I am finishing Simpson’s biography of Douglas Adams at the moment (more of that when I have finished), but it’s a pretty cumbersome volume, and so I brought The Secret World of the Irish Male to read on the bus this morning. By page 5 or so I had already startled my fellow passengers by chortling uncontrollably and I was well and truly hooked. With sentiments such as these:
You never know what’s going to happen in real life either, but some things you can be relatively confident about. The truth will always hurt, half your socks will always disappear in the washing machine and John Bruton in full flight will always be strangely reminiscent of Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Show.
(…)
After a while the police arrived [to remove students from an office they were occupying]. They were quite angry. They said thay would «do whatever was necessary» to get us out. They repeated the phrase a few times. We scoffed, heroically. We’d be here, we said, until all of our demands had been met. They asked us what these demands were. There seemed to be a bit of confusion at this point. Personally, in addition to having Ireland immediately declared a 32 county socialist republic, I wanted to have a regular girlfriend and «Brideshead Revisited» repeated on a Monday night.
How could I be otherwise?
I’ve just glanced at the amazon reviews, by the way, and it’s a long time since I’ve seen a book that people either love or hate, not one «ok, but not very exciting» comment to be seen. It came highly recommended to me, Linda put it into my hands saying «Here. Borrow this. I almost died laughing.» so I will persist in looking forward to the rest of it…