MARCH 17th: IRISH CHRISTIANS? WHAT'S ST. PATRICK'S DAY ALL ABOUT?

Colour me green and teach me how to count to potato – we’re a week out from St. Patrick’s Day and I’m sitting here and thinking; “what have the Irish contributed to the global community of late?”

… Still thinking…

… Nothing’s coming to mind…

Anyway, what is this St. Patrick’s bollarchy all about and why do we celebrate it?

Well, it seems that sometime about 1600 years ago this guy called St. Patrick arrived in Ireland bringing Christianity with him. Now can you imagine that? Irish Christians? That’s like free-thinking Socialists or Islamic Women’s Rights Activists – it just doesn’t sound right does it? And there are a number of issues about this as far as I can see.

Firstly, how much of a coincidence is it that this guy happened to have an Irish name? According to historic recollections (uploaded from the ever-reliable Wikipedia) this guy was born across the water in England – to a wealthy Romano-British family. So how come we’re not celebrating St. Augustus Antonio Day or St. Arthur Daley Day? How did his parents know that they had to call him ‘Patrick’?

Secondly; not only did St. Patrick bring Christianity to Ireland, but apparently he also managed to drive all of the snakes out of the country too. Now come on… we both know that’s all a wee bit of a fib don’t we? Like, everyone knows that it was the English who actually drove all the snakes out of Ireland. They did it during the late nineteenth century by transporting them all to the Convict Colonies in Australia.

Thirdly (or, with an Irish accent; “Tirdly”), is the very concept of celebrating the arrival of Christianity to Ireland. I mean, I can’t tell who’d be worse off; the Christians or the Irish. Like Jesus O’Christ, it’s Holy Communion with a baked potato and a Pint of Guinness. And apparently (according to Wikipedia again) St. Patrick used the three leaved Shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity to his Pagan Irish congregation. So what was that like? “Here’s the Father, here’s the Son and here’s the God damned Holy Leprechaun!!!”

And you can just imagine some of those early Pagan Irishmen gathering at their local taverns, downing a few Ales and telling each other Christian jokes. Like:

“Did you hear the one about the Christian guy who rescued a young woman from a Roman executioner and took her home and made mad passionate love to her?”

“No, was she beautiful?”

“Don’t know… he never found her head.”

Now here’s the thing; we all know that according to that other great and reliable information source Mel Gibson, at exactly the same time that St. Patrick was arriving in Ireland to begin his ministry (give or take about a thousand years) the Irish were heading the other way in droves to help the Scots fight off the English at Bannockburn. As Mel’s depiction of Wallace stated in his heavy accented Scottish drawl; “Ye coon nawt tek ma frdeedom!”

So it’s kind of hard imagining the early Irish being so accommodating of St. Patrick and his Christian ideals. I mean, they must have viewed him in the same way that we view those annoying Jehovah’s Witnesses today;

“For God’s sake, I’m bloody hung-over and was trying to have a sleep in!”

Yes, that sounds as though it could have been as common an expression in a fifth century Ireland as it is on a Saturday morning in suburbia today.

So there you have it, three good reasons why it makes no sense for the Irish (or any of us for that manner) to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. But despite that, on March 17^th we’re all going to go out together, dress in vulgar green, drink bucket loads of Guinness (even though no-one other than the Irish actually likes the stuff), eat a potato, talk in a silly accent, and kiss and hug a bunch of perfect strangers while reminiscing about the plight of Irish oppression…

… Yes, it all sounds very Irish-Christian to me…

That’s what I think… and usually I’m right.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO BUILD AN ARK INSURE THE BLOODY THING

Bring me a truckload of timber, a pallet of nails, a bucket of bee’s wax and call me an ark builder; the weather this summer has gone madder than a pre-Darwinian animal collector preparing for a tsunami in a desert.

Take for instance the part of the world where I grew up. It’s a little place called Cootamundra in Australia. Now interestingly, in the indigenous language of the region, ‘Cootamundra’ means something like ‘swamp turtle’. But all I ever recall growing up there was the endless droughts and subsequent bushfires. I mean, it would get so dry during the depth of summer there that even the dust would lose the dirt off its’ back on a windy day. And local cattle would be grateful to be able to chew dry old chunks of clay from the bottom of their watering hole while sheep would gouge each other’s eyes out to be first in line to have their woolly coats shorn by some overweight, singlet wearing clipper-maniac oozing perspiration in the fragrance of Jack Daniels.

But this week Cootamundra has been truly drenched – and I’m not talking about a Broad Spectrum oral antiparasitic drenching either – I’m talking about rain at a velocity and volume that would give Poseidon a titanic anxiety disorder for his troubles. It has bucketed down; and not the metaphorical ‘cats and dogs’ either; it’s poured down like hippos and walruses – and I’m thinking that right now, ‘maybe swamp turtles could live there’.

And here in New Zealand we’ve just been hit by a ‘weather bomb’. Now what’s that all about? Did some cell of fundamentalist Meteorologists decide to conduct a mass suicide forecast attack on us all – drawing isobars and troughs over selected maps without any regard for the human cost of their actions? For crying out loud, I had to cancel a plane trip because of their Mecca-maniacal meanderings.

But in all seriousness, some parts of New Zealand were hit by winds of over 150 kilometres per hour during the weekend. 150 kilometres an hour? Like, that’d rip your underwear after a plate of onions. And it tore roofs from houses, trees from the ground, and knocked out the local electricity supply (I guess Dorothy and Toto aren’t in Kansas anymore). And people have been left homeless and some don’t even have a place to charge their Ipod – how cruel is that?

But the whole world is getting like this. And I don’t know if it’s global warming or greenhouse gases or melting ice-caps or what – but we’re seeing heavier snow falls, torrential rain, cyclones, hurricanes and all manner of weather events across the globe. And they’re destroying townships and ripping communities apart. For example, where I live in New Zealand we haven’t had enough sun this summer to tan a possum-skin glove - and people here are just hopping mad about it.

And some people have a right to be hopping mad about it all. For instance, in the part of the country where I live the so-called ‘weather bomb’ hit a small community taking roofs off about 50 houses. Now that’s a terrible thing in itself, but the thing that truly turns my tornado is the number of those households that had no God-damned insurance!!! Like, their sitting there now screaming hardship and uncertainty and demanding to know who’s going to ride in and save their bacon when, in fact, they chose to take no responsibility whatsoever for themselves or their families in the first place.

“But we can’t afford insurance,” they tell you.

Well I say; “who can???”

Like, no-one pays insurance because they want to – they do it because they feel that they have to. That’s the responsible thing to do for you and your family. I mean, I could go to Disneyland twice a year for the amount of insurances I pay to protect my family (okay, Disneyland might not be a good example because nobody goes there anymore – but you get my point). When you live in a place that's prone to major weather events and you want to build an Ark, insure the bloody thing you stupid twat!!!

That’s what I think… and usually I’m right.