The billy goat cabaret

If ever a tome disproved that adage about it being wrong to judge a book by its cover, it is Laptop Dancing And The Nanny Goat Mambo by Tom Humphries. There are two striking images on the cover of this diary of a year in the working life of the Irish Times sportswriter. The first is a computer that is not only not a laptop, but a model that is now so obsolete that I distinctly remember an identical one in the hotpress offices being powered by coal instead of electricity.

The second image is that of a goat with hands that are clearly those of a man (man-hands, if you will) wearing one of those dress shirts with an extravagant ruffle down the front, while appearing to sing or perform stand-up comedy into a microphone. My limited knowledge of animal husbandry, combined with my extensive knowledge of the kind of people who wear dress shirts with extravagant ruffles down the front, leads me to conclude that the goat in question is not in fact a nanny goat, but a billy goat.

But the fact that his book should have been called Peering Into A Very Small Black And White Screen And The Billy Goat Cabaret notwithstanding, Humphries has produced a fine work. However, before I continue hurling bouquets in his direction, I should declare a personal interest – I have never met Tom Humphries, but I once stood behind him at a taxi rank.

He is a very big man who, by his own admission, dresses and looks like a vagrant. Over six foot tall and almost as wide, on the afternoon I sheltered from the rain behind him on Dublin’s Dame Street, he resembled a man who’d been dragged backwards around Leopardstown racecourse by a team of Clydesdales. Overcome by awe at being in the presence of this scruffy sportswriting behemoth, I didn’t know whether to shake his hand or give him the price of a cup of tea. In the end, I did neither.

And despite being as Dublin as – to borrow a phrase from Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly – coddle, Guinness and getting stabbed in the neck with a syringe, soon afterwards, Humphries penned a lavish tribute to the sporting enigma that was the Offaly hurling team du jour. A hilarious interview with Offaly hurler Johnny Pilkington followed a year later, then more recently Humphries was responsible for a thoughtful evisceration of those who believe the Irish football team has a divine right to play in Croke Park.

So in short, I have long been of the opinion that, when it comes to sportswriting, Tom Humphries is the king. If he pulled down his trousers, squatted over a blank page and – thunk! – dropped a big steaming turd on it, my GAA-loving Offaly-born adherents and I would buzz around it in excitement like flies. I can think of no higher praise and only wish I was famous so that his publishers could stick this ringing endorsement between inverted commas on the cover of his next book: “I couldn’t put it down!” – The Evening Herald. “Shit on me Tom!” – Hot Press.

But enough of this shameless fawning – there was a point to all of the above, but I’m damned if I can remember what it was. Dum-de-dum… eh… ah yes, Big Brother. Like almost everything else in life, my attempts to go the entire series of this year’s Big Brother without watching a single episode, as documented in these pages some weeks ago, ended in abject failure.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen more than a handful of less-than-gripping installments, but I have witnessed enough to have been highly amused by the following e-mail circular that arrived in my inbox recently: “Those of you who’ve been watching Big Brother will have noticed that once again the Irish are being shafted by the English,” it began, signaling the tedium that was to follow. “They’re editing the programme to portray Ray (a Dub) as an Irish drunk and blaming his drinking and temper on the fact that he’s Irish. Now’s the time to fight back! We managed it before by getting ‘A Nation Once Again’ into the top BBC songs of all time, and we can do it again by showing the Brits that the Irish can beat them again in their Big Brother. If everyone in Ireland was to vote just once, Ray and the Irish would definitely win.”

Never mind that the TV editing suite hasn’t been designed yet that could disguise – never mind exaggerate – the fact that Ray is a green card-carrying, shillelagh-waving, Dublin geansai-wearing, potty-mouthed jackeen who is prone to blowing a gasket after a sniff of the cork, it is these poll-rigging scams instigated by the denizens of our once-great nation that need to be addressed. I mean, has it really come to this? Do we really feel so inferior in the cosmic scheme of things that we still believe that orchestrating it so that a short-fused “fuckin’ alright, bud?” Dub winning Big Brother would be one in the eye for the Brits?

What… we do? Oh, right so. In that case, I’d tell you to vote early and vote often, but unfortunately by the time you read this column the series will have ended.