Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

For a while there, it seemed there had been a backlash against the so-called ‘metrosexual’ culture. A breed of raw action man — epitomised by the lean, mean and detached style that Daniel Craig brought to the James Bond role last year — appeared to be metaphorically raiding the metrosexual’s bathroom cabinet and throwing out all those wimpy male moisturisors, exfoliators and face packs.

Yes, the grunts and knuckledraggers tried to convince us that the ‘retrosexual’ was now the dominant male archetype in popular culture, and we had better all start getting used to it. Or not. Feel however the bloody hell you like — retrosexuals don’t care about girly-man things like feelings.

But this week, it seems the metrosexuals have claimed back lost ground — if not evolved into something else entirely, something bigger, stronger and more metro than ever before.

That was the news that a quarter of Irish males aged between 18-25 own a GHD hair straightener. The very idea that any man would use such a taboo beauty appliance to tame their unruly mops was just too much for the retros to handle. As news of the survey broke, there was surely a collective shudder felt throughout the land as these last bastions of pure manhood punched a wall or a nearby well-groomed metro in sheer frustration, horror and disbelief.

Of course, the automatic accusation/taunt that was flung around was that men who used a GHD were “gay”. What would the retros do without that default, catch-all insult, eh? But I would be very interested if researchers somewhere delved a little deeper and found out what type of men have GHDs. Is there one lurking in the changing rooms of, gasp, a GAA club? Does that burly builder working on that site opposite your office have one stashed in his bag in case he gets caught in a shower while working and the rain plays havoc with his carefully maintained curls? Does the Taoiseach’s hefty make-up bill include a miracle hair straightener?

The GHD, it seems, has the same stigma today that moisturisor or male waxing kits had back pre-Beckham. But seriously, what’s so shocking about men using a hot tongs to straighten their hair? It’s not exactly as if these guys are wearing glittering nail polish or stilettos with their suits, now is it? To you ‘tuft’ guy retros, I ask: how can we help you get over this post-traumatic ‘tress’ disorder?

Morning radio is supposed to light, perky, and should have some content that has potential to inspire in you some kind of good will towards mankind. Otherwise, how on earth could you get up out of bed on a freezing, wet November morning and face the world? Morning radio is not meant to make you feel bad about yourselves and others, as happened to me last week.

There I was, minding my own groggy business, sleepily tucking into my porridge, when this woman popped up on a morning radio show and pronounced that she had all of her Christmas shopping done since the end of October. All that was left for her to do now was enjoy the festive season’s abundant opportunities to be jolly.

Thankfully, the presenter was in tune with my thinking and told her, ‘You seem nice, but I hate you’. I can’t even begin to fathom the organisational skills and commitment it would take to be that prepared for Christmas – or ‘Chrismoween’ as it’s now apparently known ever since our capitalist overlords decided to merge the world’s biggest pagan festival and the most important date in all of Christianity into one convenient, if hard-to-dress-for, holiday season.

I’m not a fan of shopping at the best of times. Don’t get me wrong: I love having, you know, clothes and stuff, but whenever it comes to actually having to venture into town to buy them, I revert to my default state as a whimpering four-year-old, tugging on my mother’s sleeve, wailing that I want to go home as she drags me into yet another shoe shop.

Now that I can no longer rely on my mother to buy all my clothes – and if anyone old enough to read this is still in that position, put the paper down, and slowly back away- I try to make my own shopping excursions quick and painless. Well, as painless as something that’s so easily hindered by the random and infuriating behaviour of the general public can be.

My plan always is: get in early, wear clothes that are easy to change in and out of, have your Laser card and/or all ATM needs sorted out first, and get the heck out before the hordes of merciless consumers arrive en masse like an invasion of zombies from a George A. Romero horror. And whatever you do, for the love of all that’s holy-pagan, don’t attempt to shop at weekends.

But in the two-to-four months that constitute the Chrismoween period, all those rules disappear faster that a pot of mulled wine and your dignity at the office party. Every day is like a weekend in terms of trying to navigate shopping centres. There’s no such thing as ‘early’ because everyone else now plays by that game too. ATMs have queues long enough to rival a run on a Northern Rock branch no matter what time of the day it is. The list of festive mood-sapping shopping hurdles just snowballs.

So what’s one to do? Internet shopping seems like the best option, but you better get clicking now. Also the problem with that plan is that you really have to know what you’re buying for the person beforehand. Otherwise, you’ll end up doing the cyber equivalent of running around Dundrum frantically trying to find the right PJs and Brut toiletry set for your dad.

As for me, I think I have no choice but to resurrect my adoringly charming, if not very well-received, gag from my impoverished student days when I cheekily gave people imaginary “boxes of love” as gifts. Or maybe I’ll give them “my time” or send them “best wishes”. Anything but brave the crowds and go shopping. I don’t wanna Mammy, I wanna go home!

The book is called The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, written by the former editor-in-chief of French Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby. In December 1995, Bauby suffered a debilitating stroke that left him utterly paralysed with a condition known as ‘locked-in’ syndrome. The only movement he could make was with his left eyelid, and through a laborious system of blinks, he dictated this remarkable, profoundly moving account of his life as a ‘locked-in’ patient. Bauby describes the condition as like having your body trapped and held down under a giant diving-bell, while at the same time your mind retains the ability to flutter like a butterfly.

The words ‘life-affirming’ and ‘inspiring’ cannot even begin to describe the effect this book has on the reader. Through his insightful, often funny, often unbearably sad prose, Bauby (who died in 1997) will be able to make you fall on your knees in weeping, grovelling gratitude for being able to even fall on your knees, or even swallow your own spit. Without any self-pity, or preachy, Tuesdays with Morrie-esque sentimentality, Bauby will forcefully remind you just how so very, very blessed you are to be able to go about the routine things in your life, for good and for bad.

The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly will – should – encourage you to live the life you want, to take chances, to not take anything for granted, and to not miss out on any of life’s opportunities, no matter how massive or how insignificant you might think them to be. Reflecting on his lost chances by reference to a racing bet he never placed on a sure thing, Bauby says that, from his current vantage point, life looks like “a race whose result we know beforehand, but in which we fail to bet on the winner”.

The book had been made into a movie directed by Julian Schnabel, which will be released next year, and which understandably has attracted attention as an Oscar darkhorse. Please, please read this book. It literally shook me to my core with its message that your entire life could be gone in the blink of an eye.

Movie critics are prone to say, “If you only see one movie this year, make it this”. However, rarely has that term been more appropriate than in the case of Charles Ferguson’s self-financed documentary, No End In Sight, a brilliantly edited, calm and lucid, but utterly devastating examination of how the Bush Administration mishandled the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

You know most of the reasons for the chaos in that country, and No End doesn’t present you with any new facts. But the concise and precise manner in which this documentary chronicles one catastrophic decision after another from an unfathomably incompetent, arrogant, intransigent and just plain idiotic US Administration, and the way it is so clearly and incontrovertibly argued, makes the film literally jaw-dropping to behold.

No End is compiled from interviews with military experts who were there on the ground, all of whose concerns and advice were largely ignored by the Bush Administration before, during and after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Their insightful contributions are intercut with footage of press conferences held by former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was in effect running the operation. I didn’t think it possible, but you come away from No End with an even lower opinion of Rumsfeld than you had before. On foot of the arguments here, history is sure to regard him as arguably the worst Secretary of anything in all the history of the United States. But then again, there are a lot of figures in the Bush Administration jostling for ‘Worst Ever’ positions, including the president himself.

All you can do is watch in disbelief and increasing anger as the damning evidence mounts: how there was zero post-war planning; how the Department of Defence ignored all advice from military experts with combat experience (unlike the cretinous quartet who planned the war, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz); the Administration’s reliance on, and indeed pursuit of, dodgy and plain false intelligence to bolster their case for war; the failure to halt the looting in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam; the disastrous policy of De-Baathification that left most of the country’s public sector unemployed and disenfranchised for life; the failure to guard ammunitions dumps; and, most calamitously, the decision by the Coalition Provisional Authority (who had never even visited Iraq at that point) to disband the Iraqi military not only without consulting those people trying to contain the chaos on the ground, but without even informing the State Department or even Bush himself. As the documentary spells out, this move put 500,000 soldiers on the streets, unemployed, impoverished and furious, fuelling an insurgency that they could have helped to prevent.

No End in Sight is shattering stuff, that in its profoundly depressing but essential examination of just how insanely rotten the last eight years of American “leadership” have been, predicts an even more dispiriting future for the US, the Middle East and the world, regardless of who takes over the White House in January 2009. This is almost unbearably sad to watch, but No End in Sight could legitimately lay claim to the title of film of the year – if not the decade.

I have been living without TV for the past three months. Seriously, it’s been a whole 90 days and counting. Well, kind of. I should explain. I moved apartment recently, in the course of which I splashed out on a glorious 37 inch LCD screen that came highly recommended from that increasingly popular website, moremoneythansense.com.

But when it came to getting a TV cable package, the wheels came off the wagon. After a series of infuriating and blood-vessel popping encounters with a certain cable company who shall remain nameless (let’s just say they are Not Too Laudable), my housemate and I decided to see how long we could go without any channels.

As it happens, this isn’t the first time I’ve undergone such an experiment. While in college, a friend and I moved into a place with four others. None of us had a TV set, and what with us being scroungy, broke students, none of us bothered our fundaments getting one either.
On that occasion my friend and I lasted two months, and only finally cracked after we found ourselves not only doing the crossword in a daily broadsheet, but actually taking the more complicated crossword, redesigning it with markers, and devising new clues to create our own, new super crossword to distribute amongst friends. As you can imagine, it takes a spectacular kind of boredom to drive two sane people to such an activity.

This time it’s different though, and it’s not just down to the fact that I work when most quality TV (a paradox in terms) is on. Thanks to downloading, my housemate and I can watch our favourite TV without ever having to switch on a box. So whereas before I might have watched 3 hours of TV just to catch an hour-long show, now I can just access said show in its stripped-down, ad-free, time-saving 42 minute form.

So when I say I’m living “without television”, I guess I mean I’m living without everything else that comes with having access to TV land — namely the endless stream of soaps, reality shows, daytime dross, makeover programmes, self-consciously zany adverts, property vehicles and Vernon Kay-fronted pap that could only charitably be referred to as the fat clogging up the arteries of the televisual body.

Do I miss all of that? On the whole, no. Working in a newspaper, it’s pretty easy – in fact, it’s unavoidable – to keep abreast of soap news and reality TV’s goings-on, whether you want to or not. Otherwise, I genuinely have not seen an episode of Corrie or EastEnders since last Christmas Day.

The only things I can hand-on-my-heart say I miss watching regularly are X Factor (though by the sound of things, this year’s version sucks) and, on fragile Sunday mornings, repeats of 8 Simple Rules, which gets my vote for the most perfect and infinitely comforting hangover TV show in history.

Mind you, while at a fancy dress party over Halloween, a male friend, who was gussied up as a disturbingly attractive version of Tyra Banks, led a chorus of horrified and increasingly violent abuse against me when I admitted I wasn’t watching, nor had I ever seen a single episode of, America’s Next top Model. When instructed to “smile with my eyes” for party photos, I could only reply with a bewildered, “Ya wha?” Never have I felt like such an outcast from the telly-watching world.

Since then, I’ve been considering just caving in and getting my TV package back. That America’s Next Top Model backlash at the party has instilled a fear that my lack of the TV bare necessities has sent me hurtling (further) towards the bottom of the social ladder. And I want to be on Top! There Tyra, I said it. I guess I’m all yours.