Category: Writings

Neal’s Belch no. 144 for 12th Jul, 2004

Yesterday I was on my way out of a train station when I noticed something that I had never noticed before.

Without exception, every single one of the turnstiles at the exits was set to turn in a clockwise direction. So I did some research and it turns out that all turnstiles and revolving doors in the northern hemisphere turn that way, while everything south of the equator goes counter-clockwise.

Apparently the same is true of the way liquids swirl clockwise or anti-clockwise when you pour them down the sink. For some reason that I can’t quite fathom, the hands on clocks move clockwise no matter what part of the world you are in.

But this got me thinking. What would happen if I started messing with the laws of gravity or magnetism or whatever you call it? Would I get in trouble with the law? I mean, who the hell set up all these scientific laws anyway. Where I come from, if you want to pass a law you must first put yourself up for election to the national parliament, and then convince a majority of your colleagues to vote for your proposed piece of legislation.

But apparently if you’re Isaac Newton or somebody, you can pass a law just by saying stuff that nobody else understands.

As an aside here, I would just like to pay tribute to all of the scientists throughout the ages who have experimented with apples. I myself once ate an apple right through to the core, and on seeing the hard white flesh near the centre, and thinking about it in silence for a few long minutes, came up with an idea for an essay about turnips for my website.

So I can easily see how an apple could provide inspiration for such masterpieces as Newton’s Gravity Yoke, or whatever he came up with. Really if we’re being fair, we should give credit to the apples, not the scientist. But this is a topsy turvy world and for some reason it’s always the human, not the inaminate organic food, that gets thanked.

Anyway, back to the thing about laws of science. Now I, as a private citizen, am not empowered to pass a law, for example, that bans television stations from killing selected viewers who change stations during the commercials.

However, apparently I am completely free to legislate that “What goes up, must spin three times, freeze for a second like a tense moment in a cartoon, then come down”, and call it “Neal’s Law of Going up and Spinning”, Because that’s science. So I’ve decided that I’m going to take advantage of this new-found power by passing some new scientific laws.

I hereby order that cats cannot land on their feet unless they are covered in orange marmalade and humming the theme tune from Frasier.

Okay that’s enough for now. I don’t want to abuse my priviledges. In fact, in the above short paragraph I’ve achieved pretty much everything I set out to achieve when I decided to go into politics, so I’m going to retire now.

I think I can achieve more by quietly campaigning and maybe making a few Euros on the lecture circuit to support myself. You know, when I was a twelve year old I wanted to change the world.

I thought I would become Prime Minister of my country and I would outlaw all crime and remove poverty forever. Then I came to realise that all crime is already outlawed, so I decided to concentrate on a cure for poverty. The solution I came up with was to give everybody a large quantity of money and order them not to spend it. Then nobody would ever be poor ever again and we would all live happily ever after.

Just like in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Although Goldilocks, of course, would never have dreamed of putting orange marmalade on her cat’s paws. And this refusal to conform with the norms or our society would mean she is now guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal under my new “Orange Marmalade Humming Act, 2004”, referred to earlier.

But you shouldn’t take from this that I am a staunch conservative who wants to hang all criminals and then put them in jail after they’re dead. No.

All I’m saying is that it’s fun to make laws that annoy people, especially those who have cats or who refuse to keep a minimum level of marmalade in stock. These are the same people who you see at polling booths, scratching their heads and trying to make a last minute decision about who to vote for. My country now has colour photos on the ballot sheet, so you can pick which candidate has the best hair, and vote for him or her without having to find out who they are or what they stand for.

So it’s not all bad. And I never said it was. I’m not a glass-half-empty person. It’s not empty until I shove the flat, day-old coke from last night down my parched throat at seven o’clock the next morning because I don’t have time to make coffee. 

Then it’s empty. And that brings me nicely back to the hemispheres / clockwise / anticlockwise thing. Because there’s going to be nothing left in the glass to throw down the sink and test which way it swirls as it disappears down the drain.

So now we’ll never know.

Neal’s Belch no. 143 for 9th Jul, 2004

I’ve recently been teaching myself how to play the piano, and I’ve found, to my amazement that I’m very good at it.

And now that I come to think about it, that’s lucky, because it would be very difficult and impractical to teach myself the piano if I wasn’t already equipped with the knowledge and skills neccessary to play it. You can’t have a piano teacher who isn’t able to play the piano. That would be just stupid.

Anyway, while I was having a look at the various elephant and tree parts that make up the piano, I realised that the keys bear a striking resemblance to the road-markings used at pedestrian crossings here in Ireland.

In order to be thorough in my research for this article, I climbed up onto the piano and walked along the keys. And sure enough, no traffic crossed the keyboard in either direction while I was crossing it. I was very impressed.

Then I remembered the guitar that the previous occupant of my flat left in the wardrobe, and the three violins which are in the attic at my parents’ place, and I came up with an idea that could save my country billions of euros in building costs over the next five years.

All stringed instruments have a little part called a “bridge”, which sits under the strings somewhere between the neck and the big hole that makes the music. Now, I know it’s just a small strip of wood or plastic, but I tried out the piano-crossing thing and it worked fine, so I propose that we get the manufacturers to make more bridges than they need, and we can use them as pedestrian bridges accross railways lines and motorways.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that vehicles should be allowed to be driven across these bridges.

And by the way I don’t claim to be an expert in all of the architectural issues involved. But the basic idea is sound, I’m sure. I’m an ideas person, not a details person. I leave the details to somebody else who isn’t able to write and think as beautifully and gracefully as I do. It would be an enormous waste of my talents if I were to spend my days working out the practicalities involved in turning part of a musical instrument into a pedestrian overpass. There are other, lesser people, who can be happy doing that.

Yesterday I wandered into a road museum and found myself enthralled by the section where they keep the old road markings.

It’s fascinating to see how they have evolved through the decades since the invention of the motor vehicle. The first dotted white lines, for example, were made from flattened ivory, taken from recycled piano keyboards. The elephants were forced to stamp on their own ivory, to flatten it into rectangular pieces, before being sent off to wildlife college to be reprogrammed as hippopotamuseseses.

Then, obviously, somebody “discovered” (i.e. travelled into the future and stole my idea) the possibility of using this ivory to make zebra crossings. Sadly (ha ha suckers) they misread my essay and thought I was suggesting that these crossings would be used by striped zoo animals, rather than humans.

Since there aren’t very many zebras around these days, the people who suggested it started to look pretty stupid, and they were fired from their jobs at the National Roads Authority.

Ironically two of the three officials involved have since taken up employment at a local zoo, where they are designing a new enclosure for the zebras. The main problem they have is that the payroll at the zoo lists staff in alphabetical order of which animal they look after, so anyone involved with zebras is at the bottom of the list. The always run out of money just after the “w”s. Which is a shame.

Personally, I think it would be rather interesting to be a walrus feeder at a zoo.

Walruses are very similar to cats in that they have whiskers and they lie about playing with string and eating tuna. Alhough admitedly I eat tuna too, so obviously it’s not quite as simple as that.

Things cannot always be boiled down to a simple single phrase that sums everything up and gets the message accross. I learned this the hard way when I promised the editor of The Times of London (Ireland Edition) that I could produce an abridged version of Stephen King’s “The Stand”, and do it in fifteen words or less. The words that I came up with were all very accurate and self expanatory, but when I tried to assemble them into a sentence of some sort, the whole thing fell apart. The best that I could come up with was “Always look on the bright side of life. Whistle”.

The editor of the aforemetioned newspaper wrote a very polite but firm letter to me, explaining (in what I thought was a rather patronising tone by the way) that not only was the phrase copyrighted to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but also that it was technically two sentences, not one, which was obviously a breach of my contract.

So you see, you may think you have a good idea, and you may think that you know how to make it work. But there’s always going to be some bamtard with a big chair and a scary voice who wants to knock you down.

So let’s all just give up and go knit ourselves a giant balaclava with no mouth hole, big enough to wrap round the earth and keep it all nice and warm at night.

That’s pretty much all we can do.

Neal’s Belch no. 142 for 2nd Jul, 2004

I’ve noticed that recently my fingernails have been becoming longer and longer. I assume it’s because I’m evolving in some way or other, and that part of this process involves growing a shell.

This couldn’t have come at a better time, because house prices here in Ireland are soaring and I can’t get a decent apartment on my salary. I suppose I could grow a house if I really needed too, but it’s so stressfull waiting for the seeds to germinate and wondering whether it’s going to be a boy house or a girl house. Not that it matters, but you really need to know where the main entrance is going to be, if the house is going to line up with your garden path properly.

Anyway, the reason why all this came up is that I was in Dublin Zoo a few weeks ago and I noticed that some of the staff who work in the primates section had devolved into monkeys. Not only that, it became apparent after a few minutes of exploring that one of the giraffes had mated with a monkey and there was a guy with a really long neck walking around busily trying to evolve so that he could re-integrate himself into modern society.

When I was around six years old I asked Santa Claus to give me a monkey for Christmas. My parents called Santa on their rather primitive early nineteen eighties cellphone, and made sure that he had received my letter which I had sent by telex from my bedroom the previous evening.

Now, I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but what I received on Christmas day was not the cute little black furry creature that I had expected. It was a tall yellow duck with an orange beak and, for some reason, a striped t-shirt which was sewn onto it’s torso. Duckegg (such was the name that I gave him) fell apart after a couple of years. They don’t make stuffed toy ducks like they used to. His head started to become seperated from his body at the back within weeks, and it wasn’t long before my bedroom floor became strewn with lost stuffing. Although technically it wasn’t lost because I knew where it was.

It was right there. On the floor.

Anyway, for some reason Duckegg had two legs and two arms. And this confused me, as a child. What was I supposed to think? That ducks have arms and stand upright? Well, I suppose they do stand upright but I’m pretty sure ducks aren’t supposed to have arms. It’s just not the done thing.

Then I realised.

It became mindbogglingly obvious to me. The toy companies were conspiring to hasten the evolution of children so that they would demand more sophisticated and challenging toys from Santa Claus. They were doing this by making incorrectly limbed toy ducks which would force the children to use every ounce of brain power that they had, to try to figure out what the hell was going on. This would cause their brains to grow and that was exactly the type of evolution that the toy manufacturers wanted. So that’s what happened.

But I’m sure you’re wondering, where did it all end.

Well, I dunno.

I really can’t be bothered today. I should have just written something about cats, because that’s so much easier. But no, I had to pick an unbeaten path as usual, and discuss a topic about which there exists very little solid research to rely on.

I probably told myself something about needing to excercise my mind, or some such carp. You know, when I was in school we used to be told to take our pencil for a walk, meaning draw a neverending line and keep drawing until the page was covered in shapes.

We were then given some pencils and told to colour the shapes with the crayons. You could always tell when the teacher had a hangover and wanted an easy day.

And that’s pretty much what I’m going to do now.

Here’s your crayons. Knock yourself out. Just try not to eat them because I’m not completely sure they aren’t toxic. And besides you shouldn’t ruin your appetite between meals. If you must, have a piece of fruit or a serving of vegetables instead. I always find that a carrot is excellent for drawing orange things. You would think an orange would do it better, but there’s too much liquid in an orange. So it’s only good for watercolours. Although the peel is excellent for making marmalade.

I’ve deleted a paragraph here at the end, because it wasn’t terribly exciting. In case you’re wondering, it was a brief discussion about the problems involved in carrying out time and-motion studies in marmalade factories. But you knew that already. I’m becoming so predictable these days.

Neal’s Belch no. 141 for 25th June, 2004

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to live in a bank vault, under the gaze of a security camera all day.

I’m sure having your entire life recorded on tape would be fine. The problem would arise when you find out that, every forty eight hours or so, they tape over the last two days of your life to save tape. It’s not really the life for somebody with an ego. Somebody with an egg would be fine, but not somebody with an ego.

If you had an egg you could break it open and use the sharp edges of the broken shell to pick the lock once a day, sneak out to the video camera room, and replace the cassette with a new one which you have cleverly manufactured by melting down your belt using the the heat from the egg (boiled), and turning it into a video tape You can do anything if you think about it for long enough.

But you must have an egg. Which I, unfortunately, don’t.

I used to have an egg. But I got hungry, and decided to eat it. And now I don’t have an egg, I’m afraid. Still, no point crying over spilt milk.

So I’ve decided to drop the idea of living in a bank safe. It’s just not the same if you don’t have an egg. I’m going to live in a house instead. A great big one with a roof and walls and all that fancy crap, so I won’t even want an egg when I have all that. Unless I get hungry again or somthing. But that’s not likely to happen twice, is it? Hunger is not like lightning.

The only problem I’m likely to have, is if a bolt of thunder scares somebody else’s egg (perhaps a next door neighbour), the egg hatches in the confusion, the owner gets hit by a flash of lightning and dies and the chicken sees me when it hatches and thinks that I’m it’s mother.

If that happens, I’m going to have to buy food for the chicken until it gets big enough for me to trade it for a cow. When that happens, I’ll be able to milk the cow and use the milk to sterilise the back yard, which it will then be clean enough to use as a nursery for chickens. Then, eventually, I’ll have my own steady supply of eggs. So it won’t really be a problem after all.

I think my ideal home would be a three storey townhouse with a yellow brick path leading from the front gate to the back door. And a huge chimney out of which would blow white smoke from the flour that I habitually throw on my carpet to brighten the place up, usually on a wet Sunday afternoon.

But I could also be happy in a bungalow, so long as it had central heating and enough space to grow turnips and daffodils in the front garden. I don’t like to grow vegetables in the back garden. I prefer to put them proudly on display out front, right beside the road, where people can look over the wall and salivate at my beautiful turnips and rhubarbs. I like to show off.

I’m not a modest man. After all, what the hell have I got to be modest about? It’s not as if I have any imperfactons of any kind. I wish I had some ordinary human failings, so that I could identify with the rest of you. Unfortunately, I don’t, so there’s no point dreaming. Unless it’s a daydream, which is always worth it because it gets you through a boring car journey, especially if it’s a long straight road and you’re the driver.

Just try not to keep your eyes closed for too long. It worries the other road users and your passengers. People get quite uptight these days. You’re not even allowed to put wet fingers into an electric socket nowadays. You get told, by the politically correct brigade, that it’s “dangerous”, and that you might “get killed”.

Well, I’m not going to allow myself to be a slave to these old fashioned conventions. I’m going out right now to walk along the centre white line of the road outside my house. I have to, anyway. I’m applying to become a tightrope walker and I don’t have any suitable rope on which to practice. I’ll make the white line walking feel more like tightrope walking, by instructing an assistant to kick the carp out of me if I set foot on a non-painted part of the road.

That will simulate the pain that I would experience if I stepped off the tightrope.

You may be wondering why I am applying for the post of tightrope walker.

Well, it’s all a con. I’ve realised that the circus’ main office is on route to my workplace. And you get paid expenses for attending the interview, so I’m getting a free ride to work that day. I love getting things free. Yesterday I got a free trolley at my local supermarket, and I’m going to have it melted down and made into coins, which I will use to pay the deposit that most other supermarkets charge for the use of their trolleys.

By the way, while I’m on the subject, I’d like to say hello to the person who sits outside my supermarket selling stickers which say “I’ve donated”. It’s really a very clever scam.

They sell you these stickers, and you wear them on your coat so that charity collectors think you’ve already donated, and they leave you alone. And the best thing is, all of the proceeds from the sale of these stickers, go to charity.

Neal’s Belch no. 140 for 21st Jun 2004

Recently I was sitting in a waiting room, patiently waiting for the sands of time to drain out of my shoes after my long morning walk along the beach. And I noticed a fly walking up the curtain.

Not flying.

Walking.

There is a proliferation of laziness in he insect community these days. When I was younger I used to walk up the curtain three times a day to harvest the latest product of the salt spider who had a web in the corner of the ceiling just above my bedroom window.

Nowadays of course, salt is frowned upon by those who are obsessed with good health. Yet these same people think nothing of going into the sea and swimming around in millions of gallons of salt water. Absolute shamelss hypocricy.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that salt water is the cause, not only of hypocricy, but of almost every other crime, sin or unpleasantness in the world today. Take a look at your atlas.

Almost every country that was involved in World War II is located within a few thousand miles of some salt water. Personally, I live in a land that’s completely surrounded by the sea on all sides, and you don’t need to look at a map to tell you that. Just take a walk down the main shopping thoroughfares here in Dublin, Ireland, and you’ll see what I mean. People are walking along gazing into their cellphones and not looking where they’re going.

If you ask them why, as I always do, they’ll tell you they are using their phones to communicate with somebody, or spreading a bit of happiness by saying hello to a neighbour or friend. But they’re not spreading happiness toward me. Instead, they’re bumping into me and not saying “sorry”. And I’m made to look like the bad guy because I’m the one who has to point out the errors of their ways, and tell them to look where they’re goddam going.

And they growl at me. They always growl. Then their owner calls them and tugs on the lead and waves a dog biscuit at them and they invariably disappear.

That’s another thing. Everybody is suddenly obsessed with dog biscuits. Everywhere I look in this stupid country, people are eating snacks that are meant for their pets. And the dogs are going hungry.

Everywhere I look now there’s a dog who’s so thin that you can see his skeleton through his skin, assuming you have a portable x-ray machine of some sort – which most people do nowadays – and there are flyies buzzing around their heads looking for salt but not getting any because a hungry dog is not a source of salt. So the flies go hungry too.

At least the flies don’t get thirsty any more. Because, for a change, they’re not eating salt all day. So yes, there are pluses and minuses; swings and roundabouts involved in all this.

But I still don’t think it’s right.

I mean, you don’t see people eating water-buffalo when they’re walking down the street. Because everybody knows that water-buffalo can only be eaten moist. And in this all-work, no-play world in which we live, people just don’t have time to sit down and drink a glass of water with their luncheon meat. And they have even less time to pour a jug of water onto the buffalo before killing it, which is, strictly speaking, the correct preperation method for that particular food, according to the Food Safety Board of Ireland. So, quite rightly, everybody avoids water-buffalo sandwiches and instead chooses a sandwich that can be consumed without water.

So why can’t they do the same with these infernal portable telephones?

Neal’s Belch no. 139 for 18th Jun, 2004

I’ve been doing some research recently into the early days of architectural design, specifically the design and implemetation of catflaps in front doors in the mid to late eighteenth century.

In those days, of course, cats had not yet become domesticated to the extent to which they have today. So we’re pretty much talking about tigers here. Tigers took many hundreds of years to adapt to the cultural change between, on the one hand, eating a zebra which they had hunted down and killed with their teeth, and, on the other hand, sitting on a kitchen floor looking cute while somebody empties a tin of tuna onto a saucer.

Tigers were always baffled, in the early days, as to why they were made to eat off saucers. Saucers, they thought, are what you put a under a cup to catch spills. Surely plates are for eating off, not saucers. Unless they’re having milk, in which case you would have thought, surely, that the aforementioned dairy beverage would be served in a glass. Or maybe in a mug if it’s warm. But apparently not.

Then there was the ball of string thing. In their natual habitat, tigers used to make their own string by catching wild sheep, shaving them, stretching the wool on the branches of a nearby cocunut tree, dying the wool in a subsidiary of the Nile, and then selling the wool on the black market to raise enough money to buy a ball of string.

Nowadays they’re just handed a ball of string by their owners. It’s gotten far too easy. Young cats don’t know how good they’ve got it. They spend all day lying around purring and watching cartoons.

No wonder dogs get confused and are sometimes seen chasing their tails as if flattening some grass to lie on in the jungle. I think we need to do something about all this over domestication of animals. They’ve become too cocky, these cats and dogs. They’ve discovered that they can get anything they want just by being cute.

Well, I suggest we show them who’s boss. I’m going to borrow a couple of tigers and put them beside a cute little domesticated kitten, and see which one thinks he’s more believable in his role as “cat”.

Anyway, the problem with early catflaps was that tigers are bigger than humans sometimes. so instead of a cat flap in a human door, they had a human flap in the middle of a tiger door.

And it all worked perfectly fine, until humans became tired of playing second fiddle to an animal that wasn’t supposed to be living in a house. So the humans got a couple of tigers, one male and one female, and squashed them until they became small and cute. And the rest is history.

In the future, cats will become smaller and smaller until mice are no longer afraid of them. What will happen after that, is anyone’s guess.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that cats will become subserviant to mice. Mice have much better taste and self respect than to eat a cat for dinner. But I do think that mice will eventually realise that their time has come. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any of the movies in the Terminator trilogy, but I’m pretty sure that one of these days a giant naked mouse will turn up here in a time machine and enter a diner with a large weapon to steal a motorcycle.

And believe me, when that happens, we’re all bandjaxed.

So we may as well make the best of the limited time which we have left. I suggest taking up a hobby, or becoming guardian angel to a troubled boy who’s thinking of running away to join the circus but who can probably be helped to resolve most of his issues tidily in about sixty minutes, including commercials.

Personally, I have no hobbies whatsoever. I prefer to fill my spare time lying on my recliner chair thinking about the passing of time, the evolution of monkeys into human beings, the mysteries of the cosmos, the colour of the sky, the depth of the seas and the price of cabbage.

And I know what you’re going to say. There’s very little that I can do about any of those things. But that’s where you’re wrong. Take a look outside your window right now and see what the sky looks like today.

You’re welcome.

Neal’s Belch no. 137 for 15th Jun, 2004

I’ve always prided myself on keeping up with the latest fashions and trends. And in that vein, I’ve recently bought myself a pointy green hat with a three inch long flap of elastic at the front to cover my eyebrows (which of course are no longer fashionable) and a free-range eggshell glued to the top, rather like a bobble. I’m not telling you this just to show off by the way. I do have a point – it’s just that the eggshell thing fits snuggly over it so it’s not visible.

I prefer things to be rounded rather than pointy. A well-rounded person can’t hurt you by pointing the top of his or head at you and stabbing you with it. And I’ve always found that very reassuring in a world gone mad. I myself am round rather than pointy, except for my toenails, which are long and mighty.

That’s one part of my masculininty that I am not prepared to sacrifice. A man’s toenails should be maintained at a length at least long enough to be able, in theory, to turn them into noodle sticks. Don’t eat them, obviously, because you’ll hurt your back, but you can always put them on display on top of the microwave as a momento of the day when you decided you were going to be a man, and not cut your toenails

In some cultures, microwaves and other household appliances are themselves considered (mistakenly, in my opinion) to be signs of masculinity. In China, for example, a four-slice toaster means you sweat a lot. But that’s bound to happen anyway if you have your head over a toaster all day. The English prefer to make toast under the grill, and I’ve always found that to be a marvellously civilised way of doing things. You can’t get sweaty in front of a grill, unless you open the door very wide and poke your head in to see whether the toast is ready. But that shouldn’t be necessary if you have a suitably-converted egg timer, to which you have attached some sort of toast adaptor, so that it can time the toast. But you know all this already.

The point is, round things are better. Allow me to demonstrate. Take a look at the following diagrams.

So anyway, back to the toast. I prefer mine with marmalade and sunflower margarine, rather than peanut butter. But I’m prepared to tolerate differing tastes. Within limits of course.

There’s no excuse for putting cheese on anything at breakfast. Hello everybody in the USA if you’re listening. Cheese is not a breakfast food, okay? Although I can see how you would get confused, what with other dairy items, such as milk, being very widely used in morning eating sessions. But cheese is different from milk, in ways that are too subtle to explain properly here. But you’ll understand, some day. Then you’ll thank me for putting you straight. Until then, take my word for it. Cheese into breakfast doesn’t go. Ditto ham.

Personally, I prefer cereal in ice cold milk. But I always take the milk cubes out just before I eat it. Ice is re-usable, and I don’t like to put anything to waste, so I put the used milk cubes back in the freezer for later. We all must do our best to preserve the world’s precious natural resources, you know, and ice is one of those. There are polar bears who would kill for an milk cube right now. Or a Fox’s Glacier Mint. Whichever is cheaper. It’s mainly a homesickness thing. They’d probably be able to get over it and become happier if they weren’t being kept in the Sahara Desert Zoo.

Neal’s Belch no. 138 for 14th Jun, 2004

Today’s Belch will be sub-standard.

This is due to the fact that it’s hot and sunny and I want to go out and make sandcastles. So I’m in a hurry. I hope you’ll understand.

In case you don’t, I’ll repeat it for you in Irish.Ta sé te agus ta an ghrian ag something amach. I think taitneamh is the word, but I’m not sure. I’ve never had much confidence when it comes to translating meaningless sentences into obscure local languages just for the sake of showing off to foreigners, and today is no exception.

Ta brón orm.

Anyway as I sit here at my new kitchen table, on my new wobbly kitchen chair in my eight by ten bedsittingroom apartment on the outskirts of Dublin city, Ireland, I can’t help but think back on that day, in the nineteen eighies, when the late (no offence), dead (no offence) President (no offence) Ronald Reagan visited Ireland and spent a day waving at us on the television.

Now, many of you will remember my discussion some time back of the visit Pope John Paul II. At the time, I explained why it was okay, for complicated reasons to do with the local economy, for the pope to eat popcorn during his visit, despite having taken a vow of poverty.. I have since been praised by the Vatican for my fairness and accuracy in that piece, and also for my continued obeyance of the ten commandments, except the one about coveting my neighbour’s cat.

So clearly I am well qualified to speak about the snacking habits of other prominent world leaders, past present and future.

And in case that’s not enough, I’ve recently made my peace with my neighbour, and have arranged, at my own expense, for a reputable veterinary surgeon to reverse the coveting.

The late President Clinton choked to death, as you know, as a delayed result of eating one of those twig shaped things that Americans like. I can never remember what the damned things are called.

Twigs, maybe. I’ve just realised that I’m confusing him with George Bush junior. I’m sorry but I’m from Ireland and I don’t follow American politics very closely. Anyway I’m not going to bother deleting it. Every word that I type here is one of my babies. Except “twigs”. I would never be so cruel as to name a child after a piece of a tree. I would name the child first, then name the piece of the tree. Some people in this world seem to think trees are more important that human beings.

Anyway, President Reagan, while he was visiting my country, declared that he had just discovered that his ancestors were from Ballyporeen. Nobody had ever heard of Ballyporeen until then, but suddenly it was the place to be.

So everybody went there, and stood in a crowd on the street while Ronnie made a speach about something or other. I was around ten years old at the time, and I didn’t understand much of what he was saying, But I liked that routine that he did about the other queues in the supermarket always moving faster than yours.

I remember very clearly a day, back in the mid nineteen nineties, when President Clinton visited Ireland. He drank beer with the Irish head of government and his girlfriend, made a speach, went shopping with his wife and kid, paid a courtesy visit to our head of state, and helped sort out the peace process.

By the time he’d finished, it was almost lunchtime. Anyway, two cats walk into a bar.

One of them goes up to the bartender and orders a large double vodca and a saucer of milk. He doesn’t like milk, he just drinks it in front of the other cats to make him look tough. The other cat orders a large double vodca and a saucer of semi skimmed. Five minutes later he’s regretting it big time, as fifteen cats crowd round and laugh mercilessly at him.

But he doesn’t care. If there’s one thing that the cat has learned during his two years on this planet, it’s that image is nothing, thirst is everything, drink Sprite. Or was it 7up? I can never remember.

When I was a young child, 7up had an advert that was adapted from the song “Bette Davis Eyes”, which was a hit in the early eighties. It featured a very loud drum beat, which used to scare the carp out of me. So I preferred Club Orange. Nowadays, of course, I’m all grown-up, so I don’t worry about things like drums. I just get on with my life, and let them get on with theirs.

Live and let live – that’s what I always say. Well, I don’t actually say it. But I’m sure it’s relevent to all this in some way.

I told you it was going to be sub-standard today so stop whining. They’ve been mostly tolerable lately. And that’s not just me saying it. Look at this praise:

“Neal’s Belch is fantastic. I don’t know how he does it, when you’re not allowed to have pencils in prison. I think he’s, like, producing his own ink now. Like a squid or a crab or something. Or is it horses? No. Horses make glue don’t they. Whatever” – Anonymous person in the street

“So it’s a belch now is it? In my day, it was a burp. And frankly, I don’t like change.” – Anomynous reader

“I swear by Neal’s Belch. Which is cool because an oath is only valid if you use a bible, so what I do is wrap a Dilbert book in a sheet that I’ve printed off his website. Then I produce that in court and swear by it. It’s kinda like having my fingers crossed behind my back.” –Anomynous suspected criminal