COLM TOBIN: My deep dive into the freezer shows Covid era frozen in time

I WAS defrosting the freezer there at the weekend.

I’ll tell you, sitting there observing the drip-drip-drip of melting ice on a Sunday afternoon gives a man of a certain age time to think.

Sure, you could drop a grand on a wellness weekend or mindful kayaking with Bressie or whatever it is people do for peace of mind these days, but nothing brings you closer to the beating heart of the universe like a ten-year-old Hotpoint slowly melting its contents onto the kitchen floor.

One of the main things you get to think about is the folly at the heart of all man’s plans. Ladies and gentlemen, the things I have put (and then found) in the icy depth of those drawers with the very best intentions. It would break your frozen heart. The high hopes and grand ambitions laid waste by my own ability to disregard my future self.

This week, I found unlabelled lunchboxes filled with rhubarb, a substance so hardy and easy to grow that it would thrive in a Siberian gulag. Then there was some form of a brown curry, origins unknown, suspended in time in a massive lunchbox that could have been put to better use. It might have been from Christmas, it might be an artefact from the civil war. Then there were the coriander leaves I had carefully cut and placed in a freezer bag during some wild foraging phase I went through during lockdown. Unlabelled and untraceable, and ultimately unconsumable. They all ended up where they should have started – in the fecking bin. Well, the brown bin ... At least they won’t go to landfill, I suppose.

September is definitely a time of new intentions and new starts, with school starting up and the slow, advertising-laden lead-in to the C-word in December. So rather than working to earn money, half of which gets taxed, only to pay the huge electricity prices to keep some rhubarb stalks frozen for eighteen months, my new philosophy is to stop buying so bloody much in the first place.

That’s the new phase now, and the freezer will be used with military precision, with labelling rules enforced by death.

We’ll see how that goes.

Ah, let's just 'leave it' there

THERE’S a well-known urban legend that you are never more than six feet from a rat in a city. Well, the same can be said about well-meaning celebrities doling out patronising life advice around the release of the Leaving Cert results every year. You’d be exhausted listening to them.

Tubbers broke his Bakhurst-inflicted silence on Instagram to tell all the students it’ll all be alright, even for those who don’t get the points they wanted. He then went on to say something about the cosmos. Then there was some Kerry lad on the radio who said that it’s important some people fail the Leaving because these are the people that end up employing all the people who got straight As. Fair point, actually.

Then there are all the newspaper pull-out sections, the radio specials, and the feverish podcasts, all adding to the general sense of hype and hysteria that makes up the military-educational complex that is our Leaving Cert every year. I mean, we tell the students it’ll be alright and to just do their best and everything will be fine (the cosmos again) but society shows them a very different reality when it comes to actually doling out points. The pressure is ridiculous and the outcomes are more and more questionable as time goes on.

When I was a kid, education meant the world to all our parents, who were absolutely determined that we all got the opportunities they didn’t get in the much poorer Ireland of the 50s and 60s. It has also been key to this country’s success.

But it feels to me like we’ve overcorrected a bit. Not everyone needs to be a doctor or a lawyer. Not everyone needs to go into debt to fund four years of a degree they have little interest in.

There’s a lot to be said for traveling, for trying new jobs, for getting a handle on how money and business work before committing to a long program of study which will likely dictate where your future career begins. There’s a lot to be said for learning to build energy-efficient houses or sustainable farming in the workplace before applying academic rigor to specialist areas.

Inevitably, I’ve turned into one of the guys doling out advice, of course.

RTÉ is toying with 9am slot

THE post-Tubridy era dawned in RTÉ with the launch of the autumn schedule earlier this week. The big question is what to do with the 9am slot on Radio One now that The Toy Guy has departed. In my opinion, we should return that hour of radio to the Irish people.

RTÉ should commission a show called The People Speak, a sound collage of WhatsApp messages of people from all over Ireland describing their daily lives interspersed with great music. A daily snapshot of life around the country in all its diversity. It’d be like Reeling In The Now. It would be a break from the doom and gloom of heavy news and a reminder that life goes on every day all over the country, in myriad ways, and outside of the bubble of politics and panicky headlines that are the staple of all our news shows. And you wouldn’t have to pay anyone a hundred and seventy grand to present it either.