Too busy burning the Taoiseach to worry about riots or mini-budgets

IT’S the mini-budget that’s the focus of my friend’s worry.

You’ll remember, Finance Minister Michael Noonan floated the idea of a mini-budget as likely to happen in the next few weeks.

My friend was quite benign about the prospect. It was, after all, a jobs budget, she pointed out.

I hummed and hawed enough to sound knowledgeable (which I’m not) and low- level worried (which I am). “What did I mean?” she demanded.

I suggested that the minister needed money to at least keep paying the interest on all he’s had to borrow to keep water coming out of our taps and electricity coming on when we hit the light switches, it being my understanding that if we didn’t have European money, all that handy stuff would stop happening. That said, I suspect my local authority of economising on me already. The dribble of water going into my glass kettle is milky to start with and after three days, the kettle has a thick floor of off-white sediment which worries me about what may be happening to our insides.

My friend cut straight to the point. Did that mean higher income tax or more levies? Because if it did, I should tell Michael Noonan that she wasn’t having any. She and her family had been pushed as far as they could go and he needn’t think he could push her any further.

I mildly pointed out that I didn’t have a relationship with the Minister for Finance that would allow me to ring him up with messages like that, and that I wasn’t sure he had the time to read this column, although of course, I live in hope.

“I’m going to riot,” she announced. “In the streets.”

At one level, that sounded sensible enough. Not much point rioting in your sitting room. The tidying up afterwards would be annoying, not many people would know you’d done it, and the family might be irritated by it. She had picked the right location for a good personal riot, although, since she’s taken her twins out of the creche because she can no longer afford it, she would have to riot while pushing a double buggy. I know the gardaí have all sorts of worst scenario plans for social protest, but has this possibility crossed their minds?

People respond in wildly different ways to the economic tragedy through which we’re living. I’m fascinated by the Oblivians, who still buy their lunches in posh emporia awash in sun-dried tomatoes and pesto. One of them told me recently that she had cut back on facials and got very disapproving when I admitted I hadn’t cut back on facials. That’s because I’ve never had a facial in my life and I’ll thank you not to look at the photograph alongside this column and mutter that my facial deficit is obvious.

I suspect most people fall into the Worrier category. Worriers weigh up defaulting on the VHI against defaulting on the mortgage. They take their rings and bracelets to the jeweller to be valued, which is never a good experience, because you find out that what you thought was solid gold is only plated, and the boyfriend who gave it to you decades before is long gone and too far away to berate for being the cheapskate he was, in addition to all the other florid flaws of which he was possessed. All you can do is hope he’s bald and fat and poorer than you are, knowing only the first is likely to be true. Worriers lie awake in the middle of the night, selecting between horrible possibilities they never thought could happen to them.

If they’re lucky, their partners in life are chronic Realistic Optimists. One Worrier told me recently that his wife impatiently pointed out to him that being 76, which both of them are, had the single advantage that they were likely to snuff it before facing the real possibility of sleeping under a bridge. He was not consoled by this buoyant realism.

My own response, unsought, unplanned, is to turn into a version of my father. Now, my father was a man so private that he’d kill me for mentioning him in public if he wasn’t already dead, and — since he died several years back — may kill me by haunting, if that still happens. My father had come through poverty which left him with a whole series of conversational devices which were constantly aimed at my sister and me. Mostly me.

“Were you born in a barn?” was one of the earliest I remember.

Now, asking a suburban seven-year-old a question like that is kind of fruitless. I had no idea what a barn was and had to have the significance explained to me by my sister, who wasn’t that au fait with barns either, but had been around my father long enough to know he meant close the door and stop letting the heat escape.

My grandfather was even more direct. He used his pet instruction so often that his budgie Ronnie (named after Ronnie Delaney because the budgie had a great turn of speed lashing up and down its perch) would regularly instruct all and sundry to “close the bloody door”. Everything to do with heat-creation and retention presented Dad with an opportunity to save money.

He made what looked like paper decorations out of carefully inter-folded strips of newspaper, rather than invest in firelighters. At the end of the night, he would blanket the fire in something called “slack”, which would keep it dormant overnight so that a good poke would revive in the morning.

MY PARALLEL heating economy is to make papier mache briquettes out of well-soaked newspapers. Last night, loading one of them into the stove, I noticed that Enda Kenny’s smiling face was on the top.

You know how they say Michelle Obama committed a protocol offence by putting her arm around Queen Elizabeth? I may be guilty of the equivalent nearer home. I have set fire to the Taoiseach. I considered preserving him, but decided he wouldn’t take it personally if I lit his tie and warmed my hands at him while he burned. Although it was a very classy tie.

Next thing I’ve decided to do is revive my father’s hay box. He used to cook casseroles in a hay box, getting my mother to bring the food to a rolling boil in the morning, then inserting it inside a wooden box stuffed with hay (which he presumably got from the barn my sister and I weren’t born in) and leaving it tightly sealed for the rest of the day, so that it did a primeval slow-cooker job.

I’m told the modern equivalent is one of those insulated picnic carriers stuffed with tiny Styrofoam balls, and any time now, I’m going to produce the most delicious casserole that way and force-feed it to the man in my life with enthusiastic claims about all the electricity I’ve saved.

You can see why I won’t be joining the twins’ mother on her riot. I’m going to be far too busy being my father.