Opening Lines

IT’S a measure of the success of the radio advertisement that I’m mentioning it at all. You know the one: “Dear 30-year old me.” The pensions ad. How much the man in the ad annoys me says more about my insecurities about the future and my beard than anything else.

Even so, I’m enjoying picturing him as an object of dislike. I see a sixty/seventy something-year-old sitting there in his chinos and Eccos, writing letters to the paper complaining that it’s a disgrace that the Irish language is not held in more esteem and it’s ÉIRE, not EIRE, how he has no objection to halting-sites in principle, it’s just that ‘Uppermiddleclassington Heights’ is a greenbelt area ...

He irks me and others because no one likes being judged by the elder generation.