I HAVE ended up with the same stomach as my aunt Fanny. She was a woman of great nervous tension, always wanting to know what was going on in the locality and mostly predicting something akin to the end of the world for all and sundry.
I liked her a lot. I liked her interest in things – many people called her nosy, but as a child I was attracted to her curiosity.
She also helped me to understand the miracle of loaves and fishes because she seemed to feed half the country even when there was little or no food in her ramshackle of a farmhouse.
She didn’t eat much herself because she had a bad stomach – wind and acid and reflux – she drank gallons of a concoction made up by the local chemist.
She suffered with it all her adult life. And now I’m at it. Bottles of chalk-like stuff and acid tablets. I blame the politics.
Like Fanny, I listen to RTE a lot. I listened when there was a dispute about Ireland being the sixth or the fourth richest country in the world.
I listened when the whole shebang blew up in their face around the year 2008. I listened during the next seven years when the country was turned into a nation of accountants.
Every minutia about debt and taxes, mortgages and interest rates, austerity and financial easing and most recently fiscal space became the daily diet of RTE.
The accountancy courses at the universities nearly went out of business.
At one stage I was convinced that there was going to be a national nervous breakdown and while I am only partially clinically qualified I can recognise wholesale depression when I see it.
Not good for the nerves and even worse for the stomach. A few times I tried to point out to a few friends in RTE that they were neglecting coverage of the north only to be told that the north was a bore and everyone turned off when it came on.
Don’t think I persuaded them that balance sheets and quantitative easing are not exactly Adele concerts.
But the one you would have to feel sorry for is Gerry Adams. The move from West Belfast to Louth was all well and dandy at the political level but going into that hothouse of economic fiscal exactitude is akin to the likes of me having to speak at a rocket scientist convention.
It is like being attacked by a swarm of university educated ants – they would pick every ounce of flesh and apologise for leaving the bones.
I don’t believe there is one of us northerners, politician, commentator or UU trained accountant who would survive or do much better than Gerry.
There is a lot to be said for staying in the north where we all have degrees in peace studies.
But the thing that would have really tickled Fanny’s interest is the coming June referendum.
Too much excitement by far! There would have been stories of smugglers and customs men and the woman who picked the wrong day to stuff the butter down her knickers.
The wrong day because it was the warmest day of the year and butter and warm places don’t mix.
Her brother, my father, would have joined in to tell of the countless nights he had to find a public phone in Belfast or Dublin and that more often than not the phones were broken or he wouldn’t have the right change to press button A before he could speak.
He was a bus driver who was in great demand for excursions and outings. If you were on the wrong side of the border after midnight and hadn’t a ‘request’ in with the customs to get across, you might have to sit at the border till dawn broke and the office opened.
But the one who would have killed her off completely would have been Boris Johnson.
Fanny had been employed as a priest’s housekeeper for a period of her life and she was a stickler for protocol and propriety.
I can hear her tittering about poor England and a man wearing a strange hat that doesn’t even fit him, as well as swinging under buses and muttering and him likely to be the next prime minister.
She always said the world would go to wreck and ruin and there it was now – stark raving mad. Time for the Rennies.
