ULSTER RAMBLES WITH DAVID I began my article for the previous edition of The Irish Scene as follows:
“As well as a new decade, it seems like a new era.’ I mentioned how optimistic many of us were for the years ahead. ‘I hope the decade has started off well for all you readers out there and of course for everyone else as well. Lately, it seems that Boris (probably not him but one of his cronies) has had an idea to link Ulster to Scotland; No, not politically but by means of a bridge.’ Well the optimism did not last long. How depressing that 90% of our news is about one item only. The other 10% is about the weather! I will try my best to avoid it here so, wish me luck. Perhaps I can now clear up the thinking of Boris. It appears that the prime minister’s commitment to “levelling up” the country should not be doubted, and so it should not be ruled out that his promised bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland is not actually intended to be a bridge, but merely a national thought experiment. It is only a few weeks after I mentioned it in my last article that the bridge (that cannot be built) was dredged up again, and inflicted once again on the public conscience. We now learn that the Scottish secretary Alister Jack, thinks the bridge should, in fact, be a tunnel. Well why not. After all, Alice was able to find great adventure when she fell down one. Someone even wrote a very popular book about her adventures. Alister reasoned that a tunnel would be cheaper, apparently, and “more weather proof”. He has told a committee of the Scottish parliament that he has raised the prospect of a tunnel, instead of a bridge. The tunnel would, he said, be a “cheaper” alternative. Why not a floating castle on a cloud, I ask you? Why not carry people from Scotland to Northern Ireland on the back of that weird dragon from The Neverending Story? Bring back Finn McCool. He was able apparently to nip over to Scotland frequently and easily.
Enough of this nonsense! To be honest I had more faith in Trump’s wall, though to expect Mexico to pay for it was going way too far. OK, I can hear you ask if I have lost my mind. I am trying desperately to avoid what is in the news at present but I am finding another topic of interest difficult to find. Anzac day will have passed by the time you are perusing the magazine. It will probably be published online only, so you will not be sitting on the couch with the great little “mag” in your hand but sitting in front of a monitor or fiddling around with your thumbs on a flash phone or iPad. Never mind, you are alive and well. May it remain so! I once sang ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, Eric Bogle’s famous song, to eight hundred school children. This year I will be singing it to our eight neighbours if they all show up. Well there are only ten houses in our road. I believe it to be the shortest road in Australia if not the world. We are so lucky to be able to communicate with our friends, relations and loved ones by means of the ubiquitous iPhone. I actually like many of the clips sent to me from all over the world by means of WhatsApp, Messenger and of course email. With Facetime and Zoom we can now have conferences with lots of people at once or, like my good wife from Dublin 4, we can have meetings with our friends and chat with all of them together. I noted that my wife’s group had to make up a set of rules for it to work as at the beginning, at least three would be talking at the same time. They came up with the fabulous idea that they would ‘mute’ themselves while one only was able to talk. It worked. How did the iphone come about? Certainly Steve Jobs did not do it all on his own. For example the iPhone wouldn’t be the iPhone without its iconic touch-screen technology. The first touch screen was actually invented way back in the 1960s by Eric Arthur Johnson, a radar engineer working at a government research centre in the U.K.
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