The apocalypse approaches as banks fall and confusion reigns while we wish we did not live in such bloody interesting times, even the Liberal Democrats across the road have started to look interesting, which is a sure sign of the imminent arrival of the beast with four heads and the end of days. One steady staple in all this perpetual pandemonium is that trusty arse paper, the Sunday Independent, which screams at me as soon as I step off the plane and reminds me of kind of degenerate discourse I had so gratefully left behind.
The article is based around a phone call to a Limerick student services doctor, who states that freshers week is a busy time for sexually transmitted disease screening. Surely the most revelationary statement since Philip IV finally admitted that he may have pissed away all the cash from the colonies in the new world. The Sindo digs up another shock doc and expands this comment into a full page piece on how everyone at UCD is absolutely 'riddled'. This literary steamer is rounded off by a couple of hoary old urban legends and passed off as a scoop. Dear Patricia Redlich recognises when her paper has broken new journalistic ground and weighs in with a comment piece of equal vanity. Good old Pat must have read it because the next day we have a radio STI special that seems to last all morning.
The TV seems to have slid in the same direction, choc full of warnings, reprimands and advice on good moral conduct and all the while Channel 4 bangs out their traditional fare for the dirty raincoat brigade. So we have ‘Sex Education’, part of ‘The G-Spot season”, combining the channel’s talent for mixing useful investigation with scurrilous scare mongering and zeitgeist. Can there be a doubt that the ability to watch any kind of porn you want from the age of thirteen will have an effect on you compared to staying up till four in the morning to get a glimpse of a tit on some National Geographic documentary or other? But will it really produce a nation of teenage Caligulas?
And so according to the writer, the 200 Marlboros I bought on the way home should keep me going till at least this time next week. Whoever said that crossing borders in Europe is no longer like going back in time?
