I was back in Croker on Saturday evening with Fachtna, my fellow West Cork exile, perched in the upper reaches of the Cusack Stand, and it felt at times like we were attending a savaging at the Colosseum. There’s something deeply unnerving about feeling sorry for jackeens, even a few weeks after those very same jackeens dumped us out of the football championship without so much as a by-your-leave. But my heart did go out to them by the end.
It was total carnage from the off: Cork like men possessed, Dublin’s goalie picking the ball out of the net again and again like he was working in a seriously depressing bowling alley. Fachtna and I barely sat down for the first half hour, roaring ourselves hoarse. But after a while, with all the jeopardy sucked out of proceedings, it felt weirdly disappointing. We were reduced to chatting about who might be contenders for the Áras at one point, which tells you everything about the state of the match.
Still, it’s been nice swanning around the northside in the red jersey all week, like a peacock in enemy territory. Myself and the lad two doors down have an ongoing tit-for-tat. He likes to shout ‘the blue suits you!’ whenever I’m wearing anything approaching Dublin colours, and I’ve had precious little to shout back at him in recent years with the ongoing football famine situation. I tell you, he’s been a quiet lad all week. Not a peep out of him.
It’ll be hard to turn down the hype machine in the weeks ahead, and rightly so. Unfortunately, I’ll miss it all as I made the rookie error of not planning my holidays around the GAA calendar , an oversight Fachtna will be slow to forgive me for, and one that may well end our friendship. So I’ll be off in France on the holibops when Liam is hopefully, hopefully taking the long road home through Tipperary. It’s the hope that kills you, as we all know...
Vitruvian dentistry
Meanwhile, in more cerebral news, a West Cork dentist has gone and solved a 500-year-old mystery that Leonardo da Vinci left lying around in one of his sketches like a crossword puzzle nobody could finish. While most of us are struggling to remember when we last darkened the door of a dental surgery (guilty as charged), Dr. Rory MacSweeney , originally from Dunmanway but now practicing in London, has spotted something in Leo’s famous Vitruvian Man drawing that everyone else missed for half a millennium.
You know the one: the naked Italian fella standing inside a circle and a square, arms and legs akimbo, looking like he’s about to do star jumps? Well, it turns out there’s a third shape hidden in there: an equilateral triangle formed by the man’s legs. And here’s the dental angle - it’s the exact same proportions as the triangle you get between the corners of your jaw and where your teeth meet when you bite down. That’s the sort of insight that only comes from years of staring into people’s gobs for a living, I suppose.
It’s no wonder we’re so handy with the small ball in Cork when we have that sort of attention to detail bred into us from birth. The rebel county strikes again!
Recovery and ambition
The population of the island of Ireland has officially topped seven million for the first time since before the Famine, which is brilliant news if you’re charting our recovery as a nation but absolutely desperate news if you’re trying to get a ticket for Cork v Tipp.
It’s a massive milestone when you think about it, and a complete turnaround from the 19th-century catastrophe that emptied half the country onto coffin ships bound for Boston and beyond. You’d hope reaching this sort of number might inspire slightly more ambitious thinking around housing, infrastructure and getting people from A to B without having to sell a kidney.
How many of those seven million are living in their childhood bedrooms or camping out in someone’s converted shed, not to mention eyeing up a few years Down Under, is a story for another day. Let’s take the wins when we get them.
Inchydoney’s credentials
And finally, a story that feels like it was cooked up by an AI that’s been binge-watching Cold War films and Room to Improve simultaneously. The New York Times ran a piece this week about Wonsan, North Korea’s grand seaside resort - designed to lure tourists but now sitting there like a ghost town with the most amazing infrastructure.
It’s got luxury hotels, wide promenades, neat rows of parasols...and absolutely nobody using any of it. Just the wind and what I imagine is some poor crater in a grey suit telling you the beach is closed for ideological reasons. The photos look like a screensaver designed to keep Kim Jong Un calm during his temper tantrums. Dystopian or what...
But it got me thinking: for all our moaning about planning permission and bureaucratic nonsense, I’d take our ‘chaotic but functional’ approach over their ‘perfect but empty’ any day of the week. At least when you finally get to Inchydoney, you can actually enjoy a pint overlooking the beach without someone asking to see your credentials.
