COLM TOBIN: The long and the shorts of it: This Hallowe’en weather is too scary

YOU’LL be glad to know that I started working on this piece sitting in my shorts in the most glorious sunshine.

Please don’t throw the paper in the bin yet, I’m not telling ye about my holidays in Tenerife again. No, I am writing from the Mediterranean capital that is Dublin city, formerly known for October squalls, imminent rain and cauldrons of coddle.

Now it’s a place where you can cut the grass in October in your shorts and relax with an iced coffee in the baking sun afterwards. Shorts. In October. There are mixed emotions involved in enjoying the beautiful, unseasonable weather, even though I know deep down that it’s a sign of something ominous and rather disturbing going on with our weather systems. 

You know there’s something amiss when you are listening to Hallowe’en fireworks going off in the evening and the temperatures are north of 20 degrees.

No cheeky Charlie here!

WE can’t enjoy anything for too long these days without being alive to the potential for anxiety, it seems.

On the one hand, we welcome Michael McGrath giving us a few quid here and a few quid there in the Budget. But in the back of your head, you’re thinking about the fact that we have some of the highest childcare costs in the OECD, some of the most expensive accommodation in the world, and a cost-of-living crisis that means every single one of us has the sort of outgoings previously reserved for the likes Elton John in the late 1970s. And that’s just to get the bins collected.

The extra eight or nine hundred quid most families are up this week won’t be long disappearing into thin air.

It’s a shame that Michael McGrath has none of the distracting, rock ‘n’ roll tendencies of some of his predecessors. He’s no Charlie McCreevy, who would barely tell himself what he was about to announce, not to mention the rest of his cabinet colleagues. It could have been a slashing of income tax, it could have been the 3rd Secret of Fatima. Nobody knew what was coming.

Even Paschal Donohoe had a bit more pizazz to him, delivering his facts and figures like a mysterious little wood nymph, flitting from branch to branch in a twilight of numbers, refusing to be nailed down. 

Poor Michael McGrath is more of a Pass Maths Technocrat, I’m afraid. If he ever got a tattoo I bet it would say ‘Steady As She Goes’. When he retires, they’ll probably play Radiohead’s No Alarms And No Surprises as his farewell song. But perhaps this is exactly what we need in a world that is slowly going off the rails. Though, there’s a part of me that craves a bit of drama on Budget day.

If I ever got the job, I’d go in heavy on the drama and the pyrotechnics while I had the attention of the nation.

First off, instead of arriving like a Dunnes Stores area manager in a blue suit, I’d don a Scream mask and brandish a joke shop scythe.

Then I’d have myself lowered into the Dáil chamber in a cloud of dry ice to the sound of Black Sabbath. 

Then the speech would kick off.

‘There will be a rise in the higher rate of the USC, which brings overall household incomes down by €120, but all that doesn’t matter much given WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE ANYWAY! HA HA HA!!! And I’m offering mortgage interest relief of up to €1500 a year to first-time buyers but WHO CARES? WE’RE ALL ON A ROCK HURTLING THROUGH SPACE AND NOBODY KNOWS WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON! HAVE YOU EVEN SEEN THE STATE OF THE NEW BIG BROTHER CONTESTANTS???!’

I’d then end the speech with a Paul Daniels twist – ‘I NOW WISH TO COMMEND THESE BUDGIES TO THE HOUSE’ and unleash a small flock of multicoloured birds into the rafters of Leinster House. Everyone brings their own personality to the job, I suppose. Actually, the more I think about it, maybe slow and steady is the way to go.

Must we keep it country?

THE truth is I’ve been doing pretty much anything to avoid the unspeakable horrors of the global headlines this week, especially the events in Israel and Gaza. I got so desperate that I even watched the first few minutes of The Late Late Country ‘n’ Western special, a sign that I was truly unwell. I lasted five minutes. 

It’s not my snobbery about the music. It’s D4 TV people’s inability to really capture the essence of something so quintessential to rural Ireland. TG4 has been doing this in a low-key way for years, with little fanfare, and buckets more authenticity. 

If Irish Country ‘n’ Western can ever possibly be authentic. I soon found a Tom Barry documentary over on TG4 as an alternative, which was about 15 years old and still far more interesting than a load of TV types patronising country people. There are still some hidden gems to be found on the TV schedules.

Let’s repeat the magic

AND then of course there’s Ireland’s big quarter final against the All Blacks this weekend to worry about. I was pretty confident we’d dispense with Scotland before half time. I think this team have a magical special something, a bit like Paschal Donohoe on Budget day.  But the quarter-final heebie-jeebies are starting to creep up on me now. 

What fantastical way can we possibly go out this time, I wonder? We are so well-prepared at this point that I don’t think it’s even going to be rugby-related. 

Something in the back of my head thinks we’re going to get hit with some random curse – the whole stadium gets evacuated because of bedbugs with New Zealand three points up; or some national injustice on the scale of Thierry Henry’s handball; or perhaps Bundee Aki and Jamison Gibson-Park ripping off their Ireland tops during the Haka to reveal they’ve been conspiring with the All Blacks all along …

And yet, despite all the worry, I think something amazing might just be on the cards. Hopefully by the time you’re reading this, I haven’t already jinxed it!