Colm O'Regan: Oh, to have the time to be obsessed with something

"It’s nice to watch what life is like if you don’t spend time worrying about trivial things like work and chores and that thing you said to another parent at the school gate or whether crime is on the up or fretting about that friend who has recently got into chemtrails."
Colm O'Regan: Oh, to have the time to be obsessed with something

Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.

'Obsession.'

Whisper the word and you sound a bit like Kate Moss, when she was in that Calvin Klein perfume ad from the mid-’90s leaning against a wall and getting stuck in a net curtain.

But now I’m seeing the children are entering the age of magnificent obsession. They have a combination of memory, mastery, a gentle touch of peer pressure, and that most precious of commodities — loads of time — to just really go at a thing they like doing.

Have you ever looked at a child playing and just envied the absolute amount of time they have. Yes we might wring our hands at the timetabling of children’s lives but there’s still plenty of time in the day. And they make good use of it.

Our two can have a fully-fledged game with dolls involving subplots and dramas and continuity and callbacks — before breakfast. It feels like they have the kind of spare time that people in American TV shows seem to have before breakfast.

They have productivity in their games that would make them management gurus. Forget Lean Six Sigma. The new productivity philosophy is called Just Being Six.

It’s nice to watch what life is like if you don’t spend time worrying about trivial things like work and chores and that thing you said to another parent at the school gate or whether crime is on the up or fretting about that friend who has recently got into chemtrails. 

I watch them playing — while I’m emptying the dishwasher and browsing Instagram jealous at others’ success — and am in awe of their concentration.

The obsessions now of course include Taylor Swift. If it isn’t Spotify it’s Childify, a new app where a human child sings randoms snatches of Taylor Swift songs on repeat. “nananana BAD BLOOD nananana PROBLEMS”. They even know the song might be about Katy Perry.

I don’t know how long the Taylor Swift obsession will last but I suspect they may be singing her at a singsong at a colleague’s retirement do. Taylor is now the name of one of their dolls and she’s being a bit demanding at Doll Pool Party.

Also featuring is Stitch. I can’t be the only parent slightly blindsided by the reappearance of Stitch. I heard of Lilo and Stitch at some point in the past and then got on with my life, and this year Stitch has started appearing everywhere. 

It’s a good cartoon but if we’re not careful it will soon be our biggest contributor to the fast fashion and excess toy problem. At the rate they’re going I’ll have to get a Stitch tattoo as I am the only thing in the house that isn’t Stitchified.

Their obsessions are both a memory trigger and an inspiration. When I think about what I was obsessed with I remember that intensity. Around the time of World Cups and European Championships I was absolutely hung up on stats for my interactive homemade wallcharts. (Well they were interactive in the sense that I interacted with them. That was how interaction used to work back then.)

There was the summer of drawing Asterix characters and then Judge Dredd, the summer of making houses of cards, the summer of jigsaws, the odd year of collecting the goldy wrappers from Dairy Milks, the year I learned to cycle, when I’d practically cycle to the toilet.

I want to try and recapture that single-mindedness. To bury myself in a task. To every now and then lose track of time. Although I might have to set an alarm to remind me to achieve that goal. 

Speaking of which, time to check the goals per game average at Euro 2024. It’s way lower than Euro 2020. And I take that personally. That’s obsession for you.

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