by Peter Quinn
Goodbye, Greens
22 June 2009
Customer: Hey, the Greens were wiped out in the election. We won’t have to live in tree houses and knit our own yoghurt now! They had mad ideas, those fascists. Sure there was one in England saying people should only have one or two children, otherwise their carbon footprint would be too big. My God, hello, China, one-child policy and all that!
Barber: Well, Cowen has brought that in without anyone realising. Now that the economy has crashed, who can afford more than one child?
Customer: True, true. Well, now that the Green Party has lost some seats, and we can keep our light-bulbs, we might start to get our good weather back. Hello, global warming! Here comes the summer!
Frost/Nixon, Cowen/Lenihan
24 June 2009
Customer: My God, what sort of people are running this country? People would get behind the Government more and accept the cuts if the leaders themselves took a cut and made an effort. But there they were on the radio the other day, and they were caught playing golf instead of being at work.
Barber: I agree. Where’s Cowen lately? They’re calling him the Virtual Taoiseach.
Customer: You know, his plan wasn’t so bad, but he couldn’t sell it to us. I don’t ever remember him explaining it. I only heard about it on BBC Radio 4. After the budget, the BBC had a report about the fact that Cowen had gone the opposite way to the US and the UK, and they were watching us to see how we’d get on.
Barber: How do you mean the opposite way?
Customer: Well, the US and UK were lowering interest rates and VAT. They were also printing money in the US and borrowing huge amounts to keep everything moving and people spending. In Ireland we had no real choice but to tax everyone just so the Government could keep the lights on and pay the wages. We are borrowing money, but Cowen and Lenihan are trying to minimise the amount, and the idea is we live like this until the wind changes and the economy begins to recover. Then, when it does, we’ll have less of a debt and less to pay back, leaving us in a stronger position. It’s a good plan. But, like I said, I heard all about it on BBC4! I think Cowen has a bit of the Nixon syndrome.
Barber: What’s the Nixon syndrome?
Customer: Didn’t you see Frost/Nixon? Great film. Nixon didn’t like people much, and he didn’t like having to explain himself.
Barber: In this day and age it’s hard to understand how there’s still such a lack of communication skills in Irish politics.
Customer: It’s all gone to hell in a dustcart!
Off your trolley
25 June 2009
Not long ago the stories of hospital corridors filled with patients on trolleys awaiting treatment moved everyone in the country. But, as is always the case even in the darkest places, there is humour. An elderly man told me that while he was in hospital on a trolley in a corridor he spoke of how much of an ordeal it was and how embarrassed he felt. ‘Would you believe, they gave me an injection on the trolley in front of everyone! No curtain—nothing,’ he told me. ‘I wouldn’t mind, you know, only they had to give me the injection in the arse!’ He praised the nurses and the families who came to visit other patients and who would always oblige by getting a drink or a cup of tea for a total stranger on a nearby trolley.
He told me about one particular character who had kept the patients’ spirits up by cracking jokes and had kept them all laughing. ‘At one stage your man renamed the corridor the Mary Harney Ward.’
Another customer told me that a patient got up off his trolley to go to the toilet only to come back and find someone else on it! And that was before the recession.
Whacko
27 June 2009
Barber: I can’t believe Michael Jackson is dead. It’s like a hoax or something to promote the tour. Maybe he’ll be resurrected in three days. It’s the kind of thing he’d do!
Customer: Michael Jackson? Sure he’s a Charlie Chester!
Barber: Well, that was never proved, but he’s brown bread now.
Customer: Or white bread!
Haughey’s PR
28 June 2009
A customer was talking about political scandal, and Charlie Haughey came up in the conversation.
Customer: Whoever looked after Haughey’s press was very good, you know.
Barber: What makes you say that?
Customer: Well, it was a long time ago, but Haughey was big into horses, and one day, while he was at the stables, he met a young lady. The story goes that he ended up in one of the stables with her and made a move on her. She began to scream, and her father and brother, who were close by, ran in to see what was wrong. They found a startled Haughey in the stable and cornered him. A punch-up ensued, two against one, and Charlie didn’t come out so well. Anyway, the next day Haughey was pictured in the papers with his injuries, and the PR story was that he had fallen from his horse, which was a good cover up, but the giveaway was that in the picture he had a black eye!
Barber: Is that a true story?
Customer: I heard it myself!
Johnny Depp’s sunglasses
29 June 2009
One of the lads I worked for cut Johnny Depp’s hair for a film that was never finished, as it ran out of finance early on. It was a good few years ago now. I think Marlon Brando was in it also. But I remember a story he told me about Johnny Depp having a pair of sunglasses that everyone was talking about, and wondering where he got them. My friend brought it up in conversation when he was cutting Johnny’s hair and asked him if they were designer, which, to his surprise, Johnny found funny. ‘I was travelling around America by car,’ Johnny said, ‘and I pulled into a gas station and filled the tank up, and when I was paying for the gas the attendant handed me the glasses, so I asked her, “What are these for?” And she said, “They’re free with a fill of gas,” and I’ve had them ever since.’
You just never know!
Girls do it better
1 July 2009
Customer: Girls are outperforming boys in exams and at college this last ten years. It seems they’re more suited to being academics. The boys just can’t get down to it the same way.
Barber: Girls just seem to realise what’s expected of them while the lads even at Junior Cert age are still dreaming of being football stars!
BOD
2 July 2009
Customer: I must say I really admire Brian O’Driscoll. I mean, he gets injured repeatedly. Sometimes he gets terrible injuries, and then when he plays his next game he goes at it without concern, putting himself in harm’s way time after time, like he’d never been injured. He must have no fear.
Barber: It’s impressive, all right. After the Rugby World Cup I heard a doctor say the injuries players get at that level are similar to the injuries he’d normally see treating patients who’d been in a car crash!
Summer job
4 July 2009
Customer: My young lad just started working in Tesco for the summer.
Barber: Tesco? What’s he doing there?
Customer: Learning Polish!
Periwinkle-smugglers
5 July 2009
After the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley came out, older customers who had seen it began to open up, and some of them told me stories they’d long forgotten.
Customer (a great customer who was in his late eighties when he told me this): My friends and I were coming home through the [Dublin] city centre. We were all about eleven or twelve. We had been collecting periwinkles near Ringsend, and we didn’t notice the time. Back then everyone had to be off the streets by nine o’clock, and the Black and Tans were out enforcing the curfew. We gathered so many periwinkles that we had to put them onto the front of our jumpers and then hold the bottom of the jumper up in front of us like a pouch. Two Black and Tans saw us and asked us what we had in our jumpers. We were terrified. ‘Periwinkles,’ we told them, and they got annoyed because they didn’t know what they were. The Tans ordered us to spread them out on the street, and we emptied them all
out of our jumpers onto the ground. They had never seen or heard of cockles, and I suppose they thought we had something hidden amongst them. They let us go, but we were lucky—we could have been killed.
Barber: It’s hard to even imagine what life must have been like back then!
Bad things happen in threes . . .
6 July 2009
I’ve heard this so often that it’s beyond coincidence. As soon as I mention that the car has broken down or that the mobile phone is acting up, most every customer will say, ‘Only one more to go, then’ or ‘Well, that’s two out of three.’ It does seem to apply to major disruptions in our lives—like deaths in the circle of friends and family—that, within a few days, or the space of a month at most, three large life interruptions occur consecutively. Perhaps this unquantified law of the social world is a close relative of Murphy’s Law?
Antiques
7 July 2009
Customer: That’s a very nice cut-throat razor. Is it an antique?
Barber: It is. I don’t use it now. It’s just for show. It’s Victorian, I think.
Customer (holding up my takeaway coffee): And this coffee cup?
Barber: I’d say this is Cardboardian!
Bank shares
8 July 2009
Customer: Had the kids round at my dad’s house at the weekend. He lost all his savings in the crash, so he’s a bit down. He was counting out his loose change for the kids, and I was standing beside him when he says to them, ‘Now off you go down to the shops and get yourselves some penny sweets. Or, if you want,’ he says under his breath, ‘you could buy most of my bank shares.’
Rock gods play golf!
9 July 2009
Customer: I was reading a book Alice Cooper wrote about golf! Can you believe back in the eighties Iggy Pop and Cooper used to quietly slip out of rock and roll parties before midnight so they could be up early and be out on the golf course by 7 a.m. They played thirty-six holes at the crack of dawn so no-one would see them. At that time they feared it would damage their ‘wild men of rock, serial killer’ image.
Barber: How did they get into golf?
Customer: Cooper was drinking heavily in the early eighties, and he almost died. He was drinking whiskey for breakfast and a case of beer to follow! So he quit the drink and started playing golf. He says it saved his life. Don’t know how Iggy started, though!
Classified ads
10 July 2009
Customer: I’ve had a terrible few weeks! My mate’s put an ad in the men-seeking-men classifieds online, and they put my phone number up too!
Barber: That’s mad. Did anyone ring you?
Customer: The phone never stopped at night. Two, three in the morning, lads asking if I was available! It was a nightmare! When I told my friends, they couldn’t stop laughing. They thought it was a great laugh! The feckers!
The living dead
11 July 2009
Customer (a barman): An old man who was drinking at the bar handed me his newspaper and asked me if I’d look up the death notices for a Duffy, so I look through it quickly. ‘No,’ I say to him, ‘there’s no Duffy here.’ ‘Are you sure?’ he says. ‘Yes,’ I said, handing him back his paper. ‘Good,’ said the oul’ fella. ‘I didn’t know if I was dead or alive when I woke up this morning!’
On women
12 July 2009
Customer: Women? They’re all great, until you get to know them!
Recession greetings
13 July 2009
Barber: How are you getting on?
Customer (sounding hopeless): Surviving. Sure there’s no use in complaining. Sure no-one would listen anyway. At least I’m still breathing!
Barber: Did you have your money in bank shares, then?
Born in the wrong country
14 July 2009
Barber: Where are you from?
Customer: Mauritius. It’s an island in the Indian Ocean.
Barber: Mauritius—that’s like a paradise over there. Why did you come to Ireland, of all places?
Customer: I like the weather.
Barber: You like the weather? Are you serious?
Customer: Yeah, it’s far too hot over there, and I don’t have to worry about that here!
Barber: You’re mad, you are!
More recession greetings
15 April 2009
Barber: How are you?
Customer: Better than the small farmer!
Double standards
16 July 2009
Customer: There’s been a lot of crashes on the roads involving the Polish lately!
Barber: Yeah, there’s been a few, all right.
Customer: And you know why, don’t you?
Barber: No, why?
Customer: Ah, they drink and drive!
Space race
17 July 2009
Yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which came up in the shop and led to this comment . . .
Customer: During the space race they needed to invent a pen that could write in zero gravity, and it also had to write upside down. America spent millions of dollars and years of research making the pen while the Russians used a pencil!
The great mobile-phone conspiracy
20 July 2009
Customer: Whenever something big happens in the world, like the death of a celebrity, a plane crash—you know, an event that gets the headlines—there are relentless amounts of jokes being texted from one mobile to another.
Barber: A lot of people have mentioned it in the barber shop over the years, and people have often said that no-one knows who writes these jokes or where they come from originally. We just receive them and forward them to friends!
Customer: Well, there is a theory that there’s a think-tank of specially chosen lads who all rush into a room as soon as there’s major world news breaking, and they write these jokes and forward them to a circle of friends, who then forward the messages on to their friends, and the snowball begins to roll down the hill. The mobile-phone companies who stand by and watch the money roll in probably have them in an office somewhere, sworn to secrecy.
Barber: Well, if it’s true, they’re getting lazy, because the jokes—as a customer mentioned recently—are quite similar to jokes used for previous world news events—just the names or details are changed. Good theory, though!
Surf’s up!
21 July 2009
Barber (to an Australian customer): I bet you miss surfing and Vegemite?
Customer: Miss surfing? No, most weekends I go down to the west coast and surf. It’s really good here.
Barber: The surfing must be catching on here: lots of people are telling me they surf down the west!
Customer: I bet you didn’t know you held the record for the most people surfing a wave at the same time: forty-four altogether! Back in May 2006.
By the way, I looked it up, and it’s true. I also found that, in 1979, the Pro/Am Surfing World Championships were held in Easky, Co. Sligo!
Interrogation
23 July 2009
Barber: Are you off today?
Customer: No, just on a lunch break.
Barber: Oh, where do you work?
Customer: Just in an office up the road.
Barber: What sort of work do you do?
Customer: What is this, the sixty-second quiz?
Ireland’s diaspora, interesting fact
24 July 2009
A customer was talking about Admiral William Brown (from Foxford in Co. Mayo), who is the father of the Argentine navy. So then he (the customer) tells me that a huge number of Irish people emigrated to Argentina. Not trusting the information, I looked it up, and here are some facts from the Diaspora web site:
In the latter half of the nineteenth century approximately 45,000 Irish people arrived in Argentina, some 20,000 of whom settled there, with most of the rest moving to the United States.
Today in Latin America some 300,000 to 500,000 people are estimated to have some
Irish ancestry, most of them living in Argentina, with lesser numbers in Central America, Uruguay and Brazil.
Who would have thought it!
Bodyboards
25 July 2009
Customer (from New Zealand): Bodyboards—they’re deadly dangerous. Do you know what we call them at home?
Barber: No, I’ve no idea.
Customer: Shark biscuits, mate!
Barber: Why do they call them that?
Customer: Because of the number of sharks that attack people on them. See, your hands and legs are paddling along, and from beneath the shark looks up and thinks it’s a big turtle and goes in for his tea. So that’s why we call them shark biscuits.
Great party the other night . . .
26 July 2009
In the shop one very busy Saturday afternoon a guy comes in to queue and sees a lad he knows having his hair cut. A conversation begins . . .
Customer 1: Hey! Saw you at the party the other night!
Customer 2: Yeah, great one, wasn’t it?
Customer 1: Who was that dog-ugly bird you were talking to all night?
Everyone in the shop started laughing.
Customer 2: That was my girlfriend.
You could have heard a pin drop . . .