Cricket, Colonoscopies & War Criminals

The doc made an appointment for me at Altnagelvin for a colonoscopy. This involves a (tiny) camera being poked and jiggled up your bum at the end of a cable and then manipulated hither and yon around your bowel on the lookout for cancerous cells lurking in the tubes and folds with malign intent. You can watch the whole show on a monitor as you lie on your side with your knees drawn up to your chin. A bit odd, but I’ve had odder.

The surgeon introduced herself. I’ll swear she was no more than 19. Two nurses took position either side of my little table.

For some reason, I began talking about cricket, and Ireland’s brilliant six-wicket victory over a full-strength West Indies world-champion side in a Twenty20 game at Jamaica’s Sabina Park the previous day.

“Did you ever hear of Boyd Rankin,” one of the nurses asked. The six foot seven medium-fast bowler comes from just down the road. Has played for both Ireland and England (you can do that in cricket, a most sensible sport), made his Ashes debut in Australia in January. We were all chatting away as the procedure began. “He’s my brother,” said the nurse. The surgeon was meanwhile manoeuvring to find the right angle for initial insertion.

Round about this point it struck me that I was in a room with three young women talking about cricket and one of the women had her finger up my bum. I agreed with the cricketing nurse that with Ireland qualified for next year’s world championship and West Indian Test star Phil Simmons installed as coach, there’s no reason we can’t make Test status in the next few years.

If Boyd and Eoin Morgan were to revert to Ireland, we’d be there.

The show on the monitor was intriguing, instructive and strangely compelling. You wouldn’t believe the whorl of tubes and tunnels, the variety of scarlets and pinks, the pulsate of the fleshy walls. I was almost distracted from the conversation.

I hope I am not taken the wrong way when I say – actually, I don’t care if I’m taken the wrong way – that I rather enjoyed it. Afterwards, the surgeon seemed impressed, suggesting that she had rarely encountered a bowel in better shape. Just as Ireland are well up for the forthcoming Twenty20 world championship in Bangladesh.

Next issue I’ll be dealing with urinary matters and – only Neil Hannon and myself in the whole world can do this – explaining the Duckworth-Lewis Method.

Writing in another place about U2 recently, I suggested that in the country of the bland it’s rare to encounter a new band brimming with energy, bags of attitude, classy songs and instant evidence of real musicianship. Then I dropped into Sandino’s for The Mighty Stef and encountered the Wood Burning Savages. They’d played Whelan’s in Dublin the night before and had just dashed pell-mell down from the Nerve Centre where they’d been supporting Little Bear.

You can tell from their tightness that Paul, Dan, Aaron and Shea had arrived at their song structures by the old-fashioned route of trying this, that and this again, practicing until the rhythmic thump is embedded in the sound and the semi-quavers rippling out as if of their own accord.

Their debut single “America” has just hit the shops, shelves and/or wherever it is that downloads come from, plus there’s an album on the way.

There’s a nice snarl in them, too. They’re good. Keep an eye out.

Stef, goes almost without saying at this stage, was powerful and dark and with a proper uncompromising rock and roll ethic. The title song from his current EP, The Watchman of Iveagh Flats, heard live is maybe his best since The Sins of Sainte Catherine album four or five years ago.

We had that General McChrystal in town last week, doing his inspirational speech thing at the Chamber of Commerce’s annual lunch. So a gang of us gathered outside the hotel with placards and flags and a megaphone for shouting “war criminal” and so on. He’s a big wheel with the Seagate company since being thrown out of the US military. We were accused locally of ‘risking inward investment’.

McChrystal was head of the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq from 2003 to 2008 – a unit so secret the Pentagon routinely denied its existence. Its speciality was to hunt down and eliminate suspected terrorists. He was commander of Camp Nama, where, Human Rights Watch reported, prisoners were subjected to extreme forms of abuse. Being dragged naked through mud behind a military vehicle was only the start of it. Some prisoners disappeared in Camp Nama.

Appointed Nato commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal was scornful of what he saw as the namby-pamby approach of the Obama administration, demanding more troops and tougher tactics. He was sacked in June 2010 after giving an interview to Rolling Stone in which he was contemptuous in particular of Vice-President Joe Biden.

RS writer Michael Hastings – who died last year in a traffic accident in LA, aged 33 - described McChrystal’s command group as “a hand-picked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs.”

Margaretta D’Arcy is in prison, while Stanley McChrystal provides postprandial encouragement to the business elite. Among those who ignored the protest and broke bread with the general were Martin McGuinness and Mark Durkan.