Dan – the Don Juan of Derry

My eldest son has morphed from a little boy who once loved Power Rangers and Ben10 to a mini lothario. Forget Hugh Heffner, Derry has its own version of the Playboy king and his name is Daniel O’Neill.
The boy had a ‘steady’ girlfriend in Primary Three. They fell out and ‘split up’ over a Hello Kitty handbag. Things were going swimmingly until near the end of Christmas term. The cracks started to appear in their relationship just as the school broke for the holidays. The Hello Kitty handbag was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
She loved that bag and wanted him to carry it for her, he wasn’t so fussed to be seen sporting a pink handbag with a diamante cat blazoned across the front. A battle of wills erupted beside the recycle bin in the canteen and nether would back down. Their primary three love affair was all over in a heartbeat and I had to bring back my mother of the groom outfit.
This year my petite playboy has been throwing girl’s names around like confetti. This one loves his Belfast accent, that one thinks his spiky hair is really cool, that other one thinks he was so brave not to cry when he got his teeth out. There’s a gaggle of girls around him in the street and in the playground.
I found three cards in his school bag before Valentines Day. All from young ladies in his class professing undying love for the little guy.
He used to be a shy little boy, would never speak up or talk to a stranger. Now he’s telling his friend’s aunt that she’s ‘a babe’ and telling the girl behind the till in the shop that she has really nice eyes. He walks with a swagger, winks at passing girls and has women of all ages falling at his feet.
He wont wear average clothes and wants to style his own hair – apparently nice, sensible brushed down curtain parting is no longer in fashion. Since like when exactly?
I am actually thinking of distributing a questionnaire around his class to find a suitable and sensible girlfriend for my boy.
All A-type answers win 10 points, all other answers win a restraining order.

Question 1. What are you going to be when you grow up?
a/ A solicitor
b/ An exotic dancer
c/ A traffic warden

Question 2. Have you ever been in prison?
a/ No, never
b/ Yes, I have served ‘hard time’
c/ Yes, but only while visiting my father

Question 3. Is Hello Kitty a big feature in your life?
a/ Hello who?
b/ She’s fabulous, she is my life
c/ Yes, in fact I have a Hello Kitty bag that I just adore

Question 4. How important is the mother-in-law?
a/ Super important. I would do everything in my power to make her happy
b/ She’s OK, but like I call the shots
c/ Couldn’t care less about her. I’m going to take her son away and turn him into my actual slave. She might never see him again

Or I could set about organising a dating show along the same lines as the US reality show Momma’s Boys. This is a dating reality show in which a group of bachelorettes vie for the affection of three eligible bachelors – but they must also win the approval of the bachelors' possessive mother. The mothers live with their sons throughout the competition, offering lots of nagging, opinions, arguments and much shooing away of what they feel are undesirable women.
I feel for these poor Mums. No matter what measures they pull out – 24-hour nagging, screaming, crying, blackmail, threats to kill etc – their sons tend to gravitate away from the sensible primary school teacher types the mammies love towards ladies who wouldn’t necessarily be offended by the title ‘Hoochie Mama’.
Who knows what the future holds? What is clear is that he has obviously inherited his father’s irresistible charm with regards female human beings. I can only use these pages as a medium from which to warn others.
Lock up your daughters – and your mothers, aunts, sisters etc – ladies man Daniel O’Neill is on the scene.

News from Japan...

A friend of ours lives in Tokyo, Japan. John and his wife Sonny thankfully escaped the worst of the earthquake and tsunami that ripped through the country last week. I spoke with him during the week and wrote a piece for the Derry Journal. Here it is...

Derry man John Gormley has become accustomed to little earthquakes that gently rock Tokyo on a weekly basis. In fact a small shake rattles the contents of his desk as he speaks with me.
He has lived and worked in Japan for seven years now. He married a Japanese girl and they will welcome a new baby in the summer. As he describes the contents of his standard issue earthquake survival kit – hardhat, water and energy bars – I can’t help feeling that he’s a long way from his childhood Rock Road home.
John, whose family own Gormley’s Shoe Shop in Ferryquay Street, felt the devastating earthquake that shook Japan last week, bringing with it the terrible force of a deadly Tsunami. From the top of his office block looking over a sprawling Tokyo he saw mammoth skyscrapers sway and shake like plastic toys, fires blazing around Tokyo Bay, people on the street running for shelter from falling debris.
“I was in my office on the 31st floor of the Mori Roppongi Hills building,” said John. “It’s right in the heart of central Tokyo, overlooking Tokyo Bay.”
“Earthquakes occur frequently in Tokyo and usually they start off with gentle rocking of the building. This one was no different except it quickly gained in strength and lasted for at least a couple of minutes.
“The fact that the building is designed to withstand earthquakes means that the building rocked more from side to side and the rocking/swaying lasted for much longer, maybe 10 minutes.
“The first big earthquake was followed by another around 7.2 magnitude and this went on every 15 to 20 minutes for around two hours. The aftershocks continued long into the night, although in decreasing magnitude.
“People were very frightened as people in Tokyo have been expecting a direct hit for some time now. A big earthquake in Tokyo is now overdue according to seismologists by around 10 years.
“I looked out my office window at other large buildings and they were swaying a lot. I actually saw some guys cleaning windows on the tall ball building opposite and their ‘cleaning boat’ was swaying violently from side to side. Even though they were strapped in they were holding on for dear life.”
John says that everyone in Japan is well aware of the standard earthquake procedures they must follow. These measures are even taught in school.
All of John’s staff has an earthquake pack, containing water, energy food and a standard construction type hat. He says some people wear the hats, some don’t. Earthquakes are so commonplace that many people don’t concern themselves too much with them. But this one was different.
“First thing I did was to open the door of the office to make sure that the door frame didn't warp with the shaking and thereby lock me in the office,” he says.
“When things seemed to settle, I looked out the window and immediately noticed large plumes of smoke and fires in the bay. There were a couple of huge fires in the industrial area of the bay. I think they were petrol-chemical plants. There was also smoke coming for maybe another five or six buildings. That was very strange to see.
“We only evacuated the building two hours later as there is more danger on the street with flying glass and things falling off buildings/buildings collapsing.
“It was very orderly on the streets. No panic. No disorder. People remained courteous and calm.
“There were no trains, queues for buses and taxis were so long that the only way home was to walk. It took around three hours due to the amount of people on the roads and the constant aftershocks making people stop and make sure they were not going to get hit by something potentially deadly falling from buildings.”
In the days that followed John flew his pregnant wife Sonny to Singapore after concerns over radiation leaking from the damaged Fukishima Plant 150 miles away from Tokyo.
Fears about radiation, food, water and acid rain have been simmering throughout Japan despite constant reassurances by authorities.
Japan's national police agency said 8450 people have been confirmed dead and 12,931 were officially listed as missing as a result of the disaster – a total of 21,381. About 360,000 people have been displaced from their homes and have taken shelter in evacuation centres. With more earthquakes reported off the coast of Japan in recent days John is, quite rightly, concerned.
“Right now, the advice of most foreign embassies is to leave Tokyo. This has caused a lot of concern. I moved my pregnant wife to Singapore a couple of days after the big quake and when it became obvious there were concerns around radiation leakages. This is still the biggest concern here.
“People have been advised to wear masks, stay out of the rain and stay indoors if possible. Other concerns are that there are power outages, food and petrol shortages and transportation is not working at full capacity.
“This combined with more earthquakes around other parts of the coast of Japan have made most people nervous about what is going to happen. A lot of people do not believe what the government is telling them in terms of the nuclear reactors.
“There is a definite fear of radiation, it has been detected in the air and in the water in Tokyo so there is a definite unease. The government reports are that it is not harmful but most people would rather do without it.”
John is monitoring the situation daily and is back at work at Barclays Capital offices in downtown Tokyo. He is taking the advice of the government and avoiding the water and what locals have branded the acid rain.
His wife, Sonny, remains safely in Singapore.

Hope you've brought your wallet Ms ToothFairy....

Our eldest boy went in for his operation last week. Nothing big or serious, just seven teeth removed under anaesthetic. But if you were trying to gauge the seriousness by closely monitoring my freaking out levels, you would have thought he was going in for major heart surgery, plus a head transplant.
Teeth or no teeth it wasn’t all a walk in the park. We had some concerns and therefore my levels of stress were justified. The boy is asthmatic. The doctor, just out of earshot of Daniel, informed me that sticking breathing tubes into his airways could irritate them and set off a severe attack. I smiled maniacally at him and nodded, trying not to let the boy see that I was on the verge of an actual heart attack.
The doctor also informed me that because he had just had yet another chest infection, there was a small possibility that the breathing apparatus could project infection deep into his lungs and therefore give him deadly pneumonia. I nodded and smiled like a lunatic.
Then there was the small matter of his father taking a severe allergic reaction to anaesthetic and almost dying. But the doctor explained that we wouldn’t know if Daniel had inherited that particularly nasty problem until he was under. Again I smiled, nodded and forced myself not to fall onto the floor, hug that doctor’s legs and beg him not to operate.
So what if he has like 12 too many teeth? I’ll buy extra toothpaste, it’s no bother. Maybe another toothbrush, we could tape the two of them together. Could we not just take those teeth out ourselves? I know this old trick with a doorknob and a length of string.
But no, the doctor told me that it was crucial that this problem was sorted, by professionals who didn't use string and doors as their tools. And it needed to be sorted today.
So we sat there on the hospital bed waiting our turn. Me trying my very best not to look absolutely terrified, him pondering what the tooth fairy’s going rate is.
Then they came for us, the hospital porters, like green-gowned helpers to an executioner and whizzed us down to the guillotine, I mean operating theatre.
I have been in a fair few scrapes in my day. I’ve had my very existence threatened. But that was me, not my precious son. I can honestly say that I have never been more terrified than I was walking behind my boy’s bed on our way to that theatre.
Yes, it was only teeth, yes it was only simple but that was my boy and there was the asthma, the pneumonia, the deadly allergic reaction. I was handing his life over to strangers who were going to knock him out and cut him open.
As the anaesthetist, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Alexei Sayle, wrestled with my boy to get him to keep a gas mask on, I tried not to cry.
I almost threw up with nerves but I kept smiling at him, reassuring him, and repeating ‘everything’s grand’ over and over in the hope that if I said it enough times I would start believing it myself.
I held it together until he went under; I went out of the room and then almost needed sedated myself. The poor theatre nurse tried to reassure me – while fishing tissues out of her pocket– that all was but I knew this would be the longest hour of my entire existence.
I sat there in the waiting room literally watching the hands of the clock, glide super slowly on. It was hell’s bells on a bike. I never want to experience terror like that again.
As I sat I thought on those parents in the wards above who’s children have serious complaints, life-threatening illnesses. I saw many of them that day – sitting beside cots with their precious babies hooked up to beeping and whizzing machines, reading books to their sick sons, playing Barbie with little girls wearing oxygen tubes as well as pretty pink hair bands. My heart broke a hundred times for them and I offered up a prayer that they would find the strength to carry on from somewhere.
My boy recovered from his ordeal quite quickly. Within two hours he was sat up in bed demanding ice cream and asking if the tooth fairy had been informed of the situation. It’ll take a little while longer until my nerves recover though.

Monsters aren't afraid of the light....

I remember being so terribly scared of the dark when I was a child that my mother had to tell me The Three Bears story over and over until I went to sleep. There were times when the poor woman had to repeat that tale 20 times. If she attempted to slip out of the room before I was fast asleep she claims I would squeal like a banshee and she’d have to repeat the whole process again.
These are either ludicrously over-exaggerated claims or the woman has me mixed up with my older sister – people have always told me I was always a very pleasant child. But I do remember my poor, tired mother having to run repeatedly up and down the stairs to check wardrobes for monsters and under beds for gremlins.
I remember being asked to attend a sleepover at my friend’s house when I was a kid. My mother was reluctant to let me go, probably didn’t want some other unfortunate to have to endure the nightly routine of 150 very similar versions of the same Three Bears tale. But she let me go, with a parental advisory warning along the old ‘scared of the dark’ theme.
My friend’s parents were very religious and helpfully supplied a fancy nightlight they had purchased at Knock or Lourdes. It was a two-foot tall crucifix with Our Lord on it. The body of the crucified Jesus bathed that room in a gentle orange light, a plastic heart above his head pulsated with red light. My friend’s parents grew tired of the hysterical screaming at around 9pm and called my weary mother to take me home. If I wasn’t afraid of the dark before that night, I certainly was after.
Now it’s payback time. My middle son has a level seven fear of the dark.
It started maybe a year ago with Caolan waking in the night screaming about monsters. Our nights since have been peppered since then with visitations from the little man at our bedside wailing about monsters, vampires, ghosts and gremlins.
Most nights I have to rise from bed and accompany him back to his to reassure him that there is nothing more frightening than a fine selection of smelly socks under his bed.
The onset of these night terrors may or may not have been directly connected to the purchase of monster-themed curtains which were purchased at a half price sale at Dunelm Mill last year. There is no evidence to directly link the two, but let’s just say the purchase and the nightmares started within days, nay hours, of each other.
Secondary to this was the introduction of a large wardrobe into his room. Everybody who’s anybody knows that monsters hide in wardrobes during the day and pounce out when darkness falls. Everyone also knows that the size of the wardrobe is directly correlated to the size of the monster. And this is a huge wardrobe. I’d say it would comfortably house a gigantic monster, if not two large ones at a squeeze.
I bought him a nightlight but then there’s the darkness in the hall. We put on the hall light, but then there’s the advanced darkness on the stairs that the monsters can hide in. I don’t know how many times I’ve told him, if monsters are going to get him, a bit of light won’t put them off. Monsters are not one bit afraid of the light. They’re not like vampires. Vampires might explode into dust if you shine the hall light on them, monsters would just look at you with their big slobbering mouths, orange eyes and fangs and laugh at you for being so very silly.
We’ll just have to work on toughening the boy up.
I got over the fear of the dark thing many years ago although, truth be told, I still ensure all wardrobe doors are firmly shut to keep the monsters in and I still sprint into bed after switching off the light so that the gremlins don’t get me.

Peppa Flipping Pig...

We’ve gone through a lot of phases in our house over the years with regards most favourite people on TV, or to give them their proper title – level seven obsessions.
There was a time that the Wiggle’s ruled the roost. It was wall-to-wall Sam, Murray, Jeff and Anthony and that big octopus thing in a dress. Aliens could have landed, taken over the world and begun their evil plan of annihilation outside our window – all broadcast live on Sky TV – and we would have been none the wiser, more concerned were we about Captain Feathersword’s misplaced eye-patch.
Then there was Thomas the flipping Tank Engine. We literally watched thousands of hours of Thomas falling into lakes and spilling barrels of popcorn oil all over the tracks. Quite frankly if I was the Fat Controller I’d have given him his marching orders long ago. He may well be a very useful engine but his track record for accidents is utterly appalling.
We went through a Power Rangers phase recently, programmes which are torturous to watch if you’re over the age of seven. The aliens in those programmes are just unrealistic and the enemy soldiers who hop menacingly towards battle? There methods are plain impractical. If that were a real war time situation, those lads would be beyond exhausted before the fighting even kicked off.
These days as the older boys gravitate more towards computer games our two-year-old, Finn the destroyer, has commandeered the television and remote control and it’s now wall-to-wall Peppa Pig and Postman Pat.
In my expert opinion Peppa Pig leads such a mediocre existence that she doesn’t deserve to have her own TV show. After a six-hour Peppa Pig marathon I honestly don’t know what the programmers were thinking making a documentary about a little girl pig who does nothing more exciting than go to playgroup or jump in muddy puddles. I wouldn’t mind if she was extraordinarily talented at, for example, painting but quite frankly her poster paint depiction of her father was rather flat, colourless and rubbish. And that song she sings about a big balloon, I woke in the night screaming after listening to that being rewinded and played continuously for an hour.
Postman Pat is another obsession. We must watch Pat roam aimlessly around the countryside talking to his cat for hours upon hours. I truly wish that something exciting would happen to illuminate poor Pat’s life, maybe an armed robbery at Greendale post office, a meteor strike at the railway station or even the army cordoning off the main street after suspecting one of his parcels of containing Anthrax. The man must surely be distraught at his lot in live, he leads such a dull existence.
There was one brief moment during a particularly uneventful Postman Pat themed weekend that made me sit up and take slightly more notice. Pat had acquired himself a fancy helicopter and I thought things might heat up a little. Perhaps some mountain rescue action or James Bond-style hanging from the base of the chopper. But no, he used it to deliver letters and a giant ice cube with his cat as his actual co-pilot.
Being infuriatingly pedantic I complement my son’s favourite programmes with a running commentary of faults and flaws.
Cats in Choppers? That’s just dangerous. What good would a cat be if Pat had an engine malfunction and went spiralling at top speed towards the ground? None, that’s what. Everyone knows cats can’t drive or fly, their feet don’t reach the pedals.
The way things are going we shall get our remote control back in 2022. By that time robots will be reading the news and they’ll be flying cars in Albert Square.