Leprechauns speak out!

Monday, December 07, 2009

Ever heard of Mizzenwood ireland?

Mizzenwood at the height of tourist season

You don't see anyone? Maybe its because everyone is home watching the radio!

Gentle Reader,

I suppose every country has one, A uncle Charlie (or in this case a town that sits in the corner  and provides such fun that even though it should have been removed years ago to make room for the chicken coop just seems to engender such memories that folks are loath to do any thing that would remove disturb it. Or in the case of Uncle Charlie, not even wake him for breakfast (He hasn't had breakfast for more that 40 years!

Such is a town just down the road from Mallow. Its name is Mizzenwood! How it got its name I don't know. You might look it up yourself. Besides that's not my point. 

I wanted to tell you about the one of the family that live in this quaint little village .  

For the past hundred and fifty years, members of the Shelf family have lived in Mizzenwood, a town in the south of Ireland. You'll find their family home about a mile outside the town – it's a seventy-three room mansion at the end of a long driveway.

Thinker Shelf inherited the house in the late 19th century, and he lived there with his wife, Maria, until his death in 1943. Maria lived for another seventeen years, and during this time her cousin, Deer Killing-Bee, came to live with her in the Shelf family home. They often used to play chess together, but Maria had a slightly different version of the game. She added in another piece – the Tin Man from ‘The Wizard of Oz’. Maria had only ever seen a stage version of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. It was a local theatre production in which the Tin Man was played by someone called Ron. Ron got drunk and puked in his tin suit, so the only move the Tin Man chess piece could perform was to fall over and talk incomprehensibly for half an hour, which is useful if you need a break from the game. It allows much more time for drinking and talking incomprehensibly, which is what Maria and Deer normally used the move for. They thought it was unlikely that the Tin Man could drink so much while all of the pieces around him were teetotallers, so the other chess pieces developed drink problems too. The pawns could only move at certain times of the day. The bishop always managed to stay upright, but he wouldn’t move at all. The knight would fall off his horse after one square, so it could move one square in any direction and then fall onto a square around it, which was randomly chosen.

Their game of chess went on for years without any end in sight. It was one long drunken haze for Deer and Maria. One night, after Maria’s king had had a bit to drink, he moved onto the same square as her queen and he started telling her that he’d completely forgotten how great she looked in black. He hadn’t gone anywhere near her in over a year, so to make the mood a bit more romantic, Maria turned off the lights and lit candles. But she left one of the candles a bit too close to the curtains and they caught fire. The room was gutted, but because of a huge stroke of luck the fire didn’t spread too far beyond that room.

The gardener lived with his wife, Alice, in a cottage on the Shelf estate. Alice was reading a book about Sir Francis Drake but she lost it, and she couldn’t find it anywhere. They had just got a new dog at the time and they were trying to come up with a name for him. Alice decided to call him ‘Drake’. Just after she gave him this name, the dog went running off through the fields, but he came back ten minutes later with the book about Drake in his mouth. This gave Alice the idea of using a similar method to find her wedding ring, which she’d lost a few days earlier, so she changed the cat’s name to ‘Wedding Ring’. Wedding Ring ran through the fields too, but it didn’t come back at all. Alice tried to find it by changing the hamster’s name to ‘The Cat’, but The Cat wouldn’t go beyond the door.

Alice finally found the cat two days later, stuck in a tree. It had found her wedding ring in a magpie’s nest. The cat seemed to be locked in a staring contest with a magpie. It must have been in that position for two days, and Alice didn’t know how to get it down, so she called the fire brigade, and she told them that there was a fire in the house, to make sure they’d come. They were just leaving the fire station when Maria started the fire with the candle, so they were able to put it out before it spread too far, and the house was saved.

Nowadays, the greatest threat to the house is old age. It’s been gradually decaying for the past few decades. Maria’s son, Andrew, was one of the greatest political leaders this country has ever known, and he always did his best to keep the house in good condition, but ever since his death it’s faded badly. Andrew’s seven daughters live there now, along with their robot, Alan. The decay of the house is causing one or two problems – things falling on their heads and so forth. They’re old now and they can’t take a blow to the head like they used to. The youngest of the sisters, Abigail, is sixty-nine and the oldest, June, is nearly ninety. Sean is in his seventies, and it shows. He was made out of wood. He has no features – no eyes or mouth or ears or nose – just a smooth oval shaped head. He looks like a wooden string puppet, only much bigger (he’s just over five foot in height). When he moves, it looks almost as if his limbs and head are attached to strings, as if someone is controlling him from above. People always look for strings when they first see him move, but they never find any.

Something needs to be done about these things falling on their heads, but they don’t have much money to spend on repairs. If they had the money they’d renovate the whole house, but they can only do what they can afford. The most immediate priority is the loose plaster on the ceilings, so they hire a local man, Jimmy, to do something about that. Jimmy works with his younger brother, Dan. They spend three weeks removing any loose plaster( As I read this to my wife I said pastor and she cracked up so it is loose pastor from here on out. I guess I do do have as crew loose somewhere down the blog) and patching the holes, and on the Thursday of the final week, there’s a visitor to the house. It’s a cousin of the sisters, Inny Light. She comes to see them about once a year to remind them of how much money she has. They always show her around the house and let her make all the comments she wants to make (like ‘we have one of those that isn’t covered in woodworm’). If you give her as many opportunities as possible for making those comments, she’ll exhaust her supply and leave early.

When they get to the room where Jimmy and Dan are working, she talks about how the fireplace would look better if it didn’t have a cat in it, and how the whole room would seem more human if it didn’t have workers staring at holes in the ceiling. But then she notices a table that’s covered in screws, and she doesn’t know what to say about that. There’s a very obvious comment to make about it – about how it’s covered in screws – but why would it be covered in screws? (See what I mean about a screw loose?)

One of the sisters, Annabel, notices her looking at the table and she says, “I see you’ve noticed our table. Would you like to see how it works?”

“Works? How do you mean?”

“It’s simple. You screw a screw into it and the table will tell you what type of screw it is.”

“It tells you what type of screw it is? How?”

“I’ll show you.”

Jimmy and Dan get down from their ladders to look at this. Annabel takes a small hand drill out of a box under the table. She finds a clear area on the surface of the table and makes a hole in it. She then screws a brass screw into the hole and waits. After a few seconds a voice says, “Brass.”

Inny is amazed. So is Dan, but Jimmy got the impression that the voice came from the direction of Sean, the robot. Sean doesn’t have a mouth, so it’s difficult to tell if he actually said it.

“I’d like to see that again,” Jimmy says. “Maybe the table always says ‘brass’, no matter what type of screw you put into it.”

Jimmy slowly moves towards Sean as Annabel makes another hole in the table and this time she screws an iron screw into the hole. A few seconds later, the voice says, “Iron,” and this time Jimmy knows it’s the robot who said it, but Inny is still convinced that the voice came from the table.

“That’s amazing,” she says. “We don’t have anything like that at home. How much do ye want for it?”

“Oh we couldn’t sell it,” Annabel says. “It’s been in our family for generations, and it’s been identifying screws since we were young girls.”

“I’ll give ye a hundred thousand  punts (pounds=dollars +/-for it.”)

Sean coughs and says, “With that type of money we could more or less guarantee that things will no longer fall on our heads.” (Like the loose pastor) Opps I meant plaster(No, He didn't he meant pastor besides I think it fits better that way-Herself, Himself's wife)

After a brief discussion amongst the sisters they agree to sell the table.

As soon as Inny gets the table home, she invites some of her friends around and tries it out on them. She makes a hole in the table, screws in a screw and waits…

“You have to give it a bit of time for it to work,” she says.

After thirty seconds of waiting she starts to panic. She says ‘brass’ under her breath. One of her friends, Martha Blend, says, “Hey, you just said that yourself.”

“I did not.”

“And that’s not even a brass screw anyway. How much did you pay for it again?”

“It was a bargain for a table that can identify screws.”

“If it can really identify screws, do it again.”

“I can’t. You have to leave it for a few months before you can do it again. It was made by unemployed people and it can’t work as often as the rest of us.”

“You were conned, Inny.”

“I was not conned. It will work again in a few months.”

“It could happen to any of us. The girls at the Flower Society will laugh at this, and they don’t laugh.”

Inny knows that the girls at the Flower Society probably won’t laugh, but it’s bad enough that Martha Blend will keep reminding her of it. For the past few years, Inny and Martha have used every opportunity to make fun of each other. Inny’s maiden name is Sanity, and her parents wanted to call her Sinny after a grandmother. But that grandmother told them that when she was in school the other kids used to make fun of her name. Her parents were very conscious of this – they were always very protective of their only daughter – so they decided to call her Anny instead, after her other grandmother, and use Sinny as a middle name. Just before the christening they realised that the initials of Anny Sinny Sanity would be ASS. The kids in school would surely spot that one. They had already told the two grandmothers that they were using the names. They couldn’t drop them now, so they decided to use Anny and Sinny as middle names, and call her Inny after an aunt. Inny Sanity. It was only after the christening when they realised the kids would probably find a way of making fun of that too, so they always called her by her full name: Inny Anny Sinny Sanity.

She hated the full name, and she longed for the day when she could get married and call herself Inny. Unfortunately she fell in love with a man called John Continent. It was heartbreaking for her. He came from a rich family, and ‘Continent’ would have been a great name if she’d been called anything other than Inny. She couldn’t marry him because of his name. Two other men proposed to her: Bill Box and Alexander Light. She went for ‘Light’, just to play safe, even though he had an unfortunate habit of talking. But it was a relief to be released from that name. She felt free as Inny Light. But then her so-called friend, Martha Blend, decided to play a little joke on her. Martha’s husband owned a company that manufactured deodorant, and she convinced him to call one of their new products ‘Inny Light’. The name had no bearing whatsoever on the product – it was a deodorant designed specifically for men who have a medical condition that causes them to sweat five times more than other men. Inny wasn't too worried about it at first because she thought the product would only be bought by men with this condition, but it proved to be very popular with politicians making speeches and people waiting for the results to be announced on TV talent contests, and those contests became very popular that year. There were numerous rival contests on different TV channels, and they were really competing to see how long they could keep the contestants waiting for the results. Both men and women were using Inny Light (in fact, it’s been alleged that contestants were spraying it on their eyes – they claimed it was to dry up the tears, but it had the opposite effect, and it’s believed that contestants were aware of this before they used it). These pauses took up so much time on TV that numerous other programs were cut. The first to go were the political conferences. Politicians, of course, were outraged, but they condemned the contests because of the effects they were having on young people. They made long, tedious speeches, constantly repeating that same point about the effect on young people. They’d say things like, “Some might say that my objections come from the fact that our conference was dropped from the TV schedules, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with it. It really is all about the kids. We’re concerned about the kids. The effect on the kids. This has nothing to do with seeing myself on TV. I’ve always been concerned about the kids. Ask anyone – they’ll tell you I’ve always been concerned about the kids. It really, really is all about protecting our youth from this, this… this sort of thing.”

But the politicians were watching the talent contests too, and they were influenced by the contests, even though they didn’t realise it. There was a subconscious competition going on to see who could make the longest speech condemning these shows and the effect they were having on young people (subconscious competitions like these had a much greater impact on the political climate than things like policies). They’d repeat the same point over and over again, and introduce ridiculously long pauses, like, “The responsibility ultimately rests with…” They’d hold a card in their hands, look down at it and just wait, before finally saying, “The parents.” One politician even started having imaginary interviews with those who weren’t responsible, consoling them and telling them that they did their best, and the record companies will be queuing up to offer them a deal.

One of the contestants on the TV shows was Karla-Ann Foot. She hated her name too, because whenever she mentioned it to people they always looked at her feet. She tried introducing herself as Karla-Ann Elbow, but people still looked at her feet, and when she went back to Foot, they stared at her feet for even longer. When she was on the TV show, she insisted that no shots of her feet be shown while she was singing. People watching her on TV couldn’t see her feet, but they noticed that she was well-endowed in another area of her body. The camera men tended to focus in on that area, and her feet were completely forgotten, but she wasn’t happy with this either, even though she was the star of the show. She complained about it, and she wanted people to see her feet again, but the director made up some excuse about how they couldn’t show anything below her waist or above her neck for technical reasons. So she started wearing a duffle coat during her performance, and those coats became very fashionable because she was so popular. Everyone started wearing them indoors, even the politicians. They accused each other of doing it just to be popular, and this added another half hour to their speeches.

All this happened during one of the hottest summers in record, so ‘Inny Light’ came on the market at just the right time.

Or just the wrong time for Inny. The words ‘Inny Light’ entered the public consciousness and they had very definite connotations. There was no way Inny was going to start calling herself ‘Inny Anny Sinny Light’. For a while she thought about divorcing Alexander, but it was he who provided another way out of the problem. He owned a company that made sweat bands, and she convinced him to release a sweat band called ‘Martha Blend’ – the name was written on it. They even got Karla-Ann Foot to wear it on TV one evening. When that became popular, Martha started calling herself by her full name, Martha Mary Blend, but people still made fun of her. Her husband agreed to rename ‘Inny Light’ as ‘Horsie Horsie’, and Alexander withdrew the ‘Martha Blend’ sweat band from the market. The words ‘Inny Light’ faded from the public consciousness, and Inny was able to use her name without any fear once more, but she’s always been Inny Anny Sinny Sanity to her relatives.

Such is Mizzenwood Ireland. Just down the road from you and me!

Tomorrow?

Clean coffee pot and cups for all!

Denis