Angeldubba

  Work can be a distraction from our private woes or worries. Going to the office – if you are back in the office now – can be a relief even if drudgery awaits, because it is a different setting, where you perhaps play a different role than you do on the home front. Granted, there are other anxieties here, especially if you feel the job is getting beyond you, the boss has unrealistic expectations, or you are not being promoted as fast as you deserve. But the kitchen-table concerns at least are left behind. This is one of the reasons why this fad for “bringing your whole self to work” is a bad idea. Leave the baggage at home, the cracked plates in the kitchen. I didn’t know about “bringing my whole self to work” but a piece by Douglas Murray  in the Spectator magazine  enlightened, as well as mystified, me. So this is a thing – has your organisation embraced it? There is a  2018 book  by US author Mike Robbins which spells out the idea. You should not try to supp...

  We’re very careful in our organisations these days. Due diligence and corporate governance, policies for correct behaviour in this and that, qualifications scrutinised, codes of conduct, background checks. And yet … Over in that London the talk is all of sleaze and how the current government is trying to escape scrutiny, and, basically  do what it likes to the benefit of those it likes . In Bulgaria and Romania vaccination numbers are critically low because, basically, the population doesn’t trust governments with a history of corruption. These are only a few examples.   Here in Ireland, the land of saints and scholars, we never have these problems! Although a  decade of tribunals into planning backhanders, dodgy meat sales, contaminated blood and other issues might persuade you differently.   Certainly Dublin is in the ha’penny place compared to London. It’s common knowledge that lucrative contracts for services associated with the fight against Covid went to...

I’ve been saying this for years – but you probably won’t yawn in recognition, as I’m under the radar, and don’t put every thought or wish on an internet platform.  But isn’t this the solution? What is needed is a government with the cojones to read the riot act to Mark Zuckerberg, and an appetite for shutting down a multi-billion dollar monster with literally billions of friends. Does such a government exist? Is it the US? China would no doubt be delighted, given its track record  in suppressing internet sites . But licensing is a different matter. Licensing is a way of making sure that industries which have most intense effect on people’s lives are acting at least partly in the interests of the customers. An example in architecture would be that fire safety is part of the considerations of the building design. In the US, home of Facebook, licensed industries include architecture, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals. A quick look at that short list indicates the...

Nothing! Except you have to be dreaming, or living in Utopia, and Ryanair ain’t flying there yet. But this is the cheery British prime minister’s upbeat prediction for his country in the future. Boris Johnson really wants us all to think of him as the new Winston Churchill. Or rather, he wants the jolly old Brits who cherish Rule Britannia and that mostly-pink map of the world to think of him as WC reincarnated. These are the people who gave him his 80-seat majority in the British lower house of Parliament. Possibly the attack on Ivor Roberts-Jones’s wonderful statue of Winnie opposite the House of Commons in London, which happenedin June 2020, might have given him a brief pause, but only the briefest. Does Johnson’s attention focus on anything for more than goldfish-memory time, apart from the great endeavour of Making Boris Great Again, and Again, and Again … ? Waspish it sounds and waspish it is, after suffering through the insult which was BoJo’s comedy routine at the Conservative ...

  How’s re-entry going, in your work and life? I spoke to a young woman in the beauty     business at the weekend. She was off work for five months, due to Covid, and the other five people who share her house (!) all worked in hospitality (!!) and somehow survived Ireland’s stringent lockdown. That’s all but a memory now, unless your business was ruined by it, which I fervently hope is not the case. Travel is becoming a reality again. It seems half of Ireland has flown to Portugal in the past few weeks, and I hear of people planning to revive their Christmas shopping jaunt to New York (why? All that way for stuff that is either wildly expensive or junk.) Australia announced that its borders are reopening , so all the Aussies stuck in other parts of the world for the past 18 months can finally go home, and those trapped in the homeland can get back to their actual places of residence. Being something of an Eeyore, I’d expected that air fares would be astronomical once flyi...

Anna Kenny called it. She was always on the ball. A young sub-editor training on new technology in the basement of the old Irish Times building in Dublin, she said to those with her in the room, “Someone’s flown in to the Twin Towers in New York.” What? There were about 10 of us, led by me, getting familiar with the new direct-publishing technology that the flagship Irish broadsheet was adopting, learning new tricks. It was a Tuesday afternoon in September, a mild day. When Anna commented, it took a while to compute. What was that about? I said, “Do you mean, like that guy Mathias Rust in Moscow?” Rust was the German teenager who, as a late Cold War stunt, had flown a single-engine Cessna into  Red Square in 1987. It was strange, and we were busy, so I turned back to what we were doing, puzzling over the future. But then Anna, legitimately reading news sites to use stories in our exercises, said: “There’s another one.” And we saw the first images. It’s a strange feeling, your ...

Pattern-making and coincidence-spotting are two harmless, enjoyable and meaningless parts of life, work or play. Or are they meaningless? While not possessed of meaning themselves, they can give meaning to our practices.  Lucky numbers, for example: our family number is 22, and every time I raise my eyes to look at a sporting match on television, the first player I ever notice is the one in jersey 22. Is this some mysterious force at work, or just my brain is primed for the lucky digits? My daughter chose as her wedding date October 10 last year – 10-10-20. Two numbers become one, with a nod  to the Spice Girls . (Setting aside a pandemic and a wedding that nearly fitted in a phone box, it was indeed a lucky and meaningful day.) Our brains are wired to spot patterns. Perhaps this is why we attribute some higher or greater meaning when small events in everyday life seem to have rhythm or completeness.   There is something about regularity, about patterns, symmetry or recur...