There are persistent rumours that the secretive Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is planning a rare foreign ttrip to Cavan later in the year to inaugurate a link between Cavan’s Johnston Central Library and the Kim Il-Sung Central Library in Pyongyang. This will include a public lecture in the library on “The Diocese of Kilmore and Korea in the Later Middle Ages”, given by the library’s preferred little darling of a historian, Dr Brendan Scott.

Thank goodness the Christmas piss-fest is coming to an end, though there are still those who want to drag it out. I really feel that Christmas should be renamed Cuntsmas as it seems to give so many people an opportunity to act like cunts.

The world seems to be so full of hatred that any signs of love and amity are deeply hidden. If we have one New Year’s resolution surely it should be: “Let’s try to hate people less in 2009”.

I can say, hand on heart, that I cannot understand people who hate large sections of their fellow men. It is true that there are some people I dislike intensely. These include people I have never met and do not wish to meet, like North Korea’s “dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il and Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe. There are others closer to home. Usually these are people whom I’ve never met but who have arrogantly decided that they can treat me with disrespect. I make friends for life, and enemies as well. I’ve always worked hard to try and overcome any disabilities I have. I see myself as a winner, but sometimes I get well tired. These people may have brains that make an average pea look like a football, but at the end of the day they are “bigger than me”.
I’d like to send them my special malediction this Christmas. They include Dr Brendan Scott, Research Officer of Cavan’s County Museum. Until this summer he was just a name. I’ve never met him but yet he decided to snub me by not inviting me to his little conference. Why? I’ve heard that it was “because there had been trouble between me and the museum, but it had been before his time, and the second reason, because he didn’t want to embarrass me. How nice and considerate Dr Scott. Are you sure it hadn’t more to do with a fear that I might embarrass you by my presence?
But why dwell in the past. Any plans for conferences this year? How about one on Masturbation in 17th century. Get people who are REALLY big this year, like Bruce Forsythe or maybe Britney Spears. Pricey, but sure fuck it the council will pay. This isn’t hatred: it’s just pity.

People with flashy and gaudy titles signifying nothing always remind me of Francisco Macias Nguema, first president of Equatorial Guinea. He amassed quite a bag-full of titles before his nephew ousted and shot him – he’d also ordered all the people in his country, called by some the Belsen of Africa – to be happy, on pain of death. One of these silly titles was El gran milagro – the great miracle. Did he believe he was miraculous, especially as he stood in front of the firing squad at Malabo’s Black beach?
 
And then there is Dr Scott’s boss, County Manager Jack Keys. I was told informally that one of the reason’s he didn’t reply to my letter was that he was sick. I have tremendous sympathy for anyone who is ill, but if I am prevented through illness from working so many people smile indulgently, shrug their shoulders and say that it’s proof that in spite of all my bluster and rhetoric I cannot and never can operate at the same level of an able-bodied person. His illness however is the result of the great strain and responsibility he has to carry, and if anything is viewed as almost an inevitable though unwelcome side-effect of his job.

This New Year I feel slightly uneasy – under threat in fact, not from any hob-goblins who may be swimming around, or from any of the multifarious baddies and criminals who are lurking in the undergrowth. No, I feel threatened by An Gardai Siochana, especially the goons attached to the station in Ballyconnell Co. Cavan. I haven’t done anything – I am a paragon of civic virtue. The gardai should be protecting my welfare and defending my peace; instead they are only interested in aiding and abetting criminals from beyond our shores. The gardai may not know it but there are criminals who are NOT Nigerians.

But I want to be happy and have a laugh. One of my mottoes for 2009 is “Don’t give a shit for little pricks”. I’m going to settle down nearer the witching hour with my darling Rosie, maybe a glass of fine scotch, and waft into a sea of domestic calm and good will. I might sing Auld Lang Syne, but I doubt it as I’m determined to remain sober.

There are a couple of people I want to send new Year’s greetings to. The staff of the Cavan Echo, as well as my dear readership. I also want to send gree4tings to my dear friend Noel Monahan. Let us hope that 2009 will be a year of verdant verbiculture.

So Happy New Year and remember, it’s only 358 days till Christmas.

But the personality cult of Kim Jong-Il and Daddy Kim is nothing if not hilarious. I remember a documentary about an ophthalmic surgeon who visited North Korea to carry out some eye operations. One of their patients was a woman who had gone blind twenty years’ earlier. On the day after the surgery the cameras stood to attention as the bandages were taken off. The woman cried: “I can see, I can see, and it’s all thanks to our Dear Leader Kim Jong-il”. Now if I had been the ophthalmic surgeon I might very well have said: “Well if that’s how you feel about it love you can shove it up your arse; a bit of gratitude wouldn’t go amiss.”

Few people outside the Hermit Kingdom know anything about daily (or nightly) life there. It is a little known fact that couples are told, upon getting married, that they must praise the Dear Leader when they experience an orgasm. The man is supposed to exclaim on coming: “Oh All praise to the Dear Leader for filling my balls with such copious quantities of spunk” while the woman is expected to scream: “It is only in the paradise which has been made by the Dear Leader for his people that I am able to experience such earth-moving pleasure.…” The ears of the secret police are everywhere, and failure to respond appropriate to the Big O can result in transportation to a labour camp or even execution, not to mention arrest of one’s close family.

Yet in the past few days photographs have appeared showing the Dear Leader with his buddies in the military as well as one of him attending a concert. The western media seemed to have been taken in by this into believing that all is well in the hermit kingdom. Has no one heard of doubles? Every dictator has had them, including Winston Churchill. Enver Hoxha’s double, Petar Shapallo, had an awful time of it, and when Hoxha died children used to throw stones at him in the street, prompting him to attempt suicide.

Now I have no desire to try and put my fingers into the Dear Leader’s sides or anything like that, but I don’t believe he’s really back.