I’ve just crawled back from a week in Clon, where I’d convinced myself I could ‘work remotely’ while actually living the West Cork dream.
You know the drill: coffee on the public benches in front of O’Donovan’s Hotel wearing a multicoloured beanie hat; pretending to answer emails while actually watching the world go by; telling yourself that a walk on Red Strand is basically a business meeting with yourself...
August used to be when the world properly switched off. Parliaments would scarper, the courts would close, and newspapers would be forced to run front-page stories about escaped Walruses overturning boats.
They called it the silly season, that glorious window when the world’s adults went on their holliers and left the work experience kids in charge. We were all off, physically and mentally, taking no notice of the ‘real world’.
But I come back to Dublin this August and what do I realise? We are actually living in the silly season full-time, year-round, 24/7.
It’s a permanent August now and Wally The Walrus is at the controls in The White House.
Catch me if you can
Speaking of losing it, did ye all catch the story about the fake aristocrat who blagged his way into the Royal Cork Yacht Club?
The French national, using the aliases Terry Birles, Thierry Birles and Thierry Waterford-Mandeville, charmed his way into the Royal Cork Yacht Club (RCYC) and allegedly used an Irish company to con a movie star out of millions.
He was arrested in Panama in February last year following an alert circulated by Interpol and will go on trial in France next month for an alleged €4.5m fraud.
What I can never understand about fellas like this is the sheer level of energy they expend conning people.
His daily schedule must have been something else:
• 9am: Invent new identity over breakfast
• 11am: Network at yacht club (remember which lies you told to whom)
• 2pm: Light lunch with movie star, rip him off
• 6pm: Cocktails and increasingly elaborate backstory
• 11pm: Quick Google search on ‘extradition laws Ireland’
Can you imagine what he could achieve by just being, well, decent?
I guess you never know who’s swanning around the yacht clubs of Cork, do you?
Make me an island
The final nail in my August sanity came via a Daft.ie email about Whiddy Island going for €4 million. ‘All outbuildings included!’, it roared.
Now, most sensible people would delete that email. But August does things to a man’s brain. The heat, the constant news chaos, the camogie final, the knowledge that September and reality are lurking around the corner. Maybe the answer to the permanent silly season is right in front of me, I thought? Suddenly I’m planning my new life as an island eccentric.
The idea is to move to Whiddy and set up a digital detox centre where troubled mainlanders are sent to get away from their phones. They could enjoy a week of uninterrupted bliss on my wellness retreat, away from all those Instagram mindfulness gurus terrorising them about their breathwork. I could reintroduce the simple joys of Irish life to these harried late capitalists. Rock fishing, handball, reading a book for more than five minutes without checking their phones, eating penny sweets, staring into the middle distance over a pint…
I could even write the modern version of Peig Sayers’ autobiography, except instead of tales of hardship and poverty, it would be about the trauma of Deliveroo not servicing island communities. ‘Chapter 3: The Night The WiFi Died.’ It’s pure genius, the more I think about it. All I have to do now is come up with the four million euro.
AI, and I’ll be back
I see OpenAI has finally released ChatGPT-5, or as they’re calling it, ‘the last AI you’ll ever need’, which sounds reassuring and not at all like the tagline from a dystopian thriller.
I was listening to that Diary of a CEO podcast during the drive back from Cork - you know, the one where the millionaire interviews billionaires about how money isn’t really that important, and they were seriously discussing how AI might become the world government. Not in a ‘this is terrifying’ way, but in a ‘wouldn’t this be better?’ way. The logic went something like this. Humans are making a bags of running the planet, we’ve got Trump, Putin, Netanyahu and a load of other megalomaniacs calling the shots, so why not hand it all over to a nice, rational computer? No more wars started over hurt feelings. No more economic crashes because someone got greedy. No more jetting around the world with Jeffrey Epstein. Just pure, cold logic making sensible decisions while the rest of us go to the Long Strand for chips.And you know what? Sitting in traffic on the M7, listening to the news about whatever fresh hell Trump’s unleashed today, I found myself nodding along. Yes, actually, give the robots a go. They’ve bided their time long enough. What can possibly go wrong?
Which is exactly how every sci-fi film starts, isn’t it? ‘We created AI to help humanity...’ Then we cut to Arnold Schwarzenegger looking for some fellas boots and his motorcycle. But as we all know, when it comes to August, there are no bad ideas.
