Archive for January 2009
School days
Funny isn’t it the type of stuff you remember from your school days. I have some great memories from my time in Cavan’s Royal School, but I have one over-arching regret,
There was a teacher (I won’t name her to save her blushes) who was, quite frankly, on another planet, and she was unashamed at demonstrating how out of touch she was by saying really stupid things. Now one of the girls in my class was a very good-looking female called Juliet (not her real name). Actually she didn’t really do anything for me but my good friend Keith really fancied her. Now on one occasion this teacher made one of her many verbal gaffes, prompting Juliet to titter uncontrollably, whereupon the teacher turned to her and prophesied: “There will be a time in the future when you take your Leaving Cert results out of the drawer or wherever you’ll keep them and you will say to yourself ‘I now wish I had worked harder when I was at the Royal School.’ “
The moral of this story is that I often think of MY leaving cert results and my not inconsiderable achievements since then, and I say to myself. “I wish I hadn’t worked nearly as hard.”
Greed
We have all heard about how the wages of sin are death, and that he who is consumed by greed ends up being literally consumed by it? Very biblical, almost worth of the Martyrs’ Memorial Church in Belfast, but an event in Somalia shows just how true these adages are.
Two months’ ago the pirates operating with apparent impunity off the coast of Somalia hit the big time when they captured the Saudi oil tanker Sirius which was estimated to be carrying one quarter of the Saudi kingdom’s daily oil output. Well it seems a ransom was paid – in the region of $3m last week. Certainly a helicopter was seen hovering over the ship and dropping a bag. After this the ship and its crew were released.
Then greed got the better of the pirates. They decided to make a rough division of the spoils, pocketing something like $150.000 each, and jumped into a speed boat with the intention of disappearing with their loot. Sad to say the sea was, as they say in Cornwall, a bit lumpy, and their speed-boat capsized. Some of the pirates managed to swim to shore, but alas their money was gone. One pirate sadly didn’t make it; his body has been washed ashore but with the money in his pockets. Some of it is okay but the rest has to be separated and dried, something his family say could take weeks.
Where did the wave come from? Was it not a reminder that man may count himself materially rich but he is as nought when compared with the forces of nature or, dare I say it, the wrath of the Divine?
There is a lesson here for those greedy bastards who arrogantly claim to govern us and who are at this moment cooking up new schemes to steal the widows’ mites so that they and their relatives can live like princes.
