THIS week I learned that Room To Improve is nowhere near as entertaining when it is real life and it is happening to you. You see, we’re about to let a load of lads in hard hats into our house to start knocking walls and digging holes and showering all our stuff in dust. Meanwhile, we will sit rocking in a dark corner looking at our bank balances dwindling.
You’d think that after all the years of training every Sunday night, watching Dermot Bannon play God with young couples’ hopes and dreams, that we’d be primed for this moment. This is the Renovation Olympics and we should be ready, gosh darn it!
But alas, no. We’ve gone and made all the same mistakes as the rest of the deluded morons that parade themselves in front of the nation for our entertainment of a Sunday. We’ve engaged an architect and created something that is way beyond our means to build. We’re having to hack away at the plans, rubbing out lofty atriums, binning architectural external bricks and completely rowing back on a ‘garden studio’ idea. (We’re a long way from sheds, lads.) We’ve even become obsessed and emotionally tied to a very specific variation of a marble worktop. I honestly thought I was better than this.
Of course, in the current climate, we feel very lucky to have a house at all and be in a position to be improving it. I can only imagine what it is like to be trying to build something in a more constrained scenario, say at an earlier stage in our lives and careers. Everything from cement to windows to internal doors is so eye-wateringly expensive, you’d wonder where it will all end.
So you’ll forgive me, over the coming weeks, if I feel the need to vent or let off some steam in this column.
They say we’ll be in by Christmas. Ho, ho, ho, says we.
Not so well matched
I MADE the short journey down to Croker on an extremely chilly evening last Saturday to see the bumper local clash of Leinster hosting Munster.
I met Fachtna, my old stalwart from home, who is just about recovering from the hurlers’ loss to Clare. This, he reminds me, marks progress from years ago when he was known to stew for up to a decade over rebel failures. He still has a rather long list of terrible referees which I think probably amount to his mortal enemies.
We were ready for a night of high drama under the lights but, unfortunately, the game was over after about ten minutes.
Despite a spirited display by Munster in the second half, the reality is that these are two teams in different classes at the moment and there is no sign of that abating with the Leinster academy continuing to produce more stars than K-pop.
It’s hard to see the glory days of Munster coming back soon.
Look up, it’s Elon Musk
ELON Musk, eh? You couldn’t keep up with the lad. Designing electric cars, boring high speed tunnels under cities, ruining Twitter, hopping around on stage at a Trump rally like he was a stage invader at Féile ’95 .…
Then, last Sunday, SpaceX achieved a significant milestone with the launch of Starship Flight 5 and the successful ‘catch’ of the Super Heavy booster, a feat that has never been accomplished before. The booster, equipped with 33 engines, launched in Texas, and after its separation from the Starship, was caught by Mechazilla, a giant mechanism designed to grab the returning booster with chopstick-like arms. Sunday’s mission tested the most powerful spacecraft ever built, with over twice the thrust of Nasa’s Saturn V moon rocket, making it a significant event in the history of space exploration. The phallic symbolism was lost on nobody this side of Ursa Major III. Whether they will have enough rockets for us all to escape the planet before Sinn Féin implodes, is another question.
Micheál rocks up
IN another universe entirely, I see Micheál Martin was trying to ‘Make Cork Great Agin’ in the attempt to rescue Rory Gallagher’s guitar, presumably from a miserable life on some English Lord’s wall. There is nothing that fills me with more fear than a politician getting involved with, or even being remotely adjacent to, anything rock ‘n’ roll – but there is an election on the way. And maybe we should make a list of Cork artefacts that we should ensure are returned to the county in the years to come, priceless items like Roy Keane’s whiskers, Cillian Murphy’s eyes, Sonia O’Suliivan’s runners ….
