I fail at blogging. I fail hard. If you were to compare my level of failure to something in history I reckon I'm about tied with Neville Chamberlain's failed policy of appeasement with Germany leading to World War II...
It's not that I don't want to, I just can't handle the commitment. For most normal people, spending half an hour once a week on a task would be perfectly acceptable. If I do anything for more than thre or four weeks at a time it feels as if I've been asked to clean out the Augean Stables...
So to make up for that here's SUPER SPECIAL DOUBLE BUMPER EXTENDED EDITION!!!!! of the 'weekly' Bank update. That's FIVE exclamation marks, mutha-fuckas... That's how sorry I am.
Ireland has a magazine called the RTE Guide. It's a TV listings magazine, published every week. I guess it's a bit like the Radio Times over here. At Christmas they made a 'bumper' edition with two whole weeks' worth of listings and many other special treats. It was at least double the size and of sturdier stock than the regular weekly version, built to last the many thumbings of two whole weeks and at that weeks where TV watching tends to be done at a much greater rate than usual.
It'd probably contain an interview with Marty Whelan (who you won't know) and perhaps Teresa Lowe (who you definitely won't know - probably even if you're Irish). There'd be an interview with Dustin the Turkey (don't ask) It might have a picture of Gay Byrne (who?) in a cardigan beside a crackling fire.
We didn't have a whole lot of money growing up, and a glossy magazine with TV listings for lots of satellite channels we coudn't afford, and maybe a Q&A with Bryan Dobson (now I'm being deliberately obscure) was definitely an unnecessary extravagance. Other families I knew bought it every week, and some, in what seemed like an almost inmaginable luxury, would even have collections of the magazine; an unintended archive containg nothing more meaningful than endless recaps of the week's Coronation Street and Fair City (please don't ask - it's embarrassing)
Christmas was different, though. Christmas is when even families with tight budgets buy minor indulgences for sheer joy, and the RTE Guide Bumper Edition was one of those. I can remember tearing it from its plastic wrapper, admiring its considerable thickness, and flicking through the glossy pages filled with horoscopes, z-list celebrity interviews and other light entertainment nonsense.
I would pore over the pages of listings, noting all the glorious movies I would watch over the Christmas break, working out exactly schedule was needed to maximise the number of good movies one could watch over two weeks. I would read over and over the listings for the three most important days: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and St. Stephen's Day. These were given in a different colour; marked out in red or green and adorned with snowflakes to differentiate them from the more prosaic offerings of the Christmas holiday.
The RTE Guide Bumper Edition was the first real material proof that Christmas was on its way. Picking out what was to be watched on TV was a sort of dress rehearsal for the real thing: A wonderful thought-experiment which allowed a first visualisation of an event that seemed so monumental and distant as to be largely unknowable the whole way through October and November. Within those glossy pages was contained not just TV listings, but the very idea of Chistmas.
The RTE Guide Bumper Edition would perform its duties admirably for the two weeks it lay around the house, until it was time for it to be thrown, in its now morose and sorry state, in the dustbin along side the Christmas tree and the cheaper of the decorations. It's demise may have been inglorious, but for those two weeks it was the undisputed king of magazines: It was the bringer of Christmas, and it was a stately, serene mercury, confident in its position of arbiter of two weeks of festive entertainment.
I've forgotten to write about Bank, haven't I? Shit... Sorry about that... It's coming right up...
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