 100 Art Works’. The first being a portrait of James A. Joyce as a young mock-heroic modernist. Please quell any quel surprise you may feel.

    ‘Men of the West’ features three men, Aran Islanders with rifles, from the Wild Atlantic Way – water again, just no avoiding it,. And causing Mensa Man to pause for t for thought and to write:’ oddly reminiscent of cowboys’. (Perhaps the rifles were of the Winchester repeating model which, erm, won the westht? Mensa Man does not specify).

    But he does go on to opine: ‘Even while creating an iconic image of how the new Nationalism saw itself , Keating reveals the ‘uncertainty’ beneath the surface of the canvas’. Hmmm. Like,Fintan O’Keating?

    But of course ‘Keating dealt in the heroic while Joyce dealt in the mock heroic’.

    Thus, in the Mensa Man’s scheme of things : heroic bad, mock heroic good. Ergo, the last folk you would find yanking their loin-fruit cubs by the left lug out of CB schools for the Paddy Stinks and the Mickey Muds would be, erm, employees of The Unionist Times and planking them in the civilised surrounds of, say. St. Patrick’s Cathedral grammar school..

    Where the B.A. of the B.A. flutters in the some mock-heroic profusion. (For B.A. read ‘Butcher’s Apron’ and ‘British Army’). Water balloons and eggs (both rotten and fresh) follow in the same mock-heroic modernist tradish.

    Mensa Man returned yesterday to the same fray. This time his flying column has the words ‘Big Idea’ in the title, as befitted the scribe with the Biggest Brain in the Free Southern Stateen: ‘The State’s first Big Idea was the Gaelicization of Ireland – economic autarky plus the revival of Irish as the main vernacular’.

    (Perkie was flummoxed at first: never having come across ‘autarky’ before. And by ‘Irish’ his inner card-carrying member of Densa guessed He was referring to ‘Leprechaun’).

    Mensa Man:’It failed on both counts for the same reason – mass emigration of half the population to decidedly non-Gaelicised places’.

    Like, erm, Downunder, perhaps? That doughty, droughty place bereft of water? And thus, for the most part, such w. of miss destruction as, water-balloons?

    Australia (for it is it) produced the marvellous cobber called Barry Humphreys (no relation), one whose stellar creations, Bazza McKenzie was, whenever in the, (gulp) Water Closet was much given ‘to pointing Percy at the porcelain’.

    Ditto: The Unionist Times, whenever they want to diss with the p word, the Leprechaun, ‘point O’Toole at the porcelain’. The acronym for Percy O’Toole is P.O.T. may, or may not be, a coincidence.

    ‘The two failed Big Ideas are not coming back. No one seriously thinks that Irish is going to displace English as the vernacular’.

    So, there you have it, discerning reader: Sir Oracle O’Toole has spoken and so let no dog bark: ‘The news is out. The D.O.G. it was what died. D.O.G. being the acronym for Darby O’Gill’.

    In a curious class of a way, Big Chief Crooked Mouth would find this piece of smoke singalling from the summit of Carauntoole, rather disconerting. As a keen follower of fairies up the airy mounain and down the rushy glens himself he would find this effort to, erm, curry favour with himself, beneath lament. For he knows that Mensa Man is a native of Crumlin, Dublin. And ‘Crumlin’ is derived from the original leprechaun; ‘Crooked Glen’.

    Response of Big Chief Crooked Mouth: ‘Big Chief Crooked Glen speak with forked tongue’.

    Well, curry my yoghurt.

    A caught short (yet again) Perkie must now excuse himself even as he heads for the Fir. No, not to point P. at the porcelain. We’re talking Number Ones and Number Twos here.

    And in this instance, it is NOT about water.

    • Ceannaire November 19, 2014 at 11:09 pm #

      Perkin – you READ Our Boys? Next you’ll be telling me you underlined things in the Sacred Heart Messenger! Oh, those were the days…

      • Jude Collins November 20, 2014 at 11:28 am #

        Kittie the Hare LIVES!

  5. Iolar November 19, 2014 at 12:43 pm #

    An tAire Airgeadais is a driven man. Raidió Teilifís Éireann featured the Minister being driven into Tigh Laighean on 18 November 2014. He availed of an opportunity to speak to waiting reporters about the Tánaiste being delayed by protesters at the weekend. It was evident that he was not prepared to deal with questions about the use of pepper spray on protesters and abruptly terminated the interview.

    The current administration would do well to tread water carefully in relation to stealth taxes. Floating voters remain less than impressed with the failure of ministers to negotiate effectively on their behalf with the EU-IMF Troika. Protests on the streets are not a reason for control, they are a response to the drip feed of austerity measures being imposed on the vast majority of decent and law abiding citizens. The tide has turned and the electorate will no longer accept shallow promises designed to keep the good ship ‘Coalition’ afloat much longer.

  6. ANOTHER JUDE November 19, 2014 at 4:37 pm #

    I can not bear (?) the whole Children In Need nonsense, it has been going on now for what, decades and STILL there are children in need? In need of what? Food? Shelter? Heating? The Cameron junta will ensure there will soon be even more children in need, particularly those scrounging foreigners who came to the great old country that is Britain just to sponge off the hard working right wing NAZI lite people who hate all things foreign. I also turn the tv over when that self publicist bore Geldof appears. Give your donations to REAL charities, you know, the ones that have been helping the poor for centuries. You`ll see their boxes at the back of your church.

    • giordanobruno November 20, 2014 at 12:41 pm #

      AJ
      I don’t think religious charities are the best way to go given their habit of trying to convert those in need of help.
      Another form of cultural imperialism really.
      There are plenty of real charities doing good work without the religious baggage.

      • pretzellogic November 23, 2014 at 4:05 pm #

        gio

        Just came across your reply there regarding religious charities and thought I might share this with you. My younger brother who is now deceased once approached the Salvation Army in Lisburn. He was on benefits and had two dogs. Now, before any charity was given it was pointed out to him that he was expected to attend meetings or something similar. I can’t remember what the stipulation was exactly. He explained that he was in need of food for himself and the dogs and not looking spiritual help. The upshot of it was they gave him some money but made it clear that it was for the dogs.Now I suspect they knew the dogs weren’t going to be the only beneficiaries of this donation but that was how it was presented to him.

        • giordanobruno November 25, 2014 at 7:48 am #

          pretzl
          Thanks for that. Sorry about the loss of your brother.
          Christian organisations are more concerned with saving our souls than sustaining our bodies in this life,so I suppose it makes sense for them.
          Better to donate to smaller secular charities I think, though I suppose none are without faults

  7. michael c November 19, 2014 at 5:34 pm #

    Is there anything more sickening than the so called auction for “Children in need” on the Hugo Duncan show?

    • Jude Collins November 19, 2014 at 6:33 pm #

      Two auctions…

    • paddykool November 19, 2014 at 10:29 pm #

      Is there anything worse than “Ye wil…Ye will….Ye will?