THERE is a Light Nazi living in our house, wielding a reign of terror over all the other occupants.
He prowls the hallways by day and night, index finger at the ready, always prepared to snuff out any trace of electrical light in an instant.
Flick!
No sooner will a light go on and the Light Nazi will be there, on hand like some sort of switchboard ninja, scaling the wall from weird angles to turn it off again immediately.
No light will stay on for too long in the hallway. No bathroom light will be left to linger unnecessarily into the night.
Hello darkness, my old friend. Light Nazi switched them off again.
Light Nazi comes home after the school run every morning to survey the range of bulbs, lamps and downlights that are inevitably left on by every single member of the household on the rush out the door.
These lights have been flicked on willy-nilly, usually by wasteful, sleepy-headed little people who are being ushered out the door like cattle or by their sleepy-headed parents. By 9am, as the school run kicks off, the house is lit up like something out of Home Alone 2.
And Light Nazi is not best pleased.
Light Nazi quietly seethes on the trip to school. He can almost feel the euros draining from his bank account as he drops the kids at the school gates, while at home the lights are on with nobody home. Literally.
Luckily, Light Nazi works from home and rushes back from the school run, puffing and fuming as he methodically goes from room to room switching every light off with a loud ‘tsk’ which can be heard through the walls three doors down.
Hello darkness, my old friend. Light Nazi’s home from school again.
Later in the day, the Light Nazi has a range of sarcastic phrases that he uses to impress upon other members of the household how very wasteful he believes them to be.
These phrases include gems like ‘I didn’t realise ye were having a party!’ or ‘If I wanted to live in a casino I would have married Michael Lowry!’
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you guessed it, I am the Light Nazi. Bow down before me, for my reign of darkness is about to begin!
It’s an unpopular job, of course, but someone’s gotta do it.
And every house must have one these days or else we’ll be hostages to Putin and facing into an even bleaker winter than we already are.
We are patriots, really, albeit fairly miserable ones.
I think I learned my craft from the very best in the game, my own mother, who can switch off a superfluous living room side lamp from a range of up to three miles using only the power of her mind.
They say these mystical gifts are passed down the generations, like telekinesis or diabetes.
Well, I have the gift now, and it is my time to take up the mantle, in this age of energy shortages and ballooning prices.
Now, do you really need all those lights on to read this? Do you?!
Flick!
Rishi to the rescue?
ANOTHER week, another UK Prime Minister, eh?
The neighbours are sure having a torrid time at the moment.
But there was some respite on Monday when Rishi ‘I told you so’ Sunak, was announced as the new Tory leader, after a disastrous couple of weeks under Liz Truss, the George Lazenby of British prime ministers, which surely has discredited the Tory far right for a generation (or for at least the next fortnight).
Of course, everyone on this side of the channel can only hope Sunak will offer a pragmatic, more collaborative outlook in the post-Brexit landscape.
It’s absolutely not in our best interests for Britain to be a laughing stock in perpetuity, even if it was quietly amusing after the bluster, blather and clueless nostalgia of Brexit.
Sunak’s speeches so far have been pretty uninspiring, but perhaps that is what Britain needs right now.
A technocrat who will steady the ship and restore some credibility.
Of course, in a few months, Leo Varadkar will most likely be back in charge here, so we could have the prospect of Anglo-Irish relations being conducted by two men of Indian heritage, something you couldn’t have imagined even a short few years ago.
So that’s a mark of progress surely, whatever your view on their politics.
And it’s fair enough really, we’ve been ruled by cowboys long enough ....
From Russia, with no love
HAVING spent a little time in Russia in the 1990s (okay, so it was in connection with a school tour from Clonakilty Community College and a very long story for another day) I was really intrigued to watch fascinating Adam Curtis’ latest documentary series TraumaZone on the BBC iPlayer.
It’s an incredible tale of the fall of Communism using archive footage and B-roll from the BBC archives, woven together by one of the great, contrarian filmmakers of his generation.
The use of incongruous juxtaposed imagery and amazing background shots from Boris Yeltsin’s calamitous reign paints a stark and terrifying picture of a country in freefall and also a population in despair.
It is a cautionary tale of a failed political and economic system, with free market economics being introduced in what was surely the most aggressive economic experiment in the history of the modern world.
The result was theft on a historic scale at the hands of the oligarchs and the introduction of their golem, their proxy – a gaunt little ex-KGB agent named Putin.
