Goodbye and good riddance to August, that most wicked of months ...

By Tony Galvin EDNA O'Brien was right: August is indeed a wicked month for most people â€â€ but it's hell for hacks. Now I'm not trying to rehabilitate the hussy from Clare. To my mind, as the nuns might have told her, she did indeed disgrace her county, her country â€â€ and worst of all, herself â€â€ by writing those dirty books. It was a sad day for this country when the ban on such books was lifted â€â€ the resulting tide of debauchery, licentiousness and fornication that has flooded in ever since has been the ruin of us. Bring back censorship, I say. We've lost out on so much by not having to surreptitiously pass banned books to each other. Back then we knew what sin was and if we didn't, the dog-eared pages and sweat-darkened passages soon informed us. Not that it made a lot of difference to the likes of me. Plodding through a tome such as the aforementioned Edna's Country Girls left this poor Mayo lad more bewildered than enlightened as to the secrets of you know what.[private] I knew there was a code to crack but the intricacies of the combination eluded me. I figured out it had something to do with the chemist shop, but that's as far as I got. To this day, I can't go into such an establishment for a packet of Aspirin without wondering what I missed back then and worrying whether the staff has me pegged as some kind of pervert. I'd try reading the book again, but life's too short. Repressed we may have been, confused we certainly were, but we still had the excitement, the mystery of the unknown to spur us on. What do the young lads of today have? The bookshop shelves are groaning under the weight of Fifty Shades of Grey: A manual for people who like slapping each other's arses. I missed the boat here too. The last time my arse was slapped it was for tearing off the head of my sister's doll. Yes, I was a naughty boy, but I'm afraid even my frenetic imagination couldn't stretch to enjoying the experience. My real concern here is for the propagation of the species. My generation had to search out the facts of life. Each of us built up a jigsaw of rumours, scare-stories, lies and old wives' tales until finally we were so utterly confused as to be terrified of the opposite sex. But like lemmings and a beckoning cliff top, we followed the siren call. It was more trial by error than trial and error, but we served our apprenticeships. Today, young lads are hardly finished with acne before they've learned the finer points of bondage knotting and the advantages of leather over rubber for spanking. Is this progress, I ask you? A few generations of this sort of thing and the species will have forgotten what it's all about. With half the population tied up and the other half convinced they've been put on earth to use the leather like a demented Christian Brother, I don't think we'll have to worry about a population boom. My solution? â€â€ Bring back censorship. Get back to banning Hemingway and George Orwell, Joyce and McGahern. Reawaken the inquiring mind in the young by convincing them something is being kept from them. And when you catch them, don't spare the leather. Divil a bit of harm it did us. Lenin played hurling for Mayo YOU can tell it's the silly season, when there's fuss made over Enda letting the cat out of the bag about Lenin's visit to Ireland. Sure, it's been common knowledge for years in my part of the world that not only did Lenin visit Ireland, he played hurling for Mayo in the great 1908 team. Lenin lost the run of himself when the team failed to make it out of Connacht and had all players, selectors, managers and most supporters shot in a lonely spot in the Ox Mountains known as Béal na Bocht. There was talk of a plaque and an interpretative centre doing the rounds for a while, but what with the recession and all that, it's back on the back burner. Lenin and Collins were great buddies and kept in touch. The Big Fellow's 1916 activities so impressed Lenin that he decided to have a go himself the following year â€â€ hence the 1917 Russian Revolution. Its success disappointed him. He was looking forward to being counted among the patriot dead. Vladimir Ilyich knew a thing or two about coalitions and how to arrange large majorities. When, like Enda, he found himself in a minority in pre-revolutionary Russia, his group was known as the Mensheviks, meaning smaller party. His opponents were known, in communist circles at least, as the Bolsheviks, which means bigger. Cute hoor Lenin didn't waste his time in Mayo, some say he sat on the Co Council there for a while. He began calling his smaller Menshevik grouping Bolsheviks and called the bigger grouping, the real Bolsheviks, Mensheviks. And it stuck. That's the thing about PR, whoever gets in first with a good soundbite has the race almost won. So today, as Enda's Bolsheviks prepare to devour their Labour Mensheviks, naturally our great leader's mind is on the man who helped make it all possible. Enda commands the largest majority in the history of the world and once his Bolshevik Blueshirts eat their Labour substitutes without salt, we'll have the kind of one-party state that would have made old Vladimir proud. Believe me, it's on the way. One of the first things Lenin and Co had to do when they took power was to get rid of the land-owning peasant class known as the Kulaks. This was achieved through the creation of collectivised farms and shipping off the Kulaks to the gulags. It also brought about devastating famines in the 1930s but hey, look at electronic voting, no plan is perfect. As a trained political scientist I can see the outline of a process to collectivise Irish farms being introduced via the proposal to include the value of farms when means testing for third-level grants. As soon as the farmers hear of means testing they'll abandon the land and live like White Russian exiles in their villas in the South of France. Then the Bolshevik Blueshirts will round up the 600,000 unemployed, plus at least half of the public service, and ship them out to work on the newly created collectivised farms. In one fell central planning swoop not only will the class enemy farmers be eliminated, but so too will the niggling problem of the unemployed. And then Enda will finally whip off the mask of modesty and servitude and reveal himself for the man of steel he is â€â€ Stalin. You can tell from the above why August is regarded as such a wicked month for journalists. It's not called the silly season for nothing. By now, as the month thankfully creaks to a close, most of us have scraped the barrel dry and are hallucinating and spilling out the contents of our addled minds. Running on empty is not a pleasant experience for a social commentator. The political world grinds to a halt in July but we have to freewheel along until hibernation ends, sometime in September. Yes, for the élite there are summer schools â€â€ glorified crèches for alcoholics and insomniacs â€â€ but for the likes of me there's just the painful slog. Normal service will resume as soon as possible. New wine cure for balance and mobility problems IN my desperate quest for topics to plagiarise, sorry, that should read pilfer, I mean, ponder, I came across an item that should cheer the hearts of all those who enjoy good cheer via the vino. It seems boffins have discovered there is an element in red wine that enhances mobility and balance and helps prevent falls. I know, I know, hold the jokes for a minute. Here's the science bit: Pay attention now. Experiments have established that resveratrol, an antioxidant found in dark-skinned fruits, helps older mice improve their balance and mobility. The compound has also been shown to help stave off heart disease and cancer by reducing inflammation. The best place to find resveratrol is in red wine. Mind you, there's one little snag, well at least for some. To get full advantage of this scientific breakthrough you have to drink 700 glasses of wine a day. Yes, a day. I wonder if you can get it on the medical card. My late father, a man of science, would approve. He selflessly donated his body to the advancement of medical knowledge long before he died. A man never short of a theory as far as the medicinal benefits of the black stuff was concerned, the family love to tell the story of his misguided son-in-law, who one evening tried to keep pace with him in his local hostelry. Walking home, my father noticed that his charge was a little unsteady on his feet, and was mystified. What could have caused such a dramatic deterioration after a modest feed of porter? After a lengthy contemplation of the puzzle, drawing on his many years of medical training, he came to the conclusion that has gone down in family folklore â€â€ 'it must be a problem with his inner ear' â€â€ nothing at all to do with the ten pints consumed. Sadly, he didn't live to see the curative red wine breakthrough, but somewhere he's smiling at a fellow theoretician's theory being proved. Quote of the Week 'Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.' â€â€ Mark Twain[/private]