General Chat

Attagirl Emma! <3....*picks up quill.....

I'm all for it, was thinking yesterday about when it was
going to start up again.

Anyone able to send me their work now, would be pleased
to receive it. :-)

Emma

Thanks for resurecting this thread, Dermot :-) Ann, maybe, if enough are interested, we could start afresh in the New Year? Like you, I have felt uninspired of late, but it was always a pleasure to write and read everyone's offerings. New Year? New Brooms? New Ideas? :-D :-D :-D <3

I think we are all sleeping writers Dermot, except yourself and Jan. Sorry, will try and do better, I seem to have lost the incentive since people all dropped out and can't think of anything to write about.

nudge.

Sorry haven't been on here, been mega busy.....loved both pieces Dermot, please e mail them to me.......will send message with e mail address Jan

You're nothing but a slobber
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In the UK, they are referred to as ’Cowboy Builders/Electricians’ & so on. But not in Ireland.

‘Slobberin’. I'ts a great Irish word. Note the lack of the 'g' at the end to emphasise the pronunciation. Slobbering (with a ‘g’) sounds far too posh. Slobberin’ has a much more culchie cut to it.

'Slobberin’ - means to do something half-baked; messing instead of doing it right. It’s a word that you'll not find in any dictionary but it is what it has morphed into particularly in the west of Ireland where I was born, a colloquialism if you like. And in the west, we accentuate the b’s to the hilt. Slobb-bur-in’. Go on - practice the real Irish pronunciation.

‘What's Paddy O’Reilly at out there’? ‘Ah, he’s slobberin' as usual, taking a week to do a day's work’. See, it is very easy to get identified as a ‘slobber’ when it comes to work. Ireland, it would appear, is full of ‘slobbers’. Some are harshly branded so, while others, well, we all know them.

Mum had a fellow working at our house years ago - he was an Electrician, allegedly. Because he was so slow at everything he did, my mother nicknamed him 'lightening'. And someone always had to stay and make sure he didn't doss on the job. You see, he wasn't an expensive worker. But, because he was a ‘slobber’, you had to keep an eye on him to make sure the work was being done right.

Paddy O’Reilly loved to talk as all Irish people do and there was no better man to get two hours out of a spot of lunch - otherwise known as the Irish lunch hour. Who do you think thought of the ’happy hour’ in pubs usually lasting a minimum of 90 minutes? When my father told him he was paying him for the job, not by the day, suddenly Paddy found a gear we didn't think he had.

But slobberin’ applies beyond the work place. It is a lovely, nuanced word that can take on a world of its own. Slobberin’, believe it or not, is often used to describe how a lad is getting on with a lady.

‘Is he going out with her or what's the story?’, one of our crew might enquire. ‘Nah, he’s just slobberin’. That is, he is ‘with her’ in a loose sense but has no interest in anything serious.

So there's some free advice ladies - beware of the slobbers because they'll always let you down.

Thank you Dermot and I'm sure most of us have ignored house alarms at some time....foolishly I know :-(

I'll still be pleased to read any writers' offerings.Just not sending out.

Mau xx

Lol thank you dermot. You did get my message to say continue to send to me didn't you?

Not knowing who to e-mail, I'll take a chance by posting my feeble piece on here for a change. Anyone & everyone can read it at their convenience. Where would writers be without readers?

On that note, here it is. Be gentle with me this week as my brain has broken down or possibly overheated with all the Jubilee Celebrations. God Save Our Queen.

Don't Get Alarmed. (GR Writers Group).
------------------------------------------------------

Is it a uniquely Irish thing to ignore ringing alarms and to get very annoyed if nobody rushes to turn them off.

By their nature, an alarm should normally indicate an emergency of some sort and the natural response should see you scurrying for the exit, or, if you’re a good neighbour, rushing towards the source of the noise to see if there’s a break-in or a problem you can help with.

Instead, when an alarm goes off in an Irish pub, for example, you presume it’s been triggered accidentally and if you sit tight supping your pint while trying to ignore the din for a few minutes, normality will be restored. It works sometime.

Equally, if the house alarm next door kicks off, you hope it will run out of battery power before you go to bed because it’s hard enough to listen to it during the daytime and it’s next to impossible to sleep through. Our dog dislikes the commotion too & begins to howl. And the cat has no time for a howling dog as it scurries out headlong through the cat-flap.

You never think for one minute that the reason the alarm is sounding is because the adjoining house has been burgled and the lone resident is lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor – any more than you think the pub is on fire and you’d better make for the exit.

I remember a night in Manchester some years ago – in fact it coincided with a Saw Doctors’ gig in the city but they had nothing to do with the incident – when a fire alarm sounded at about four in the morning in the hotel.

Now I presumed it was some eejit who’d had too much to drink and was running around the corridors – probably without some if not all of his/her clothes – who was hitting the button for the craic. But when hotel staff knocked on all doors, you knew it was time to take this a little more seriously.

So I got up, got dressed, put my contact lenses in so I could see where I was supposed to go, packed my case and headed for the emergency meeting point the adjacent car park – where I was greeted by the sight of several hundred people who obviously took the word ‘emergency’ in a more literal sense and had been standing there in the cold & drizzle in their pyjamas and underwear for the previous 20 minutes.

Now while I felt particularly snug and smug in my daytime apparel, it was only afterwards that I realised that, if there actually was a fire, I’d have been toast before I’d have my lenses back in to be able to see the flames.

On another occasion, at a time when I was working for a different newspaper, there was a particular editor who insisted that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances while he was thinking.

As this was not a task he appeared to bother with too often in the normal course of events, these occasional bouts of thinking rarely presented a problem – but one day he was locked away in his office when a fire drill took place.

That involved all of the staff fleeing the building and, as it turned out, heading for the adjoining public house – which, if there had been a fire, would have burned every bit as quickly as the newspaper office itself.

The point was that, in the meantime, our editor concluded his bout of thinking and emerged from his office to find a newsroom which minutes earlier had housed three dozen journalists was now emptier than my bank account.

Which only goes to prove that too much thinking can be as bad for you as not thinking at all – or that the last thing you should ever do when you hear an alarm going off in any context is to get too alarmed about it.

No idea David, I will send out to usual suspects this week, but would be grateful for some guidance as to who still wishes to receive, as I would hate to send when not wanted

Have a good weekend

Jan

I used to write short articles fiction or autobiographical (sometimes hard to tell the difference these days) for an online writing group known as Urbis.com but it seems to have folded unless some one can advise me otherwise.

It is sad news for the thread has given me the impetus to write again after many years of doing nothing. Can we confirm by e mail who wishes to receive our efforts......looks like it will just be me and Dermot

Perhaps it will pick up in the dark months

I am still in to receive Dermot but not writing at the moment

I haven't resigned Dermot merely taking a break. :-)

Sad news, Scribblers.

Perhaps those few who are continuing could e-mail me please just to re-confirm their e-mail addresses.

As I'm unsure who is now 'in or out', this will stop me from sending my rubbish articles to those who have resigned.

Many thanks & good luck.

Seeing as that will only leave about 4 of us I think I shall do the same. Disappointing when there are so few and I have found without the encouragement of a lot of us I have flagged and stopped writing so I shall write for my self I think. :-(

That's fine Mau, I am doing the same myself for some time, not even writing at the moment. Maybe when autumn is here and the nights start getting longer we can get going again :-D

Sorry but I think I'll take a rest from the group for a while. Will still be writing but not sending out.

Mau xxx

Okay thanks Ann :-D