The Soapy Vulva Monologue

Prologue

The light in the copse was dappled as the early spring sun shone bright and hard through the leaves of the thick-trunked oaks of the wood. Its rays flashed on the pale skin of my penis as I pummelled it with my manly fist; ah, my penis, like the sunlight, bright and hard, like the mighty oaks, thick-trunked and, uh, wood.

Ah, penis! Penis, penis, penis! That correct, scientific word. How wonderful it felt in my mouth!

Open and propped against a protuberant root were the last unstuck pages of an aging Gentleman’s Relish and there a French maid presented her fine hindquarters to my gaze as though she wished her vulva to be soaped, or indeed, the secret place between her buttocks.

I was seventeen and knew that soon the horizons of my erotic world would expand beyond those increasingly cracked and brittle pages. I had explored and accomplished all the arts of Onan. But now I was becoming a man. The sap was rising in me even as it rose at the march of spring through the stems and stalks of the green willow, nearby banks of which were often in my contemplation.

Yes, I was becoming a man. Had I not the bar of soap that would stand proof of my earnest to she, the lady o’er whose breasts and in whose bathwater I should have the great quickening of my coming of age?

Yes, I had it. I had that bar of soap. I had, yes!

George Lee, Wunderkind Unleashed

The one-time RTÉ economics editor and now-FG candidate for the By-election in Dublin South has unleashed his grand plan for getting the country out of a depression. Conor McCabe over at Dublin Opinion:

Apparently, housing construction is being held back by big government and its VAT rates, and not by the fundamental crisis in the Irish and international banking systems. not only that, more housing is what we need to get us back on the straight and narrow. And mortgages. fucking lots of them. Happy days again.

As if on cue, we've also now got EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevey begging us not to eat the rich:

"But it is essential that we remain focused on the dynamic and human nature that drives risk-taking, economic activity and tax revenues forward and that we guard against policies and tax-rates that drive risk-taking, economic activity and tax revenues backwards.

"Put simply, it's not higher tax rates that generate higher tax revenues, it is higher economic activity that generates them. We can sink or swim, but if we lose sight of these simple facts, we will certainly sink," he said.

Damned right. If not for our altruistic rich class who continue to selflessly pump money into the Irish economy, where would we be?

Google Juice

Cruiskeen Eile's Myerswatch (watching Kevin Myers since 2006) is the Number 1 result on Google when the term "mad irish bastard" is entered into a fresh, virginal search field.

It's the little things that give the greatest joy.

69

69 is not a reference to a position of mutual affection adopted in the course of his priapic peregrinations by the youthful Sir Myers na gCopaleen, but to a test proposed by that theorist of media ecology Marshall McLuhan for persons humming and hawing over the purchase of a new book.

Professor McLuhan may be familiar to readers from Annie Hall in which Woody Allen magic-realistically pulls him out of a hat as the ultimate slapdown for the cinema-queue loudmouth who pontificates on the great man's work.

The key word here is indulgent.



According to an extract from John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel published in The Guardian recently, McLuhan's test applies Occam's razor to breathless blurbs, prominent product placements, 3 for 2 deals, bestseller lists and "quote whores" and requires us, simply, to turn to page 69 of whatever book it is we're browsing in the book shop. If you like what you read there, buy the book.

Apparently, a better test has never satisfactorily been devised, and having applied it to a number of books about the old homestead, I confirm its efficacy. Whatever the strange alchemy at work, page 69 seems to be usefully representative of the text as a whole, to embody the general tone and style and, curiously, to be a point at which some initial waymark of the plot is passed or epiphany occurs.

So here's page 69 of Watching the Door for those readers agonising over whether to submit themselves to Shagger's tender mercies.

SIX

BY LATE MARCH 1972 the British government had grown tired of the grotesque effrontery of the Northern Ireland government at Stormont directing policy (and the British army) in the Province, and abolished it. Unionists were perplexed, astounded, indignant: they had grown used to this absurd dependency status, wherein for fifty years they had been given capital grants by the British government, and had even been lent the British army, but nonetheless expected the British to have little or no say in the conduct of policy. What had once been a favour had over time become a right, and you do not easily remove a perceived right from a Calvanistic Covenanter - well not without using large earth-moving machinery, and much blood, sweat and tears.

The night that Stormont was suspended, I walked up that heartland of Protestant sensitivity, the Shankill Road, to test the mood. I had expected maddened crowds, as there usually were when loyalist power had gone down another notch, but this night there weren't. Instead groups of men stood at street corners, glaring angrily. Had any of them discovered a reporter from Dublin wandering all alone, I would probably have been torn limb from limb as a spy.

I walked into the Eagle chip shop, which was beneath the headquarters of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the illegal paramilitary organization whose existence was now effectively tolerated in an utterly one-sided security policy. The Eagle, justifiably, was believed to be one of the best chip shops in Belfast.

In my strange accent I chatted away about how quiet the road was, before sauntering past the groups of leather-jacketed young men simmering with ire, back to my car, parked in a side street at the botom of the Shankill Road. I was, deliberately, testing my nerve: that is, going just a little mad.

As Withnail might say, look at the size of his head, imagine the size of the fucker's balls!

Readers who feel the above seems unusually politically correct for the Colonel should note that the next paragraphs feature a noble and anguished intervention by a British soldier of the officer persuasion. Interestingly, I could swear I've read another anecdote by Sir Myers some time back which features a very similar officer uttering the same irate words but in a very different context. A cynic might believe the character is a mere cypher and something of a moveable feast, a crack trooper whom the Colonel can deploy at a moment's notice to some corner of a foreign argument.

Cruiskeen Eile, however, is very, very far from a cynical publication.

Phwoarr. How to Report on the Troubles While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink

Well, well. It appears that fusty old Colonel Myers - he of the prissy Edwardian prose and antique patrician values - rocked out with his cock out for much of the 1970s. Looking like a cross between Jim McCann on a stint with the Dubliners and a six foot public school beef injection, Kevin "Shagger" Myers was able to play fast and loose with the ladies right across the sectarian divide. And they loved it.

Hard-man republicans annoyed by Kevin's attempts over the last two decades to get up their noses would do well to reflect that at least he's discontinued his '70s hobby of getting up their women.

For it transpires that the Colonel spent much of the decade in the nip, "nakedly" sequestered under the beds or behind the wardrobes of a lush cast of classic '70s dolly birds straight out of an episode of Minder. Night after night, Caoimghín came and went through their windows and down their drainpipes, like a cheeky Irish version of Robin "Confessions of a Window Cleaner" Askwith, at the heart-stopping sound of burly paramilitary husbands slotting unexpected keys into front doors and dum-dum rounds into Webleys.

"Reporting the Troubles", this weekend's Sunday Times breathlessly explains, "was a deadly game laced with as much casual - and sometimes dangerous - sex as any red-blooded journalist could handle, according to Kevin [McDonald Fraser] Myers in his new book, Watching the Door". And with one eye on the door and the other on the magnificent, quivering breasts of the married conquests straddling his war-weary bones, Shagger engaged in a Rake's Progress of "such galant cross-community endeavours [that] peace was surely at hand". Nobly indifferent to the hot-house sectarian atmosphere of the time, the Sexy Pimpernel's palid arse was as likely to be seen lamping into the night down the Falls as the Shankill having emerged from a bit of the old flagrante with a Taig or Prod.

In fact, it seems Shagger Myers was the one thing on which community defenders on both sides agreed. Wherever the Colonel found himself sinking a restorative post-coital libation, be it seedy nationalist pub or squalid loyalist drinking den, the patrons had one thing in mind. To nut the bastard before he reduced the entire province to a vast montessori of mop-headed mini Myerses.

“They’re going to nut you,” he whispered. “The guns have just arrived. Do as I say or you’re dead. Slip out of the side door there. Get behind my car. Do not move until I come out. Now GO!” Instantly sober, my fly still open, I turned and walked out of the side door on to the street, where I hid on the far side of Bob’s taxi, gazing through its windows at the pub door. The two young men ran out with revolvers in their hands. They scouted immediately around them, but, just feet away, still missed me.

Later, in a confessionally distinct part of town:

...I visited another city centre pub with a few friends. The IRA leader known as the Fruitcake was there with a woman known as the Black Widow because of the power she had derived from her marriage to a now-dead IRA leader.

I was enjoying myself when a stranger came over and whispered that the Black Widow and the Fruitcake were arranging to give me a hammering, and that I should get out. I didn’t ask why. This was Belfast. That was why. Flanked by my friends, I got to the door before my would-be ambushers were aware of my escape. They ran after me, with the Black Widow in their wake, screeching “Kill him!”.

Fortunately, they didn't succeed and the Colonel lived to shag another day.

While I think we can discount this particular gent as Kevin's 1970s loin fruit, does anyone know what Hugh Green looks like?

Please Define Your Terms

While CE has been rather lax in its duties of late, exams are out of the way and it may well be that some of us might now find the time occasionally to pop into the local library or house of public resort to have a read of the Colonel's diurnal emesis over a quiet pint of Uncle Arthur's opaque and bitter nectar. However, disappointed readers of myerswatch should be cheered to find that someone was on the job. Over at talideon.com the Cruiskeen crew will find a rather excellent "fisking" of a typically deep and coherent consideration of the topical issue of same-sex unions by the bould Kevin.

Keith of talideon picks up on some of the themes which have been explored here, not least the Colonel's bizarre, near fascist attacks on the notion of "law" and his unfair, unprincipled attacks on those advocates who refuse to compromise on their common law, ethical and moral duty to advance arguments and evidence to protect and assert their clients' interests. I was personally gratified to read Keith's acute observations re the Colonel's use of the word "decent". It rather reminds CE of certain philistine young bloggers who don't read, don't watch interesting films in case, just in case, it might be a waste of time and whose musical "ear" extends across a very narrow range of compositions and who, yet, likes to bandy around words like "degenerate" - vile, dehumanising, intolerant and degrading language - to describe the cultural and intellectual lives of other human beings.

Kevin Myers adopts a totally wierd and inconsistent line on the law. While on the one hand he asserts a macho vision of robust individualism characterised by ex-rugby playing billionaires with virile bouffant haircuts - when it suits - he nevertheless suggests that lawyers should represent their clients and judges interpret the law in accordance with outcomes which take account not of freedom, liberty, fairness and the complex balance to be achieved between public and private interests, but rather in a way which ensures that nobody does anything that his Kevness might find distasteful or upsetting or which gives him to perceive that they have got away with something, the bastards. The only mild point of disagreement CE has with Keith is his assertion that judges are answerable to the people. While that is correct as a matter of constitutional aspiration, the practical means of disciplining members of the Judiciary are unsatisfactory, to say the least, and, in essence, non-existent for anything less than being caught with images of pederastic abuse on your home computer.

Following yesterday's furore at an event in the Royal College of Physicians, superbly live-blogged by Suzy of Maman Poulet (a stout-hearted supporter of the myerswatch team whose blog archives are a good source of comment on the very issue of same-sex unions) the blogosphere has some interesting posts and comments at, if memory serves, such diverse forums as the aforementioned Maman Poulet, Mulley dot net, Back Seat Drivers, Reality Check dot ie and Freestater.

As Keith points out in his post, the slippery Kevin refuses at any point to actually define what it is he means by "marriage". Of course, if he did, the cracks in his logic would begin to show. Of course, again, Kevin's position is a matter not of logic but of reaction. I have a lot more respect for people like Boris Johnson whose approach to this issue might best be summed up as "Look, I'm instinctively against this notion that marriage doesn't necessarily refer to nuptials twixt man and woman, but I can't justify it rationally or by reference to the other principles I have articulated and as such I have to really examine my position." I think it behoves us to consider that our reactions to the idea of gay marriage are probably a matter of chemistry and as such, should be scrutinised on that rather than, initially, on "moral" grounds.

Homosexuality as with any other orientation is a product of both nature and nurture; nurture in so far as one's environment has an impact on the development of the brain in childhood and adolescence. As such it's entirely a matter of biology and in no respect a lifestyle choice. Of course, there are degrees of sexual identity along the whole awesome spectrum and I am sure it is open to some people to choose the sexual life they will wish to lead on the basis of inclination and a personal even societal determination of what would be a good and happy life for them. That's really beside the point.

We are a reproductive species, machines for the replication of our genes, and as such our sexuality is at the very heart of our identity. But we are each and every one of us mutant beings, which is why we aren't clones of our parents or, simpliciter, the first ameobic lifeforms. And given the complex interplay of our mutant cells and the reproductive and environmental processes to which each and every one of us is subject it is approaching the miraculous that there are any ordinarily heterosexually adjusted people around at all.

If Kevin Myers has been lucky enough to develop a sexual identity against all the odds of his mutant genes, and the impact of the things he saw as a little boy on his brain architecture, which co-incides with the straitened Edwardian standards that confuse reproductive efficiency with social order, he should count his blessings. Life is hard enough for people, especially those whom the exigencies of evolution have determined will have as the most fundamental aspect of their identity as human beings a sexual orientation which, on the face of it, is confounding of reproductive effects. The compulsions are the same for all of us, it's in the consequences that difference lies. And the reactionary likes of Mr. Myers have an incredible cheek not to mention little of the milk of human kindness in expecting people to resist billions of years of cosmic and evolutionary forces during their brutish, short four score years and ten (CE is very lifespan optimistic) when he and his ilk can't even be bothered to define their terms and explain a) what is "marriage" and b) by what logic is that definition immutable and binding on everyone else?

Anyway, go read Keith on Myers, dear, loyal readers. CE is sure you are hanging out for news of the Colonel's doings. CE is only sorry that Keith's post didn't appear here.

And when you're done, why not have a read of this.

Tally Ho

The jaded blogger hacks here at Cruiskeen Eile rejoice in seeing that the Colonel's transfer from the D'Olier Guards to the Talbot Fusileers (© The Phoenix) has resulted in his popping up on hitherto unvisited front lines in the Glorious Conservative Counter-Revolution - namely, everyone's favourite pre-scripted panel discussion, RTÉ's Questions and Answers.

(Is Myers indeed going to take the fight to the enemy (i.e. the great unwashed Irish public?). Time will tell, though undoubtedly fellow scribe 'Copernicus' is sharpening his pencil in anticipation as we speak and will return with a vengeance once exams permit...)

Noted longtime Myers fanboi Richard Waghorne, meanwhile, is left bemoaning Kevin's deft handling by pinko socialist union riff-raff - and what's (undoubtedly) worse for the Colonel's manly aura - a woman. Cheer up, Dickie! It could be worse - it could be Senator David Norris doing the deed.

Finally, though we recognise that it is a tad ungentlemanly to speculate on the nature of a fellow officer's relationship with a lady, we cannot but wonder if the Colonel and Madam Editor have yet worked a time-share arrangement for custody of the, ah, airwaves at RTÉ. We can't see Ms. Kennedy too long forsaking her favourite public platform, and confidentiality agreements may not stand up too well once the protagonists are trapped in close proximity...