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TPQ
Michael Praetorius ✒ with the sixteenth act in his satirical series.

Trigger warning: this segment contains examples of man to man banter which may offend some readers

These men's WhatsApp groups, eh ... ? Diabolical.

Have to admit, though, that I was a member of one such cabal when I worked in libraries. And I hold my hands up: it was bad.

The minute a woman arrived in the place the dodgy messages would fly between us lads. The most disgusting would centre around the real man's nasty but fundamental question of women: Is she a Jane Austen or an Emily Bronte ... ?

In other words, would she or wouldn't she ... ?!?

Do any work, I mean. The Janes tended to be practical and get on with things, whereas the Emilys usually had their heads in the clouds, daydreamers who were too preoccupied to get much shelving done at all. Which meant more for the rest of us.

Or we might, just for the vicious fun of it, call one a Bach, or another a Beethoven. The crude, vulgar in-joke being that we knew the 'Bach' was essentially flowery, ornate, mathematical even, in her approach, while the 'Beethoven' would be more prone to push the boundaries, encourage change and transition.

I offer no excuses or justification. Librarianship, and the men in it, are seen as sedate, cloistered, innocent. Nothing could be further from the snide, lurid, sickening reality.

Watch your back

It's back ... and better than ever ... !!

The amazing Amazon £3.99 watch ... !!!

Last one I had a few years back has now been superseded by a new, updated state of the art model.

Emails, texts, phone calls, satnav, pedometer ... it's all there [Ts&Cs apply].*

Freeing up this little beauty to do the real biz ... ! Your friends will gasp in astonishment if and when someone asks the time and, before they can even reach for their bricks, you simply raise your wrist, glance at the watch, then say things like, Nearly tea time, we'd better hit the road ...

So fab I bought two ... !

*[i.e. on your phone]
 

Real men

Armagh real men are divided into two groups: those who wear baseball caps; and, those who wear bobble hats. Rivalry between them is feral.

[Please note that we are disregarding those who sport 'beanies' (i.e. pompomless bobble hats), since all research to date suggests they're, what we teachers used to call, ESN.]

Baseball cap wearers are Micky Harte/GAA to the core; they preserve Irish culture by playing roadbowls and gleefully holding up traffic; they have loads of children so as to outnumber Prods all the sooner; very few of them can be arsed to learn Irish, but give their children names like Tighe, which in Irish means handsome, even though many are just plain ugly; they go to Mass; they holiday in God's Little Acre (Donegal).

Bobble hat wearers are QPR (or similar) to the core; they preserve Irish culture by learning the language and go around the place actually using it, declaiming such as: Oy tink Oy'd loike tings dat way, or, Is der anniemore praties der, garsún?; they refute any suggestion that they are just insecure big girlies; they can read; they are daylight atheists; they holiday in Omeath.


Selene Dion

Like many an old codger, who knows that his next grand day out will be to the crematorium, and that God has deserted him for the trifling offence of being an existential nihilist and militant atheist, I stare at the moon for long periods.

Living in the country doesn't help, for every time you go out of a night there she is, hanging in the sky like a Chinese meteorological balloon, except that you can't shoot it down. And so you look up, and 15 minutes later you're still stood there. On especially socially disorganized, disoriented and alienated nights, I go inside and get the binoculars.
 

Poetry Corner

Just over a year ago the sky fell. Gone, but not forgotten. In memoriam: the Northern Ireland Assembly.

So. Farewell then still,
Paul Givan, DUP First Minister.
You had a relative, an uncle perhaps,
whom you were too young to remember;
but he had Down's Syndrome,
and therefore it is only right that
men of faith and principle like yourself
control women and their reproductive systems.

Jean says you have a bit of a nerve there,
but she's a woman,
so we can't expect anything constructive
from that quarter.

Your tenure will be remembered too
for your other great achievements,
even if no particular instance of one
springs to mind.

E. Jamie Thribb-Bryson (17 and a half)

Everything I never wanted to know about sex

Even as a former (or lapsed) Catholic, I have only ever seen sex as being an unfortunately necessary, but brisk, joyless, and filthy, means to an end i.e. procreation; nothing more or less. So you can imagine my distress and trepidation when I first encountered Jean, the Protestant woman.

For a start, displayed prominently on her book shelves were titles like The New Joy Of Sex, the Kama Sutra, The Sex Hacker's Guide To Endless Orgasms, Come As You Are, and Nifty Lay-bys For Bonking Alfresco In N Ireland (published, bravely enough, by the NITB).

But I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

Many years ago 'Missions' would come to our village Chapel. Brother missionaries, mostly just back from converting the black babies in Africa, took over all services for a whole week. They were giants of men, tough and hardy looking, fierce in manner. They wore brown habits, and each had a large wooden crucifix, tucked into his big brown leather belt.

These men really let rip at the evening Masses. One came out through the altar rails, and over to where we boys sat (in the front pews, girls in the front pews on the other side of the aisle).

He rested the heel of a big left hand on top of the cross in his belt, leaned back, and glowered down on us wee lads. He paused. We trembled in fear and awe. Then:

D'yis tink i don't know what yis get up ta, ya dorty rascals ... ? he roared.

We jumped. Whatever it was, we knew we were guilty.

Yis basties ... ! he added for good measure.

It all came out: he knew from the look of us that we were constantly playing pocket billiards, poring over smutty photographs, sniggering at obscene talk, and, worst of all:

Lustin' After Protestant Hussies !!

Other than Elmore James, I can't think of anyone who made a bigger impression on my young self than this mad Brother. 

The curse of Finbarr Saunders

You know, said Jean, I sometimes think you had it in you to be a half decent writer, but you've wasted the little creativity you have in chasing after puerile double entendres.

I don't know about that, but it's true - all my life I've been obsessed with making plays on words, so much so that it has destroyed all my relationships with women. They just get bored and tell me to grow up.

Now I am old and isolated, at my life journey's end. Yes, I'm suffering The Loneliness of the Long Distance Punner.

An apology

In my column over the months I may have given the impression that, like many high achievers, I've suffered bouts of personal listlessness and fatigue, including many varieties of nervous exhaustion. I may have attributed this draining of the spirit to the speed, variety, complexity, pressures, and so on of my striving relentlessly at the coal face in our modern technological, global workforce.

I may even have looked for, and apparently found, cures in a whole range of physical lifestyle changes, encompassing everything from yoga to diets (including an evangelism for the eating of muesli).

It may also be the case that I have at various times diagnosed my condition as neurasthenia, or existential tiredness, or angst, or anomie, and so on.

I now realise how wrong I have been in any such diagnosis. What I am actually enduring is burnout. This term makes clear that the sufferer, in this case myself, has selflessly simply given too much of himself, with the further implication that I have done so for the greater good. Thus am I absolved from the suggestion of self indulgence that accompanies those said to suffer from 'fatigue' or 'ennui'.

I apologise unreservedly for any misunderstanding caused.

Jumping the shark

I was arranging contents insurance on the phone, as you do ... when you're old, and worried that somebody might steal your dartboard.

What exciting things are you up to now you're retired? asked the girl as she waited for the system to calculate a quote.

Oh, the usual, I said, trying to sound on-trend, gung-ho silver surferish. You know ... er ... Vietnam, ... and ziplining, and, you know ... trekking and cruising to, like, Antarctica and the Northern Lights ... sort of thing ... you only live once so you have to make every second count ...

£136.72, she said.

I looked around (see photograph below) ... that's what I do ... and it's only a kiddies' pinball too ...
 

Coming in

Do you know what it is I'm going to tell you? I said to Jean. It's important for my head I tell you that I'm actually straight. This is something that has caused me much heart-breaking reflection for years now. Yes, I am feeling pain and confusion, but that comes only from the hurt that I am causing you. My inner conflict contrasts with an outside world that has changed so very much for the better.

Today, quite rightly, I continued, being straight is a reason to celebrate and be proud ... I'm in awe of those I meet who have been brave and open in confronting this truth about themselves - so now it's my turn to share mine.

You're no longer living a lie then, she said and gave me a big, supportive hug.

It's true: people are much more tolerant now. But what if I'd told her that when a dog barks late at night and then retires again to bed, he punctuates and gives majesty to the serial enigma of the dark, laying it more evenly and heavily upon the fabric of the mind ... ?

That’s my real dilemma ...

Chronic town

I was busking in Armagh. It came on to rain. I moved over so as to be underneath the overhanging canopy that stretches around the outside of Sainsbury's.

Soon security man comes out. Lights up cigarette and comes over.

You can't busk here, mate, he said, it's private property. And he exhaled a cloud of smoke around us.

Am I smoking that cigarette too? I asked.

Did you hear me? he asked.

Call the police, I said.

About an hour later a group of women stopped. It was someone's birthday, so they asked me to play Happy Birthday to her. As I did so two PSNI officers appeared from round the corner and interrupted.

Well, the women were very cross.

Jesus, said one of them, have you pair really nothing better to do ... ? Catch yourselves on ... !

We cut a deal whereby I could finish Happy Birthday and do a few more tunes, then go.

It had stopped raining anyway.

Armagh ... the best thing about it is the road out . . . 

⏩Michael Praetorius spent his working life in education and libraries. Now retired, he does a little busking in Belfast . . . when he can get a pitch. He is TPQ's fortnightly Wednesday columnist.


Joy And Fun Are Fucking Killing Me ✑ Act XVI

Michael Praetorius ✒ with the sixteenth act in his satirical series.

Trigger warning: this segment contains examples of man to man banter which may offend some readers

These men's WhatsApp groups, eh ... ? Diabolical.

Have to admit, though, that I was a member of one such cabal when I worked in libraries. And I hold my hands up: it was bad.

The minute a woman arrived in the place the dodgy messages would fly between us lads. The most disgusting would centre around the real man's nasty but fundamental question of women: Is she a Jane Austen or an Emily Bronte ... ?

In other words, would she or wouldn't she ... ?!?

Do any work, I mean. The Janes tended to be practical and get on with things, whereas the Emilys usually had their heads in the clouds, daydreamers who were too preoccupied to get much shelving done at all. Which meant more for the rest of us.

Or we might, just for the vicious fun of it, call one a Bach, or another a Beethoven. The crude, vulgar in-joke being that we knew the 'Bach' was essentially flowery, ornate, mathematical even, in her approach, while the 'Beethoven' would be more prone to push the boundaries, encourage change and transition.

I offer no excuses or justification. Librarianship, and the men in it, are seen as sedate, cloistered, innocent. Nothing could be further from the snide, lurid, sickening reality.

Watch your back

It's back ... and better than ever ... !!

The amazing Amazon £3.99 watch ... !!!

Last one I had a few years back has now been superseded by a new, updated state of the art model.

Emails, texts, phone calls, satnav, pedometer ... it's all there [Ts&Cs apply].*

Freeing up this little beauty to do the real biz ... ! Your friends will gasp in astonishment if and when someone asks the time and, before they can even reach for their bricks, you simply raise your wrist, glance at the watch, then say things like, Nearly tea time, we'd better hit the road ...

So fab I bought two ... !

*[i.e. on your phone]
 

Real men

Armagh real men are divided into two groups: those who wear baseball caps; and, those who wear bobble hats. Rivalry between them is feral.

[Please note that we are disregarding those who sport 'beanies' (i.e. pompomless bobble hats), since all research to date suggests they're, what we teachers used to call, ESN.]

Baseball cap wearers are Micky Harte/GAA to the core; they preserve Irish culture by playing roadbowls and gleefully holding up traffic; they have loads of children so as to outnumber Prods all the sooner; very few of them can be arsed to learn Irish, but give their children names like Tighe, which in Irish means handsome, even though many are just plain ugly; they go to Mass; they holiday in God's Little Acre (Donegal).

Bobble hat wearers are QPR (or similar) to the core; they preserve Irish culture by learning the language and go around the place actually using it, declaiming such as: Oy tink Oy'd loike tings dat way, or, Is der anniemore praties der, garsún?; they refute any suggestion that they are just insecure big girlies; they can read; they are daylight atheists; they holiday in Omeath.


Selene Dion

Like many an old codger, who knows that his next grand day out will be to the crematorium, and that God has deserted him for the trifling offence of being an existential nihilist and militant atheist, I stare at the moon for long periods.

Living in the country doesn't help, for every time you go out of a night there she is, hanging in the sky like a Chinese meteorological balloon, except that you can't shoot it down. And so you look up, and 15 minutes later you're still stood there. On especially socially disorganized, disoriented and alienated nights, I go inside and get the binoculars.
 

Poetry Corner

Just over a year ago the sky fell. Gone, but not forgotten. In memoriam: the Northern Ireland Assembly.

So. Farewell then still,
Paul Givan, DUP First Minister.
You had a relative, an uncle perhaps,
whom you were too young to remember;
but he had Down's Syndrome,
and therefore it is only right that
men of faith and principle like yourself
control women and their reproductive systems.

Jean says you have a bit of a nerve there,
but she's a woman,
so we can't expect anything constructive
from that quarter.

Your tenure will be remembered too
for your other great achievements,
even if no particular instance of one
springs to mind.

E. Jamie Thribb-Bryson (17 and a half)

Everything I never wanted to know about sex

Even as a former (or lapsed) Catholic, I have only ever seen sex as being an unfortunately necessary, but brisk, joyless, and filthy, means to an end i.e. procreation; nothing more or less. So you can imagine my distress and trepidation when I first encountered Jean, the Protestant woman.

For a start, displayed prominently on her book shelves were titles like The New Joy Of Sex, the Kama Sutra, The Sex Hacker's Guide To Endless Orgasms, Come As You Are, and Nifty Lay-bys For Bonking Alfresco In N Ireland (published, bravely enough, by the NITB).

But I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

Many years ago 'Missions' would come to our village Chapel. Brother missionaries, mostly just back from converting the black babies in Africa, took over all services for a whole week. They were giants of men, tough and hardy looking, fierce in manner. They wore brown habits, and each had a large wooden crucifix, tucked into his big brown leather belt.

These men really let rip at the evening Masses. One came out through the altar rails, and over to where we boys sat (in the front pews, girls in the front pews on the other side of the aisle).

He rested the heel of a big left hand on top of the cross in his belt, leaned back, and glowered down on us wee lads. He paused. We trembled in fear and awe. Then:

D'yis tink i don't know what yis get up ta, ya dorty rascals ... ? he roared.

We jumped. Whatever it was, we knew we were guilty.

Yis basties ... ! he added for good measure.

It all came out: he knew from the look of us that we were constantly playing pocket billiards, poring over smutty photographs, sniggering at obscene talk, and, worst of all:

Lustin' After Protestant Hussies !!

Other than Elmore James, I can't think of anyone who made a bigger impression on my young self than this mad Brother. 

The curse of Finbarr Saunders

You know, said Jean, I sometimes think you had it in you to be a half decent writer, but you've wasted the little creativity you have in chasing after puerile double entendres.

I don't know about that, but it's true - all my life I've been obsessed with making plays on words, so much so that it has destroyed all my relationships with women. They just get bored and tell me to grow up.

Now I am old and isolated, at my life journey's end. Yes, I'm suffering The Loneliness of the Long Distance Punner.

An apology

In my column over the months I may have given the impression that, like many high achievers, I've suffered bouts of personal listlessness and fatigue, including many varieties of nervous exhaustion. I may have attributed this draining of the spirit to the speed, variety, complexity, pressures, and so on of my striving relentlessly at the coal face in our modern technological, global workforce.

I may even have looked for, and apparently found, cures in a whole range of physical lifestyle changes, encompassing everything from yoga to diets (including an evangelism for the eating of muesli).

It may also be the case that I have at various times diagnosed my condition as neurasthenia, or existential tiredness, or angst, or anomie, and so on.

I now realise how wrong I have been in any such diagnosis. What I am actually enduring is burnout. This term makes clear that the sufferer, in this case myself, has selflessly simply given too much of himself, with the further implication that I have done so for the greater good. Thus am I absolved from the suggestion of self indulgence that accompanies those said to suffer from 'fatigue' or 'ennui'.

I apologise unreservedly for any misunderstanding caused.

Jumping the shark

I was arranging contents insurance on the phone, as you do ... when you're old, and worried that somebody might steal your dartboard.

What exciting things are you up to now you're retired? asked the girl as she waited for the system to calculate a quote.

Oh, the usual, I said, trying to sound on-trend, gung-ho silver surferish. You know ... er ... Vietnam, ... and ziplining, and, you know ... trekking and cruising to, like, Antarctica and the Northern Lights ... sort of thing ... you only live once so you have to make every second count ...

£136.72, she said.

I looked around (see photograph below) ... that's what I do ... and it's only a kiddies' pinball too ...
 

Coming in

Do you know what it is I'm going to tell you? I said to Jean. It's important for my head I tell you that I'm actually straight. This is something that has caused me much heart-breaking reflection for years now. Yes, I am feeling pain and confusion, but that comes only from the hurt that I am causing you. My inner conflict contrasts with an outside world that has changed so very much for the better.

Today, quite rightly, I continued, being straight is a reason to celebrate and be proud ... I'm in awe of those I meet who have been brave and open in confronting this truth about themselves - so now it's my turn to share mine.

You're no longer living a lie then, she said and gave me a big, supportive hug.

It's true: people are much more tolerant now. But what if I'd told her that when a dog barks late at night and then retires again to bed, he punctuates and gives majesty to the serial enigma of the dark, laying it more evenly and heavily upon the fabric of the mind ... ?

That’s my real dilemma ...

Chronic town

I was busking in Armagh. It came on to rain. I moved over so as to be underneath the overhanging canopy that stretches around the outside of Sainsbury's.

Soon security man comes out. Lights up cigarette and comes over.

You can't busk here, mate, he said, it's private property. And he exhaled a cloud of smoke around us.

Am I smoking that cigarette too? I asked.

Did you hear me? he asked.

Call the police, I said.

About an hour later a group of women stopped. It was someone's birthday, so they asked me to play Happy Birthday to her. As I did so two PSNI officers appeared from round the corner and interrupted.

Well, the women were very cross.

Jesus, said one of them, have you pair really nothing better to do ... ? Catch yourselves on ... !

We cut a deal whereby I could finish Happy Birthday and do a few more tunes, then go.

It had stopped raining anyway.

Armagh ... the best thing about it is the road out . . . 

⏩Michael Praetorius spent his working life in education and libraries. Now retired, he does a little busking in Belfast . . . when he can get a pitch. He is TPQ's fortnightly Wednesday columnist.
Joy And Fun Are Fucking Killing Me series Michael Praetorius

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