G’Day
Image: Reuters
from Melbourne ISN’T IT WONDERFUL TO SEE SOME GOOD NEWS COMING OUT OF IRELAND WITH THE COVID19 RESTRICTIONS BEING LIFTED? I was beginning to forget what it was like to hold a hard copy of the Sunday Independent and the Cork Echo, thanks to the Australia Post being back in operation again. I do like to read newspapers from home, in a strange way, it makes me feel more connected. As soon as the papers arrive in my letterbox, I’m like a dog chasing a bone off down the pathway. I then spend hours reading every item even the deaths, remembrances and classifieds. Many years ago growing up in Cork one of my jobs at home was to cut up the newspapers into tidy size squares and then hang them up on a hook in the outside toilet. I first had hoped that there might be some serious money in this work, when a few of the neighbors gave me the job of cutting up their papers for the large sum of a penny to do their weekly lot of papers. I suppose the reason why a lot of papers and magazines have gone online is because politicians and celebrities were not amused seeing their words in print going down the toilet. The job of cutting up used newspapers for a penny was no longer fashionable with the introduction of toilet rolls and I knew from then on that there was no future in that job for me anyway. It just shows that starting off in humble beginnings doesn’t mean that you won’t succeed, of course you will if you’re determined to. I have written many times in past articles ‘that the road you start out 70 | THE IRISH SCENE
MIKE BOWEN on isn’t always the one you will finish on, as life’s road has many turns and always be prepared for the unexpected’. Who would have believed it way back then that I would spend thirty five years as a financial advisor, and then I would go on to write for many newspapers and magazines here in Australia, as well as in Ireland and the USA for another twenty years. I suppose you could say that I did start out as a paperboy? Ha ha.
Having mentioned The Cork Echo earlier, I should also mention to everyone out there from Cork, see if you can get your hand on a copy the 17th of May edition. If you can’t find one, try the net, because there is a two page spread on Joe McCarthy, only ever known as Joe Mac, the legendary drummer and a brilliant comedian with the Dixies Showband for many years. Joe was one of the legends in the music showband era. He started out as a drummer and took to comedy, he once told me that sometimes he got bored looking at the backs of the other band members. One night he decided to move forward on the stage to see what he was missing, he liked what he saw and that’s when the comic in him let go. So from then on, he often moved his drum set in front of the band on stage and played the clown. So when you went to see the Dixies expecting to dance you would
