AH, the crisp breath of autumn. The dark evenings that fall in and whisper soft promises of Christmas. The spectacular display that nature puts on with the dramatic turning colours of the leaves. THE fecking leaves. I know there is a lot to be anxious about in the world right now. There are wars abroad, tragedies at home and the future seems to contain nothing but terrible vistas.
Colm’s leaves are hardly a cause for commotion, are they?
You see, after years of working in various stressful environments, I have learned that the only thing to do when you feel overwhelmed by the world is to focus on doing one small thing at a time. And so I have decided to focus my attention entirely on the monstrosity that is the influx of leaves in or around my front door.
I think it’s okay at this moment that we give ourselves permission to just stick our heads in the sand when it comes to the news, or in my case, to stick my head in the leaves.
So that’s what I’m doing, And let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen of West Cork, that my battle with nature’s fall is not going well.
I started by trying to get ahead of the problem. I know that every autumn my front drive becomes overwhelmed by armies of foliage.
This usually results in me giving up completely until I open the door sometime in December to find a bank of leaves falling in on my head, like an Inuit after an avalanche.
This year, I decided to get out fast with the yard brush and shovel, to make some early gains on the scoreboard by dealing with the first fall ruthlessly. They are like the All Blacks, the leaves. If they get a bit of a lead at all, you’re screwed.
But then there was Halloween, which brings its distractions, including a glorious trip to West Cork where I got to admire the kaleidoscopic splendour of the leaves as I journeyed around the countryside in the wake of Storm Ciarán. It’s amazing how beautiful they can look when you don’t have to clean them up.
I should have known that while I was home in West Cork, waxing lyrical and ‘making memories’ with my children, the bastard leaves would be forming a small phalanx around my front door and undoing all my early work. And there they were when I got back, piling up on the porch again, like students forming around a keg.
Part of me thinks I should just let nature take its course. Maybe we should hunker down for the winter. Admit defeat. Take the kids out of school until the leaves retreat. We surely have some homeschooling skills left after Covid, right?
The other option is to go out there diligently every day and meet the challenge head-on. But there is nothing quite so heartbreaking as spotlessly cleaning a driveway and garden only to open the blinds the following morning and see them all back again, like Bobby Ewing in the shower.
I see other men in the neighbourhood making more progress, more manly types usually, with their Black & Decker tops, Black & Decker gloves and their Black & Decker leaf blowers. You know, the kind of fella who might bring a drone to a christening. They are often supported loudly from a doorway by a Black & Decker wife.
But I know their game. They are really just pretending to clean the place up while gradually transferring the leaves back into everybody else’s gardens.
So I must content myself with going out every few days to deal with my little patch. A small little bit at a time. Keep things going, keep the place tidy and try to be thankful for all my small little worries.
Not big on intelligence
I WAS intrigued to see the AI Summit at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire last week. It was pitched as a global conference to discuss the dangers posed by Artificial Intelligence and was the British Tory Party’s attempt to be seen as a world leader in this emerging field.
It rang fairly hollow, given that Rishi Sunak, the Tory’s version of artificial intelligence, recently rowed back on climate commitments. This is surely a far more pressing concern.
Sunak took part in a fireside chat on AI with Elon Musk, the man who recently outdid his other scientific achievements by defying the laws of physics by turning Twitter into X and then into a somehow more toxic place than it used to be. Some achievement that, if there was a reverse Nobel Prize he’d be a shoo-in.
Meantime, in the background, the Covid inquiry hummed away like a crocked ventilator revealing Boris Johnson’s government’s handling of the pandemic to be even more disastrous than we could have imagined. Incompetence, gross misogyny, callousness ... They are never not at it.
We can be glad, I suppose, that our handling of the crisis over here was done in a much more level-headed, compassionate way, despite its flaws.
Not that we aren’t capable of our own acts of gross hypocrisy.
It seemed fairly odd after a week of climate-related floods that we had a trade mission in South Korea trying to sell them our beef.
Trade ties with these markets are hugely important, I understand this well as a business owner, but you do get the sense that we don’t comprehend the sacrifices that are ahead.
Lights? What lights?
I WAS only telling the kids about the Northern Lights the other night as we were watching an episode of David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet on the telly.
I got a bit excited when reports started coming through that we might be able to see them in Ireland this week, with green-glowing images in Irish skies appearing all over social media.
Unfortunately, here in Dublin, it turns out you need a camera to see the Aurora Borealis, to the naked eye it just looks like a normal glow on the horizon.
So you need to travel north to Iceland or northern Finland to see them without a long exposure camera. An Instagram filter will have to do the job, for now, it seems.
