No 9 Most Embarrassing Moments

Sunday Tribune, 20 January 2008


There are two types of person in the world: those who get embarrassed and those who do not.
Actually, that’s not true. There are loads of other types of person in the world, but this week we’re just concentrating on the aforementioned type.
This is due to the convergence of two recent events in our shrivelled brain. The first was the settling of clothes-maker Karen Millen’s case with Dunnes over the copying of her designs. The second was the fresh horse manure being spread at the Mahon Tribunal.
(Please keep reading – this isn’t about Tribunals.)
We’ll come to Karen Millen later, but for now let’s consider Mahon where, on Tuesday, lobbyist Frank Dunlop claimed he had paid trainer Jim Bolger the equivalent of €200,000 for a share of a horse in 1992.
The nag, which Dunlop had never seen, died before it could be registered and never had a name, passport or insurance. Remarkably, Dunlop didn’t ask for his money back and forgot about the affair until questioned by the tribunal. He denies giving money to Bolger for “onward transmission” to someone else, or of using him to facilitate a payment to someone else.
Judge Mahon was unimpressed and said he was making the horse story up, yet thick-necked Dunlop ploughed on, proving that he falls into the Impossible to Embarrass category.
Erindipity does not and is regularly embarrassed by our own behaviour.
And so, for your delectation, here is a selection of Most Embarrassing Moments, beginning with yours truly in a Dalkey restaurant.

Most red-faced Indians

Several years ago we found ourselves nursing a heavy cold and grimly celebrating our birthday in the Al Minar Tandoori. The Family had decided spicy food would unclog our nasal passages, which it did, and after the main course we went to the loo to blow our hooter.
Turning our nose up at the sandpapery bog roll, we grabbed a fistful of soft paper hand towels, and after a few blows had cleared our head. Relieved, we flushed the lav which immediately backed up as the towels had absorbed so much water they were the size of extra-large Pampers. We waited for the cistern to fill again and the water level to drop.
And waited and waited. Five minutes later sufficient water had dripped into the cistern to allow another flush.
Still the towels refused to budge. So we waited again on the pathetic cistern. And waited and waited. As this was the restaurant’s only men’s toilet, we began to panic, imagining that someone might be waiting outside for almost 10 minutes now.
Again we flushed to no effect and panic turned us into a sweaty ball of rage, waving our fist at the loo, kicking it and swearing (as quietly as possible) that we’d “f******g get you, you b*****d.”.
We lifted the lid of the cistern and yanked the ball-cock in an attempt to make the water flow faster, which it did and continued to do, as we stood with the broken implement in our hand, mouthing “oh my God oh my God” like a religious goldfish.
Over 15 minutes had elapsed when we returned to the table. There had been nobody waiting outside the bog and no-one to point the finger of blame at the perspiring madman who had, evidently, broken the loo after a quarter hour spent dealing with the effects of his vindaloo. We were in the clear.
“Cleared my nose,” we said to the our guests, as the strains of “Happy Birthday to you” started up behind us. Several red-faced Indian gentlemen surrounded the table, one carrying a cake with almost-spent candles.
“They’ve been waiting for 15 minutes for you to come out of the loo,” Mrs Erindipity whispered.
We never went back.

Most purple-faced Bishop

In 2006 the C of E Bishop of Southwark appeared at Mass sporting a black eye after being mugged following a drinks reception at the Irish embassy in London.
The Bishop had told police and his flock that he had been robbed after two hours drinking wine with the Paddies, but didn’t remember the incident.
Others did, however – much to his embarrassment.
According to witnesses the Bishop ended up in a lane near his cathedral where he climbed into a stranger’s Merc, setting off the alarm.When the owner came to investigate he found the robed Bishop sitting in the back, throwing toys out on to the road. The incident was to provide the classic definition of a Bishop’s job.
“What are you doing in my car?” the owner demanded.
“I’m the Bishop of Southwark,” the figure haughtily replied, adding helpfully, “it’s what I do.”


Most embarrassing line for an actress

Victoria Smurfit must have been transfigured with delight when she learned that she was going to act alongside Leonardo di Caprio in the movie ‘The Beach’. It was an experience she would never forget (however hard she tried).
The trade-off for acting with Leo was that she had to recite the worst line in a movie ever.
In the scene where his character is about to go ashore to get rice, Leo is inundated with requests for sundry items.
“New shorts and a new hat,” says one hairy chap.
“Bleach,” says a dyed blonde.
“Toothpaste,” says another hirsute islander.
And then it’s Victoria’s turn.
“Aspirin, paracetamol and,” she says, breathlessly, “six boxes of tampons.”
Interestingly, the movie was never billed as a ‘period drama’.

Least red-faced Rose

The Rose of Tralee regularly throws up (pun intended) a few moments of arch-squirminess among the regular squirminess we have become used to. In 2007 the Washington contestant surpassed all expectations and proved that it’s impossible to embarrass a Rose when she sang the alphabet backwards and spoke, onstage, to her mother in her own made-up language called ‘Op’.
Rose? Pricks? Construct your own gag.

Most embarrassing fashion moment

Finally we get to the previously mentioned Karen Millen story.
Last Christmas our good friend Dominick Lewis traipsed into Brown Thomas’s to buy his fiancée a pashmina. Dom, being a man’s man, knew that this was not a breed of dog, but was still unsure of what he was buying. After 20 minutes wandering around he eventually found the relevant department. Two assistants stood by the cash desk chatting as he fumbled through the rails. Eventually he gave up and approached them.
“I’m looking for a pashmina,” he said to Assistant One, “but I don’t know anything about them. Can you help me pick one out?”
“Certainly sir,” replied the lady, turning to her left, “This here is [italics] Karen Millen [close italics] . . .”
“Hello, Karen,” said Dominick to her colleague, “I’m looking to buy a pashmina for my fiancée . . .”

Most embarrassing jockey moment

Roger Loughran stood tall in the stirrups of Central House at the end of the Dial-A-Bet Chase at Leopardstown in 2005. He waved his whip at the grandstand and punched the air.
Roger had just turned professional and couldn’t contain himself after scoring his first Grade One victory. His joy was unbridled.
There was just one problem – he still had 80m to race. The hapless jock had mistaken the end of a running rail for the winning post, and as he slowed down two other riders galloped past, relegating him to third place. The crowd booed and he was, rightly, mortified.
His remains the second most incredible story about a man and a horse ever told.
So what’s the difference between Roger and Frank Dunlop?
One’s a jockey getting it in the neck for acting the b****x, while the other’s a man with a neck like a jockey’s etc, etc, etc . . .

No 8: Ireland’s Fittest Corpse

Sunday Tribune January 13

"You are a bloated, disgusting, fat pig."
Erindipity never had a problem with being called the above as a tweenager. None whatsoever.
We did, however, have a problem with being called a "skinny, wimpy, little git" as this was an accurate description of a boy with pipe-cleaner legs, who was regularly bullied by butterflies and wore a crash helmet when it snowed.
Our pathetic physique was due to our habit of hiding food, particularly at breakfast time. School mornings began with Weetabix and hot milk. We really liked Weetabix with hot milk, but for some still mysterious reason, we felt compelled to stir it and stir it until it became a disgusting, dung-coloured emulsion. Even though we knew we were turning our favourite breakfast the consistency of cat puke, we couldn’t help it. We had to see if we could get all the lumps out (which we never did). Then we couldn’t eat it
Stuffing the bowl inside our pyjamas, we would sneak upstairs to the bathroom to hide the evidence of food-wasting.
Over time we discovered that flushing Weetabix down the loo was a non-runner as – due to its high-fibre content – it floated. Also, if any stuck to the side, it hardened like cement.
So we threw it out the window.
This practice continued for a number of years, until a man who had been painting the outside of the house asked our mum if she had been keeping cows on the garage roof.
"No. Why?"
"It’s covered in cow s***te, missus."
Another breakfast time ‘yeuch’ was eggs fried in the dripping she collected in an enamel bowl in the fridge. This would be added to over the course of many Sunday lunches and the only way of gauging its age was by slicing it in half and counting the rings. Depending on who was frying them, the eggs would variously arrive hard and shrivelled or runny and covered in burnt black fat. Either way, they tasted of beef.
These were secreted in various places downstairs: behind curtains, in the coal scuttle, in the cistern . . . One day our dad – who was an occasional golfer – pulled out his six iron and sent a petrified fried egg frisbee-ing across the fairway. He later discovered three more fossilised eggs clinging to his clubs.
Curiously, he didn’t give out, perhaps because he was too afraid to ask why his weirdo son was hiding fried eggs in his golf bag.
School lunches went uneaten too, due to a love/hate relationship with garlic salami sandwiches (our mum loved making them/we hated eating them).
As a result of this lack of eating we grew up looking like the pull-through they clean rifles with, and the butt of the usual ‘skinny’ jokes.
We mention all this here in the context of last Monday’s ‘Future Shock: Fat Nation’ programme on RTE, where we were told that 25pc of Irish boys and 30pc of girls are overweight.
The reason for this, we believe, is prosperity. Parents have more cash now, so they give their children more pocket money, which they spend on chips/burgers etc. We’re not saying this is a bad thing, it’s just that the pre-Boom generation would never have dreamed of spending their meagre money on food. That was something your mum gave you for free at meal-times. If you didn’t eat it, you went hungry.
If there’s one flaw in the current status quo, it’s that many parents spoil their offspring because they feel guilty about both having to work to pay for the mortgage. As a result Ireland’s latch-key kids are now a crowd of lard-arses.
With this body-consciousness in mind, this week we went in search of Ireland’s Skinniest Schoolboy (see above) and Fattest Man and, to our delight, discovered Ireland’s Fittest Corpse into the bargain.

Ireland’s Fattest Man

Roger Byrne, from Co Laois may or may not have been fond of his butter, but he weighed the equivalent of 728 pounds of Kerrygold (52 stone) when he wobbled off this mortal coil aged 54 in 1808.
If you have problems visualising 52 stone, then consider that Roger was over four times as heavy as Asha, the baby elephant born in Dublin Zoo four months ago (168 pounds).
As if being chronically fat wasn’t bad enough, the Laoisman was also named after the mark you get if you have sex up against a radiator.
Now let’s meet . . .

Ireland’s Strongest Man

There is an old 1950s reel in the Pathe News archive, filmed in a London gym, which begins with a shot of a man cleaning his teeth. He then bites the rung of a chair on which a girl is sitting, and lifts it off the floor, twirling it around. In another scene he lifts a weight with the girl seated on it and two young men perched on either end.
The doughty chap is Kerryman Michael ‘Butty’ Sugrue (1924/1977), a Kilburn Landlord who was the strongest man in Europe in his day.
Despite being a short-arse, Butty once pulled a fully loaded bus through the streets with his teeth.
On one occasion he got a former world champion boxer to use his stomach as a punch bag after lifting two men, tied together, over his head and spinning them around.
Another favourite trick was to tie a rope around himself and get six men to try and pull him over. They never did.
Butty was also a boxing promoter and responsible for bringing Muhammad Ali over to fight in Croke Park in 1972. To do this, he took Ali’s promoter around to meet his bank manager, who said Butty was "good for the $300,000" needed to stage the bout. The deal was settled on a handshake.
Those exploits aside, Butty is included here because of the singular diet he invented in 1968, when he decided to bury one of his barmen alive.
Mike Meaney was 33 when Butty planted him in a coffin nine feet under in the garden of the Admiral Nelson as a publicity stunt. For 61 days, Meaney – who was buried with some books and a torch – breathed through a hosepipe. For his daily sustenance, Butty fed him 1,000 calories of liquid food, plus Guinness, pumped through another pipe.
On the day he was due to be dug up, a huge crowd gathered to watch eight Paddies working away their shovels, to the strains of the London Irish Girl Pipers.
As the coffin began to emerge, Butty (never one to miss an opportunity) was the first to tell the BBC – and all of England – “we have him lads!”
After 15 minutes Mike rose from the grave wearing green pyjamas, sunglasses and clutching a crucifix. For a former grave-dweller, he looked remarkably fit and trim due to Butty’s Underground Diet.
Perhaps Butty’s diet may be the solution to dealing with today’s chip-gorging piglets – ground them and feed them through a hose.
Or perhaps not.
At any rate, it’s worth pointing out that – despite years of honing his superb physique – it was food that killed poor Butty in the end.
He collapsed carrying a fridge up the stairs.
So maybe this fitness thing is over-rated.
Chip Butty, anyone?

No 6: Worst excuse for dinner being late

Sunday Tribune December 30

DEAR reader, You are cordially invited to 'Erindipity's Ultimate Christmas Dinner' on 30 December, 2007. We would have sent this sooner but the cat ate the postman and . . . we, er, this, kind of . . . got lost?
We apologise. That was the Third Worst Excuse for Dinner Being Late.
The Second Worst Excuse is that John Boyne took over the Review section last week and we were all given the weekend off, so that's why our Christmas dinner is late.
Please join us now for our festive miscellany, which uses only the most outstanding ingredients. (We've written about some of these before, but they're worth reheating. ) For starters, may we offer you a seafood salad containing the world's . . .

Most confused prawn

In February 2007 a giant Japanese Tiger Prawn was found in the nets of a west Cork fishing boat. The shellfish is normally found in the Pacific Ocean and its presence here prompted fears of an invasion, which so far hasn't materialised.
A spokesperson for the Department of the Marine said they believed the 'prawn star' (as the saucy Irish Times called it) is not right in the head and simply decided to go 'swimabout'.
"The prawn's crackers, " the official said. Actually, that's a really lousy joke so we'll have another go at it.
"The prawn's Christmas crackers, " the official said. Nope, that's even worse, so we'll move on to the soup course which features the . . .

Best soup for killing you

Sorry, but you'll have to wait until after dessert for this. This will make sense later, so let's speed along to Co Cavan for the turkey course which will be served in the . . .

Best place for Christmas dinner if you're in a hurry

Cootehill is the home of the exceptional Vincent Pilkington. On 17 November 1980, Vincent became the fastest turkey plucker on the planet when he stripped a 16lb bird in one minute and 30 seconds. Vincent became something of a superstar in Co Cavan after his feat was televised by RTE. Yes, well, apart from The Angelus and re-runs of Mannix, there wasn't much else on the telly back in the '80s.
Plucky Vincent officially defeathered his last turkey in Bailieboro in December 2005. At the time of his retirement he could still handle an average of 16 birds an hour, making him the Jack Nicholson of the poultry world. Speaking of hams, how about a portion of the . . .

Most well-informed pigs

On New Year's Day 2003 new EU directives were introduced to keep our pigs happy.
Pig boredom is a serious issue for farmers as they are intelligent creatures and need entertainment, or else they get aggressive and surly (that's the pigs we're talking about).
The rules named specific materials, including novelty items (footballs etc) to keep the porkers occupied. That February The Corkman newspaper revealed that a farm in Dromcummer had the happiest and most erudite pigs in Ireland. It said the Lehane family's pigs' contentment was down to. . . The Corkman. They loved nothing more than getting stuck into a copy of the periodical. It even published a picture of four pigs browsing the front page and, unbelievable as this may sound, they really did look like they were reading it.
Three of them did, at any rate, one of them may have been probing some poo.
The Corkman is such a hit with the pigs that their neighbours bring it up to the farm by the car load. The pigs, for their part, have ensured that there's nothing but crap in the papers these days.
Back to the menu. Would you like some spuds with your ham? How about the . . .

First spuds in Ireland

These were planted in Youghal by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585. Youghal, by the way, is the only Irish place name with an American accent. This is because when Walter left America with his spuds and tobacco, the Indians said: "Youghal come back now, yuh heah?"
Actually that's not true. They were glad to see him go.
By the by the way, did you know that 'Munster Plums' are, in fact, potatoes?
No? Neither did we. We thought southern plums were something you got from sitting in the saddle too long.
Care for a helping from the . . .

Biggest plate of veggies

In April of this year Harry Crowley from Walkinstown grew a recordbreaking carrot which was an astonishing three feet long. (Insert Carry On-style gag here, please. ) His parsnips are monsters too, with one reaching a length of 10ft 7ins.
Harry will also be remembered for setting the least-attempted of all gardening records . . . growing the Longest Horseradish in the World. It measured 10ft 4ins . . . enough to make a bucket of sauce to go with your dins.
In 2005, 'A Man Called Horseradish' likened gardening to studying electricity. "It is colossal, and you have to know a lot of theory, " he said, omitting to mention that nobody has ever been electrocuted by a garden vegetable.
Now for a glass of wine from Ireland's . . .

Most northerly vineyard

You probably knew that Ireland has a couple of vineyards. You didn't? Well bad news . . . Global warming is here and WE'RE ALL DOOMED. Ireland is an official EU wine-producing country and the majority of our few vineyards are located in 'lush' Munster. Here's a few: the West Waterford vineyards, the Blackwater Valley and Longueville House vineyards and the Thomas Walk vineyard in Kinsale.
Our Most Northerly Vineyard is located in Swords, Co Dublin and is owned by horticulturist, David Llewellyn. It's named Fruit of the Vine and does a nice little pinot noir.
(See? The northside isn't all Buckfast and cider. ) Room for dessert? Have a slice of cake. It's not traditional Christmas cake, but it is the . . .

Biggest cake ever

The largest cake ever baked in Ireland weighed 190lbs and was made to celebrate Dublin's 1988 millennium at the Mansion House. Like other occupants of that gaff, it was nutty and fruity, but it wasn't half-baked (Royston Brady where are you? ) and was eventually thrown out in 1991.
If you don't want cake you might try some of the . . .

Largest amount of ice cream lost at sea

Which was the 1,750 quarts of French ice cream aboard the Titanic.
Unfortunately you'll need to supply your own wetsuit.
And finally we get to the soup course and the . . .

Worst excuse for dinner being late

Dubliner, Brigadier General John Nicholson (1822-1857), was an utter bastard. This was especially true in India, where he was renowned for his foul temper. Remarkably, he inspired a short-lived cult there, despite the fact that he couldn't stand his devotees and had some of them jailed and flogged.
Like we said: utter bastard.
During the 'Indian Mutiny' of 1857 he displayed a particularly ruthless way of dealing with truculent kitchen staff. Having been told that the native regimental chefs had poisoned the company's soup, Nicholson ordered that they be forced to sample it first.
When they refused, he force-fed it to a monkey which, promptly, croaked.
Later, the General marched into the mess tent and coughed to attract the officers' attention.
"I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, " he said nonchalantly, "but I have been hanging your cooks."
It remains The Worst Excuse Ever for Dinner Being Late. (It's even worse than blaming John Boyne for hogging the Review section. ) And on that charming note, we would like to assure you that no turkeys, pigs, monkeys or chefs were harmed in the writing of this piece.
They, like the Erindipity family, wish you a peaceful new year.