Throwing in the (tea) towel

A small tingle of pride ran across my neck when I heard the news.

The world is watching and it thinks we’re sound.

Forbes magazine may not have meant much to us before Dec 4. Originally founded in the 1920s, it once had the slogan “Forbes — Devoted to Doers and Doings”. It was the magazine that famously said that our President Michael D Higgins was “a poet and an acknowledged homosexual”.

How could they have made such a blunder? Maybe the author was talking to someone who told him that Michael D was “a fierce gaelgoir” and misheard it.

We’ve forgiven them for that mistake because now Forbes thinks Ireland is the best place in the world to do business.

There’s a part of me loves that idea. There’s something exciting about the phrase to “do business”.

It’s vibrant and action-packed. If it was in a movie, Ireland would be a montage of handshakes, forklifts, containers being winched into place at the port, ships with “THE KOWLOON HORSEBOX” written on the side, a man shouting down the phone: “I DON’T CARE IF IT’S HIS DAUGHTER’S COMMUNION. MAKE IT HAPPEN”.

Recently, in my own head, I’m a magnate; an Irish Mammies tea-towel magnate admittedly, but a magnate nonetheless. There’s lots of driving to industrial estates, loading up the car and dockets.

Not receipts — Dockets. We should go back to dockets. Receipts are so insignificant looking. A docket is a statement of trust. Docket was one of the first words I learned. I can remember when I was small going over with my father to Coachford Creamery to get fertiliser or Golden Maverick or Layer’s Mash (food for hens, not some sort of American fratboy induction ritual). A docket would be handed to a stooped little man with a cap. And he would dump the bags into the trailer effortlessly — a sort of mid-Cork Sherpa.

My wife and I pack the tea-towels at the kitchen table. We’re up late and there’s even a weighing scales to measure the postage. It’s like the drug-packing scene in Love/Hate, except with tea-towels. We could do another montage. Against a thumping soundtrack of The Velvet Underground, we’re just packing the ‘gear’, not speaking, lashing back the tea, maybe a biscuit, down to the post office, a dotted line on a map showing the tea-towels going to Perth, Australia. With all these cardboard boxes and stamps, I feel like a real doer. Forbes would love me. But you can get carried away with business-worship. Is the accolade automatically a good thing? Is being the best place in the world to do business a bit like being the best place in the world to log hardwoods? For a while, we were the best country in the world to get planning permission to build a mews on a flood plain. Maybe the most important thing is to be the best country in the world to be a human.

Now I really have to get back to business. A teatowel shipment is delayed in Equatorial Guinea and I NEED TO KNOW THE REASON WHY.