Review of Erindipity Rides Again

Sunday Tribune
09/12/07

Books of the year

Erindipity Rides Again
By David Kenny
Mentor Books, €14.99, 265pp
Reviewed by Padraig Kenny (no relation)

THIS is David Kenny’s follow-up to
last year’s Erindipity, and is
another addition to an already fullto-
groaning Christmas miscellany
market. Fortunately for miscellany
addicts, this is one of the less
earnest ones, managing to strike
an easy balance between giving its
readers that little bit of learning,
while entertaining them along the
way. Kenny writes in a breezy,
chatty, and informative style,
dropping the occasional groan
inducing pun with more precision
than a scud missile, and then gains
easy forgiveness by rattling off a
potted history of everything from
spitting on babies, to Teddy’s Ice
Cream Shop in Dun Laoghaire,
with a brisk, easy tone that sucks
you in before you even know
what’s happened.
In the first 30 pages alone we have
the weaving together of Dun
Laoghaire swimming baths,
Richard Boyd Barret, a meditation
on the concept of proxemics, and
an ultimately fruitless but
enjoyable exploration of how the
99 got its name.
Like all the best examples of its
type, this is a book you pick up in
an idle moment, promising
yourself that you’ll read just a few
lines with the anticipation of
learning something new and
peculiar with which to impress
your friends. Before you know it,
you’re being cajoled into finding
out about the “best place for
Tarzan impersonations” (Kildare)
or the “biggest contract on a dog
taken out by the mob”. If these
don’t interest you, then there’s
always the prospect of finding out
about the “best place to see Drew
Barrymore in the nip’ (a wheat
field apparently. Location
unspecified unfortunately). When
you’re not being subtly coaxed by
Kenny, your primitive, drooling,
baser appetites for more ignoble
facts are being satisfied by pieces
with titles like “Biggest county for
slappers” and “Most electrifying
night with a little pussy”. For the
record, the pussy wandered into
an electricity substation in
Drogheda, causing an explosion
and a subsequent blackout across
Louth and Meath, before being
posthumously christened Felix by
insensitive ESB researchers who
marvelled at how fat the poor
deceased moggie was.
There’s a brilliant section on
O’Connell Street, which is one part
satire, and two parts history,
giving the background to almost
every monument on the street,
and revealing the true story as to
why almost all of Dublin’s major
statues have been erected there:
“Northsiders seldom like to be
reminded that southsiders live in
the real, old, original Dublin. After
more non-stop whingeing, a few
statues were shipped across the
Liffey to keep them quiet.” The
essay also references poor old
Doctor Quirkey’s Good Time
Emporium, which is slowly but
surely becoming the most
maligned Dublin institution since
Copperface Jacks. Kenny even
recommends taking a stroll down
O’Connell Street on a warm
summer’s evening to “savour the
fragrant, oily bull farts of the buses
as they set down outside the many
fine restaurants – Supermac’s,
MacDonalds, Burger King etc.”
He also offers a nice little
window into the absurdities of
Celtic Tiger Ireland. He writes a
particularly pithy and informative
piece about Ennis being touted as
the hub of Ireland’s aggressive
new IT strategy 10 years ago, with
confident promises from Telecom
Éireann that it would become
Ireland’s first Information Age
Town. Plans were scuppered by
the proviso that only houses built
between 1991 and 1998 would
qualify for a free PC. This is
quickly followed by the revelation
that along with the UK, we have
the highest toilet-roll usage in
Europe as revealed by the
European Tissue Symposium in
February 2007. Then we’re on to
the story about how a mini black
hole made its cosmic presence felt
in a bog in Donegal in 1868, and
mercifully, Kenny somehow
manages to resist commenting on
the interconnecting theme of
these two essays.
Affectionate pieces about
Dublin, less affectionate
references to Northsiders, and
references to Roscommon, Cork
and Clare, which are downright
libellous, are peppered throughout
the book. But amongst all the
puns, the in-jokes, and the dodgy
links between essays, Kenny finds
time for a nice piece on the 1916
Rising which contains a lovely
little revelation at the end. In a
book full of surprises, it stands out
as the most delightful and
unexpectedly heart-warming of
them all.