Summer 2010 in Ireland will be a tricky business for a lot of us. Forget about the economic mantra ‘doing more with less’; the majority of people will be glad to ‘do the same with almost nothing’.
This won’t be easy after years of Marbella, holiday homes, champagne and non-stop bouncy castles. But then the best bit of an Irish summer is in the anticipation. So here’s looking forward to a classic with a few tips on how to keep your dignity intact in these tight times.
Summer Out the Back
We’ve already had a few tastes of summer. You know, those unexpected spring scorchers when women arrive into work in their flip-flops and a pair of knickers and we all head to the pub at 5 o’clock, even though by then it looks like it might snow.
This can mean only one thing – we’re going to have a scorcher. Forget the fact that it rained solidly through the last two summers. The Irish brain has evolved to block out everything except that four day burst last August when Evelyn Cusack came on the weather each night with her ‘ye’re going to like this’ look and sun-scorched Paddys staggered around their back garden at dusk popping open bottles of cava from Lidl while roaring ‘best country in the world if we only had the weather’.
2010 is going to be all about summer evenings out the back; your garden is about to become the centre-piece of your life. Try to look beyond the fact that five years ago you were planning to build five one-room houses out there and sell them for a million each. It was a very good idea at the time. Just be glad you didn’t go ahead.
Because now you have a place to drink cheap booze, smoke if you want and crawl into bed when you’re done. First you need to choose the right set of tables and chairs.
One of the great spring rituals during the past ten years was when Celtic Tiger man emerged from his house after a hard winter and went to take out the garden furniture. As the birds chirped their message of growth and rebirth, Paddy opened the door of his shed, realised the furniture needed a lick of Ronseal and, muttering shag that, headed off to B&Q to buy a new set.
The result is that the average Irish garden shed now has more seats than Croke Park. You need to sort this out now and not just because your shed is a disgrace.
Why? Because you don’t want to attract spongers. These are ‘friends’ of yours who filled their back garden with a weird water feature or couldn’t be bothered cutting their grass. They’ll be on the lookout for a back garden buddy, particularly one with a south-facing sun trap like yours, and the last thing want to do is encourage them with plenty seating. So pick a nice chair for every backside in your family and throw out the rest.
That won’t deter everybody. Your sun-trap will still attract a crowd of friends you will end up costing you money. Why? Because Irish people are crap at bringing booze to somebody else’s house. Fair enough, we might not arrive hands-hanging, but we never bring enough.
People you barely know will arrive at the door with 4 cans of CrapSteiner lager, a packet of sausages and a delusional ‘I’m not really drinking’. Sure you’re not. Four hours later and they’re well into your crate of premium Krautenhoffer; six hours later you find one of them rummaging in your wardrobe looking for your secret stash. Thank Christ they didn’t look under the bed. It’s a Tuesday night in mid May; this could run and run.
So if you have that south-facing suntrap, you’ll need to make it a bit unpleasant. Vegetables are your friends here. Put down some onions, a couple rows of rhubarb and start giving tours of your patch complete with tedious grow-your-own chat. You’ll be friendless in no time.
If that doesn’t work, then you need the nuclear option. Spray the place with pig shite. It might attract flies, but it’s great for keeping spongers away.
The Holiday Home
Fake boobs and holiday homes were the two great trophies of the Celtic Tiger era. The only difference now is you’ve some chance of getting rid of the boobs.
But we shouldn’t be so hard on that place by the sea. For one thing, they’re a life support system for many an Irish marriage.
She takes the kids off down to Brittas all week while he reverts to his bachelor days. This time out, instead of sharing a semi-d in Rathgar with three mates, a pile of plates in the sink and that weird fart smell, he has the place to himself. Hear that? That’s not the sound of kids and questions about when you’re going to paint the fence. That’s the sound of silence. Oh baby.
He even gets the chance to revisit after-work summer-pint dreamland. That’s where you go for a beer garden Bulmers at half five and end up still outside at eleven o’clock offering your jacket to the young one on reception who keeps looking at your wedding ring like it’s some kind of challenge. Not that anything will ever happen – with two houses on the go, the last thing you can afford right now is a divorce. Have another pint instead. And go home by yourself.
Meanwhile, the wife gets to spend time among women by the sea. Which means a glass or five of Pinot Grigio at tea-time with a bunch of people who don’t start fidgeting and looking at the door when she starts to talk about her feelings.
He’s delighted to come down on Friday to get a break from the booze, while she’s dying to tell him what all the girls told her in confidence during a week of tea-time plonk. There’s no doubt – the Irish holiday home is a form of 5-star marriage counselling.
Now it has to start earning its keep. Those things weren’t cheap. Liam Collins pointed out in this paper as far back as 2003 that people were paying up to €250,000 for a mobile home at the exclusive Wicklow caravan park in Jack’s Hole. The less said about that the better, but you’d imagine it would have cost even more if the place was named after a different bit of Jack.
Suffice to say a lot of people are left with expensive holiday homes. And lots of friends who got used to staying there for free during the Celtic Tiger years. It’s a messy business. You need rent money these days but you can’t ask for it.
The best thing is stick a “For Rent – 450 a week” sign outside the place before they arrive and say nothing. You will then get a phone call from your friend insisting that he pays something. Resist the temptation to say “what about 450 that I put on the sign” and go for the classic Irish approach: “Would you go away out of that, with your 300 euro in cash for one week. I wouldn’t take a penny off you.”
Nobody said anything about 300 euros, but he’ll get the message. It’s important to say ‘in cash’ or someone will try and pawn that crate of fine wine they got for Christmas off on you. Fine wine is very five years ago. Cash is king these days.
The money will be left by the fireplace and your other friends will soon learn that the house now costs €300. You’ll never hear from some of them again.
Flip-Flops
For some reason, Irish people assume we need a whole new wardrobe for the summer. Just stop wearing your thermal vest around mid-April and you’ll be grand.
There was a time we could afford to ignore this. Back in the day when our houses earned €1000 a day, it was no biggy to drop €500 in a surf-shop on two pairs of three quarter length cargos, a couple of giant t-shirts bearing the logo “Full of Shit” and four pairs of flip flops.
Ah, flip-flops. You stopped wearing them at the age of 14 because of your weird looking toes, but they re-emerged in designer format during the Tiger years as a way of saying any minute now, I might buy a yacht. They were often right. You probably have about two grand worth of them in your overflow wardrobe and before you get any ideas, nobody will pay you more than a tenner for the lot.
A word of warning on the toe-nail front. On your post-recession list of “things I can do without”, a weekly pedicure comes just below your hourly latte and it’s been a hard week, lets go to New York. Result? Your toes are back at 1995 levels and you realise why your father’s generation were never sandaled without socks.
There’s no going back to socks under sandals. That could get tip us over the edge. Yes it’s beyond disgusting, but it’s time to start clipping your toenails.
Going to the Sun
Don’t get carried away. Ireland is the most beautiful country in the world and we might have a cracking summer, but can you do without the highlight of your year?
It’s that moment when you’re sitting out on the balcony of Hotel Sangria Del Mer at seven in the evening, just into your second glass of local plonk and the “weather shite here – how are tings wit u” text arrives from your sister at home. Oh baby, tings wit u have never been better.
Nothing matches that feeling of being half pissed on a Mediterranean summer evening and hearing that things have gone dampish at home. Ole, as you might say.
Money might be tight, but the airlines are dropping fares in an almost obscene manner to get you down south. It would be no surprise to wake up in the middle the night and find Michael O’Leary sitting at the end of the bed wearing a sombrero whispering that you’d be a feckin eejit not to go at these prices.
He might be right. Just remember to cutback on the crazy holiday extras we treated ourselves to during the boom time. This isn’t just about money – you don’t want to turn your fellow holidaymakers against you with a bling blitz. There’s nothing more bitchy than a group of Irish people in a coach. They’ll have it in for you by the time you’re dropped at the hotel.
Let’s start with the beauty treatments. Booking a holiday for €199 and spending a further €500 on a series of beauty treatments is a little mad. They’ll be watching you like hawks around the pool for evidence of a pedicure or to see if you splashed out on a Brazilian. You could do without that sort of attention.
Then there is the matter of fake tan. If getting an expensive spray job so you’ll turn heads at departures was daft during the good times, it’s downright suicidal now. That lot on your flight will have a field day.
There will be a crowd around you at the baggage carousel in Malaga, waiting to check out the streaks under your arms after the sweaty flight.
You arrive at your hotel at 11pm, dump the bags and head out for a quick one which ends up as two jugs of sangria and four zombies. You’re an Irish person on the first night of your holidays; it can’t be helped. But there’s no air-conditioning in your apartment so you wake up at 3pm the next day with €50 of tan on the pillow.
By the time you get up and go for a dip in the tan-stripper of a pool, you’re well on the road to blotchy town. The sun cream you put on after the swim will finish the job. Day one of the holiday and you’re sitting by the pool with a hangover, brown ankles and an audience of smug Paddys. Seriously, it’s not worth it.
If you still want the look for departures, get a farmer to give you a blast from his slurry tank. It will look just like false tan and smells only slightly worse. And given that there’ll be plenty farmers on the flight who made development land fortunes, a slight whiff of pig shit at departures will probably go unnoticed.
The other thing about your trip to the sun is clothes. You definitely have enough summer crap in your overflow wardrobe but it’s now more expensive to fly a bag of t-shirts to Alicante than it is a bag of bones like yourself. You need a plan.
That plan must not involve arriving for your flight in four summer outfits, one over the other. You’ll look like a gobshite.
Ryanair will probably point out the clause on page 932 of their terms and conditions titled “Extra Charges for Feckin’ Smart Asses who Wear 4 outfits.” You can’t have a drink to ease the pain because any trip to the loo is a race against time as you lash off your 4 pairs of shorts. Finally, you’ll look so suspicious on the other side that a small Spanish man with rubber gloves will ask you to step into the leetle room, por favor. The only thing worse than a strip-search is one where you have to take off and put back on four sets of clothes. It’s day one of the holiday down the tubes.
There is a way to do this and keep your dignity. Turn up at the airport in your Irish summer outfit; jeans, t-shirt, runners, jumper and coat. You’ll need to stay warm on the walk out to the plane. Bring a small rucksack for one change of underwear, a pair of shorts, flip-flops and the box of tea bags. Change into the shorts and flip-flops when you get there and head for the nearest H&M to buy r six of everything you need.
It’s cheaper than lugging them out with you and people will think you’re both loaded and cool in brand new trendy clobber every day. Bring the whole lot out to the airport on the way home. Sell what you can to the latest batch of Paddy’s coming off the flight (€1 a shot) and stuff the rest in your rucksack. Everyone’s a winner.
Summer Camp
There’s no better time than summer time to drag your children into this recession. The little money sponges have been protected long enough. It’s not that Mom and Dad didn’t love Jack and Chloe enough during the school holidays of the Celtic Tiger years; it’s just that they could afford to send them off to all kinds of summer camps and focus their attentions on golf and manicures.
Things might be a bit slack on the golf and beauty front these days, but do you really need a camp? It turns out that if you put kids together in a group they’ll play away all day by themselves without the supervision of a nineteen year old ‘co-ordinator’ with a whistle and a hangover.
Ok, so Jack and Chloe will grow up without an appreciation for teamwork, fair-play and healthy competitiveness as promised on summer camp websites. Thank God for that. It would be like living in an episode of Glee.
It’s time to go back to the old ways. The only place for a child in the Irish summertime is on a dusty roadside selling strawberries from the sunny south east.
If the chisellers are a bit work-shy, then consider a bouncy castle. Forget about the housing boom – the Celtic Tiger was really a Bouncy Castle Boom. The country is awash with them.
It should be easy to buy or hire one on the cheap and stick it down the back of the garden. It is a law of nature that a child will never leave a bouncy castle of his own accord. So just put the kids in there in the morning and go off about your business. They’ll be bouncing away where you left them when you get back.
The only thing to be careful of is when Johnny from next door calls over with a few bottles of KaiserSteiner, a fast acting beer that will have the two of you bouncing in no time, until Johnny gets shot out the front of the castle and head first into the fountain you got from Aldi.
The KaiserSteiner will make it seem hilarious at the time, but it won’t seem as funny when Johnny drops over a solicitor’s letter looking for compo. Follow the rich to get out of this one. Sign everything including the bouncy castle over to the missus and tell Johnny to do his worst.