Terry Prone: It’d be easier to get Beyoncé to call over to mine than get an electrician to come around
My computer and printer aren't talking to each other and, frankly, I'd have a better chance of getting queen Bey to drop in to perform a solo spot in my kitchen than I would of getting an electrician to call and sort everything out. Picture: Chris Pizzello/AP
Catherine Butler, once PA to Charles Haughey, once told me she always kept a small wheeled suitcase packed and ready with everything she should need were The Boss to be suddenly called overseas with her in an accompanying role. I am reminded of this as I re-pack freshly laundered clothes in the overnight bag which came in handy when I was hospitalised last week.
As you get older, “be prepared” includes the hospital eventuality. Objectively, filling the bag to cover such a possibility should be no sadder than fastening a car seat belt. But it is. Oh, Lord, it is.
Pat Kenny talks to me about me getting transient global amnesia live on his budget day programme, meaning that I apparently talked as much sense as ever I do, but have not the smallest recollection of the broadcast. It’s as if someone else conducted the interview with him. Fortunately, he seems to find the whole thing very funny.
A small version of the supply chain problem hit my home when the Imagine guys installed their broadband. The guy who installed it concentrated on how solid it was on the wall. He said he could swing out of it, and he was a big lad. When asked to plug in the extend-the-signal around the house kit that a friend had donated, however, we ran into problems.
Give him his due, he tried but said I had different electrical circuits. The signal comes in bursting to serve, but won’t cross the placenta into another room. For that, I have to get an electrician and getting Beyoncé to do a quick solo in my kitchen would be easier.
This leaves me slightly worse off in one respect: The printer, even though it’s in the same room as the Imagine signal, won’t speak to it because it had a good thing going with the weaker Eir signal.
My life is a bit like the old Flanders and Swann song where the gasman comes on Monday and wrecks the plumbing which is fixed by the plumber on Tuesday, although in the process, the plumber ruins the electrics. I so need a generalist. I need the Renaissance man/woman of joining things up and making sure everything works simultaneously.
Because I can’t print anything, Ellen has to do it and send my passenger locator form and boarding pass for tomorrow’s dawn departure to Lisbon to me by taxi.
The taxi takes longer than any taxi should. Where is he? I eventually ask. Outside, I am told. No, he isn’t, I say. Well, he was, and got no answer to the doorbell. He didn’t ring the doorbell, nothing wrong with the doorbell, I say. Well, anyway, he put it over the wall near the gate.
I have no wall near the gate. Hedge, yes. Wall, no. She rings him to get him back. Nah, he says, he’s gone too far, which suggests his car is a jet, since it’s less than 10 minutes since he flung the Tesco bag over some wall. I go up and down the road looking over neighbours’ walls (I find out later one of them was suspicious enough of me to take a picture) and eventually catch a glimpse over a wall of a house that’s closed.
It’s so decisively closed, the gate is actually chained. So this driver fruitlessly rang the bell of a closed house, then confidently turfed documentation over its wall, causing a woman fresh out of hospital to drag and climb a stepladder to invade private property...
I fly to Lisbon, arriving at Dublin Airport extra early because you have to take seriously your first visit to an airport in two years.
So far I have ignored the Nespresso pod machines installed in our offices when we did them up. If you like a tall cup of real coffee with cream or milk, they’re less than no use to you. You have to be a George Clooney type downing eggcupfuls of tar with muddy fuzz on top.
The Lisbon hotel room has one of those machines. I get it to work twice, having phoned down for something to whiten what it offers, but after that, it goes on strike and no matter what I do, dispenses only hot water. So desperate am I for caffeine that I open two of the capsules, empty them into a cup, pour hot water over them and strain the result into another cup through a clean sock.
I describe this later to a conference colleague who had his own woes with the machine in his room, and he says I’m very Bear Grylls.
Amazing how the lessons you learn return, covered in story, half a century later. The trigger today being Alec Baldwin’s unintended shooting dead of a cinematographer on his new movie, using a prop gun which wasn’t supposed to have a live bullet in it, or any simulacrum of such ammunition capable of doing anybody any harm.
Back in the day, Ray McAnally was tutor to the Abbey Theatre school of acting. He was taking us through safe swordplay. Most of us just wanted to cry “fore!” or whatever it is sword fighters shout before having at each other, although, now that I think of it, “fore!” might be an instruction to duck after a golfer has let loose with their driver.
Anyway, McAnally wasn’t having any swordplay until we recognised how dangerous it was. Some of the prop swords contracted into their handles to give the impression, when your character ran another character through, that you had lethally stabbed him.
Some you deployed by “stabbing” the air between the victim’s arm and torso, making sure they and you were sideways-on to the audience with the stabbing area upstage to help conceal the ploy from the audience. He showed us prop swords with a button on the sharp end, to ensure that even if one actor went a little off course, the other would be protected from serious injury.
All the young lads in the student group were by now going “yeah, yeah, we get it”, with their long legs jiggling with the adrenalin rush of the potential sword fight.
McAnally casually talked of having starred in what we, as new insiders, self-consciously called “The Scottish Play” because naming Macbeth would cause disaster, it having a voodoo threat attached. We were half-listening to his account of how — in this production — the actor with the big sword missed his mark because of having drink taken, stabbing the other actor through the ribs, which killed the other actor, the protective button having, unnoticed, come off the sword.
The lesson drummed into all of us was: “Props masters are great. Don’t ever rely on them. If you have to use something dangerous onstage, check it out yourself in advance, and if it’s a gun, when you’re checking it out, don’t point it at someone.”
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