The Big Boozy Weekend

What with the one month abstinence from alcohol and the two 3-day detoxes I recently undertook, not to mention all the fresh vegetable juice I've been drinking, I've been on a bit of a health buzz lately. As such, I was due a big boozy weekend and the one just gone was such a weekend. It started as usual at lunchtime on Friday. Once I'd had my lunch, the Friday feeling kicked in and there was no way I was going to be doing any productive work for the rest of the day. I kept things ticking over nicely until 4.30 when I headed for home. I knew I had a fair bit of socialising to do over the next couple of days and so I decided it would be prudent to do a workout before the madness began. By the time I was finished exercising, I could scarecly contain my giddiness and rushed downstairs for the first beer of the weekend. Myself and Wig enjoyed a couple of cans of Tuborg ver a few slices of McCambridge's apricot & cranberry bread with some mashed avocado on top. Shortly after 8pm, we hopped on a bus and headed over to Lia's house in Blackrock. Lia was due to emigrate to London on Sunday and Friday night was her going away drinks.

We stopped off along the way for some brewskies and found Lia's house with much thanks to my old friend Google Maps. As Lia had invited us all around for 8pm, Wig and I figured that turning up at 9 would be sufficiently cool. We didn't want to be the first ones there. Obviously we're far less cool than we thought and even though we were an hour late, we were still the first ones there. Not to worry, it wasn't long before people started to turn up. The beauty of this night was the amount of old Andrew's people who turned up, most of who I hadn't seen in a long time, some of who I hadn't even seen since school finished! Time passed quickly while we had fun chatting to people and catching up. The time came for us to all head into town and my original plan was to hit the Gaeity to see Special Brew. Unfortunately due to a number of reasons, this plan didn't materialise and after a bit of time messing around, I wasn't even in the mood to go out anymore. Wig and Ali (who had joined us at this stage) decided to head in with the rest of them while I opted for a taxi home in order to prepare for the onslaught of Saturday. All the same, I had a really nice evening and it was great to see some of my old schoolmates again.

Saturday began with Dad calling around in the morning to watch Ireland play Australia in the last game of a very disappointing season. Funnily enough, we ended up having countless chances which sadly we just couldn't convert into points on the scoreboard. The final score was 18-12 to Australia and I reckon the Irish boys will be glad at the opportunity to have a bit of rest. Later on in the day, myself and the lads headed into town to check out the street entertainment festival that was on in Merrion Square. We walked around the square observing the various entertainment. A few of the entertainers were impressive however they tended to drag out their acts while telling a few very poor jokes along the way. Just then, we spotted what had to have been the best entertainer of the festival. An Australian guy was performing a series of feats, the first of which was swallowing a long sword. After a quick bow with the sword inside him, he proceeded to the next feat. The man attached a sword to a long horizontal bar with a beer keg attached to each end of the bar. He then swallowed the sword and lifted the two kegs attached to the bar using the hilt of the sword which was resting on his mouth. Unbelievable! For his final trick, the guy decided it would be fun to juggle two knives and some fire while blindfolded on top of a suicycle (very tall unicycle). After a bit of messing around, he finally managed it and it was incredible to watch. Afterwards the guy appealed to the onlookers for donations and I watched in amazement as he collected probably a couple of thousand euro in change from the few hundred people who had been watching him. People were handing him notes and one guy even gave him a fifty!

It was late enough at this stage and we rushed back to the gaff to get ready for Fi's sister's party that evening. It was Fi's actual birthday but it was Maria's birthday a couple of weeks previously. So it was kind of a joint party but with more of an emphasis on Maria. After a few quick showers and a couple more beers we were on our way. We stopped off in Tesco in Stillorgan to purchase some boozy presents for the two birthday girls. Fi's parties have always been good and this one was no different. We were lucky with the weather and got to sit outside with beers and burgers courtesy of Joe Swan. Fi's cousins were all there too including Brizer who we stayed with while in Melbourne last year. We sat, ate, drank and shot the shit. Once the sun went down, we headed indoors to continue the party. At one stage myself, Ali and Fi held a bit of a conference in the upstairs toilet. I've no idea what we talked about but I just remember sitting on the floor of the jax for ages talking to them! The night wore on and at around 4am it seemed logical to crack out the guitars and have a bit of a sing song! This was a little obnoxious seeing as Fi's parents had gone to bed already and late night drunken rowdy singing is not good for those who want to sleep. Also, I had bought a bottle of cava in Tesco earlier. I suddenly remembered about it and went off to find it. I thought I had found
it and I opened it only to find it was completely corked. Then I noticed the label - I had opened a really old bottle of champagne! Luckily it was corked anyway but it could have been disastrous! I soon found the cava though and everything was alright again.

Eventually at around 5.30am myself, Ali and Wig said our goodbyes and ambled up to the N11 to try and find a taxi back to Glenageary Park. By the time we got home, the sun was very much out and Sunday had already begun. I had only one thing on my mind - bed. I awoke around 1pm feeling a bit worse for wear and remembered it was Father's Day. What better way to celebrate the day of Father's and get rid of a hangover than hit the pub? So a short while later I found myself down in the Eagle House with the folks for some afternoon pints. Later on that evening, Fi called round for some post-party analysis and a jam. We jammed out a couple of songs and then retired to the sitting room with a take-away and a funny film. A great relaxing way to finish off a very enjoyable weekend. This weekend I'm off to London (probably for the last time :) and I'm sure there'll be no end to the scandal this time either.

Now away with ye...

The scourge of the morning

Every morning, I am woken up by my alarm at 7am. I turn over, hit the snooze button and grab an extra 15 minutes of sleep. Once my 7.15 alarm goes off, I’m out of bed and into my dressing gown. I walk downstairs and prepare my morning juice. With my juice in my hand, I head back upstairs and on the way, I turn on the pump for the shower. I spend the next twenty minutes beautifying myself with a shower and a shave and a scuab of the old fiacla. Following this, I quickly get dressed and head to the dart station. This is when I start to get annoyed.

As I approach Glenageary dart station, I am confronted by two young foreigners – one male one female - but both with the same agenda. They both want to burden me with a copy of the daily rag that they are paid to hand out. Yes I’m talking about the Herald AM and the Metro “newspapers” – the scourge of the morning. Actually, the girl who hands out the Metro is fairly cute and I enjoy smiling at her every morning but my mood quickly changes to irritation when she forms a barrier to the entrance of the station with her Herald AM counterpart. The idea is that they make it difficult to enter the station without acquiring one of these rags however I pointedly refuse to accept one – even if the cute girl smiles at me.

But that’s not all! My journey to work from here takes 30 minutes and over the course of that half hour I am presented with the same problem three more times. Once at the exit of Grand Canal Dock station, once at Baggot St Bridge and yet again outside my place of work on Baggot St. When I board the dart, I am frequently required to move copies of the “newspapers” off a seat in order to sit down. As the dart fills up, the rags are moved to the floor and by the time the train arrives in town, a massive amount of litter has accumulated throughout the carriages. Some people elect to take the rag with them off the dart however this only defers the problem to a different time and place. The rubbish bin at the exit to Grand Canal Dock station is constantly overflowing with the rags. As people walk by and see that the bin is full, they simply toss the paper on the ground. I’ve even seen one guy discard his papers on the ground surrounding the bin only to acquire new ones five seconds later from the distributors standing outside the station!

Aside from the massively unnecessary number of these rags floating around the city each morning, I have a problem with the content. I mean it would be one thing handing out all these papers if something substantial and good was contained inside but nothing could be further from the truth. The level of reporting in the Metro and Herald AM is absolute bottom of the ladder journalism. In fact, I don’t think it even qualifies as journalism. www.iclasses.org defines journalism as ‘a style of writing for presenting bare facts to describe news events’. Bare facts?! That’s a laugh! I think if anyone were to read any of the “articles” in the morning rags with any kind of scrutiny, they will find that bare facts have been replaced with sensationalised nonsense and silly captions that would be more at home in a childrens’ book. These papers are nothing but a collection of short words in large font with some bright pictures for people to look at. Very often, sentences don’t even make sense. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t hold the Sun or the Star in any higher regard. But at least at least the people who read these are paying for their own rubbish. In the case of the Metro and Herald AM, the papers are forced on us for free each morning and we read them because we have nothing else to do on the way to work.

Well a long time ago I decided I wasn’t going to be subjected to this crap. I always bring a book with me to read on the dart and if I ever want to find out what’s happening in the news, I buy an Irish Times which is on sale just inside the door of Glenageary dart station. I am shocked at how many people read the tripe contained in the pages of these rags. People who otherwise command respect in society lower themselves each morning to a level beyond comprehension. And what about the kids? Every morning dart contains large numbers of school kids, most of who are also reading one of these papers. What are these kids going to grow up to be like if they keep reading this stuff? My old Leaving Cert English teacher, Ms. Duff had a way of dealing with it. Whenever she caught someone in the year reading a rag like the Sun or the Star or the Mirror, she would grab it off them, tear it to shreds and tell the student they would be in big trouble if she caught them reading that rubbish again. That was before the days of the Metro and the Herald AM but I have no doubt that she is equally as appalled by this scourge as I am.

In addition to the litter caused by these papers and the complete crap inside that they call news, I can only imagine the energy wasted on producing them. In an age where we are supposed to be as green as possible and reduce our carbon footprint, here we have two companies printing out tens of thousands of sheets of paper a day. And for what? So we can have our news dumbed down for us and be spoon fed it like children. So that tomorrow’s generation think that short words in big font together with a bright picture and a “clever” caption is news? For the four week period between 31/3/08 and 27/4/08, the Metro produced twenty issues averaging 75,805 individual papers a day. If each paper contains 30 pages that’s over 2.25 million pages produced every working day. If ever there was a contributor to global warming…

I urge people to do everything they can to stop this madness. There is no good at all that can come from the production of the Herald AM and the Metro. If enough people boycott them, maybe finally they will be shut down. Let’s all work towards a city where trying to catch a train or bus doesn’t mean being accosted from either side by rag pushing fiends. Or where people’s knowledge of current affairs does not stem from sensational claptrap. Let’s purge the scourge!

3 day detox

4th June 2008 10.00am
Today I embarked on a three day detox program which involves consuming only juice for the duration. I bought a juicer about a month ago and since then I’ve had a vegetable juice every morning for breakfast. Now I’ve decided to go all out and have nothing but fresh juice for three days.

The first thing I had to do was make sure I had everything I need. Yesterday I called into my friendly local fruit and veg supplier in the Dun Laoghaire Shopping Centre. She sorted me out with plenty of carrots, apples, broccoli, spinach, peppers, celery, cucumbers, beetroot, ginger and lemons. The final thing I needed was a flask that I could bring juice to work in – preferably one that would keep the juice cool until lunchtime. Tesco helped me out in this respect and at the expense of only €10.

I realised that I wasn’t going to be able to drink alcohol for the three days either (tough when the last day is a Friday and the temptation will be huge!), so I hit the rooftop terrace of the Eagle House in Sandycove last night for a few creamy ones with Wig and Clare. I woke up this morning, not quite in the state of mind I had hoped for day one but nonetheless I dutifully hauled myself out of bed and began juicing.

My first juice of the day involved carrots, apples, broccoli, lemon, cucumber, celery, beetroot and half a yellow pepper. I made a double batch and had half for breakfast and transferred the other half to my new flask which had been chilling in the fridge over night. This is going to be my lunch however the detox program I’m following requires that you have another juice in the late afternoon between lunch and dinner (aka linner). So I made up this juice as well and stuck it in a 1L Ballygowan bottle although there was far less of it than the breakfast and lunch juice. The idea is to top it up with water to make a full litre which I’ll do at work.

So off I set this morning with my little backpack containing my flask of lunch juice and my bottle of linner juice. I’ve already spent an hour at work and things don’t seem to be going too bad at all. I’m glad I’m not a coffee drinker as I imagine this is the point where I’d be suffering from caffeine withdrawal symptoms. However, I am under no illusions that by 11 or 12 o’clock I’ll be in a very hungry place. I’ll let you know how I get on!

2.45pm
I’ve just had my lunchtime juice and I’m still alive! I’m actually feeling very refreshed and energised. As expected, I got very hungry around mid-morning. I feared for my ability to make it all the way to lunch without eating and so I headed up to the canteen and got myself a smoothie with strawberries, blackberries, a banana and some orange juice in it. That definitely kept me ticking over until lunchtime when I gladly consumed the second half of the juice I made for breakfast. I am also pleased to report that the tesco flask works a charm. My lunch juice was as cold as it would have been had it been in the fridge all morning.

It’s now approaching 3 o’clock and I’m in a great position to finish the working day without consuming anything that isn’t juice. I’m still full from my lunch juice and I also have my linner juice to go. So I reckon I’ll crack that out at around 4pm. My biggest concern at this point is whether I’ll have the energy to complete a workout when I get home this evening. I’m sure I’m getting plenty of nutrients from all the veggie juice however a lack of carbs could make for a difficult work out. I’ll report back later with my findings!

5th June 2008 4.00pm
Well I’m halfway through my second day of the detox and I must say I feel great! It’s definitely doing a good job of flushing out my system. Last night I decided that doing a full workout would do more harm than good and so I gave it a miss. Instead I made myself a smoothie for dinner that involved mixing veggie juice with an avocado in a blender. I was surprised at how good it actually tasted! Especially since there was an entire bag of Kale involved. It filled me up and I went to bed pretty content.

This morning I had a treat in store for me. The breakfast for day two of the detox program is a delicious fruit smoothie with raspberries, blueberries and natural yogurt among other things. This was far more filling than my breakfast yesterday and I made it all the way to lunchtime without feeling any pangs of hunger. I enjoyed my lunchtime juice and am just about to start into my linner juice for day two.

The curious thing about the detox is that although I’m not actually feeling hungry, I’m craving solid foods. Not necessarily junk food but just something solid. I find it odd that I want food even though I’m not really hungry. Still, I’ve decided to opt out of the detox slightly early. I will stay on nothing but juice until the end of work tomorrow at which point I will be meeting Fi for some food, a few pints and a gig. I’m sure cutting the detox short by just a few hours won’t reduce the overall benefit by much. In any case, I’ve only recently completed a one month abstinence from alcohol so I don’t feel a need to repeat that feat so soon.

5^th June 2008 4.00pm
Bloody hell! I was doing great until last night and feeling really good about myself. I was feeling very refreshed and flushed out and impressed with my ability to endure two full days without food. Until Emsy dropped over. The first thing I noticed before I saw or heard her was the smell. The unmistakable smell of a dominos pepperoni pizza. Not only that but she had under her arm a massive box of Belgian chocolates which were for me in return for saving her and her mum from a killer bird a few weeks previously.

The funny thing is, I wasn’t actually hungry. But as I said yesterday, I was craving solid foods and as I watched Emsy begin munching into her pizza, I started salivating uncontrollably. But then to make things worse, Wig decided that he was going to have a pizza too! So just as Emsy was finished hers, Wig started into his own. And as a final test of my discipline, a few cold beers were cracked open for good measure. I can tell you now that I resisted. It was tough, but I did it. Even when I heard that beautiful kh-ksh sound when a cool can of beer is opened, I still resisted. I can only marvel at my new-found willpower.

I woke up this morning in great spirits, delighted that I hadn’t given in to my cravings the previous evening. I made my way downstairs and made a bumper batch of juices to keep me going all through breakfast, brunch, lunch and linner. I’m currently enjoying my brunch juice but very much thinking ahead to this evening when I’ll be indulging in a good meal and a few pints.

8^th June 2008
I’m happy to report that the detox was a resounding success. I went from Tuesday morning to 7pm on Friday evening on nothing but juices. To celebrate, I met up with Fi after work. After a couple of pint in Bruxelles we hit Wagamama’s for my first solid meal in 3 days. I had a delicious vegetable and chicken noodle dish with the odd duck dumpling on the side. It was great! After the meal we headed on to Andrew’s Lane Theatre where Fi had us on the guest list for ‘Those Dancing Days’, an all-girl Swedish electro-rock group. It was a really good evening and I didn’t go too crazy opting for the last bus home. Sure I had to be up early the next morning to watch Ireland get beaten by New Zealand.

Although the detox was difficult in parts, it really does work and completely cleanses and flushes out your body. I recommend it for anybody who feels they need to detox their system. You could even just do it for one or two days if you didn’t want to do the full whack. I imagine it would also be good after a heavy period of boozing and eating such as Christmas or a holiday. Yep, if feeling good and a cleaned out system is what you’re looking for, juicing is the way to go.