Dreadful Nonsense

I had a very disturbing and quite surreal conversation with my mother last night, in which she insisted that the swans that used to live on Dublin canal have been eaten by the Romanian refugees, who view them as a delicacy. She also claimed that the ducks from Stephens Green have been eaten too. She is usually a very rational woman, my mother, and not given to flights of fancy, although when she claimed the source for her news was the Marian Finucane show, I did begin to worry.

Even though I was convinced this wasn’t true, I emailed a couple of friends in Dublin to see if they’d heard these rumours. One of them answered, telling me that me about “how the Eastern Europeans have managed to get their hands on every pet rodent in the city. There are even reports of a break-in to Dublin zoo”, before telling me that I was an idiot, and that there are better things in this world to be preoccupied with.

But the fact that my mother is now telling me about this means that, somewhere out there, people are believing it. I’ve searched the usual news sites on the net to see if I can find out if someone has believed it enough to write about it, but haven’t had any luck so far. My mother swore that she heard it from accountable sources, but then used the words "Today FM" and "Joe Duffy" and so we laughed in her face and mocked her until she cried.

In other news -

1. The Guardian Best Blog results are up, resulting in some more places I can waste my lunchtimes hanging around, although the winner’s site seems to have crashed – probably due to increased traffic. Also, only one of the 20 shortlisted was blocked by my work firewall. I thought that was interesting. Just me? Okay.

2. Comedy fan makes quick buck selling oversized t-shirt on ebay. I’ve got one of these, given to my by a friend who attended the recording. I’ll be keeping an eye on this

This entry was posted on 26 September 2002 at 2:36 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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