Pictures and everything! This is my room at the homestead in Aughlisnafin. To put this picture in context, I have recently returned from a hectic month at an American university, and am now expected to reacquaint myself with permanently grey skies and countryside isolation. The blow is not softened by the fact that the last few days in the States had been spent in amongst the huge buildings of Chicago and the flights home included a lay-over in Newark Airport, complete with panoramic views of the New York skyline. Waking up to panoramic views of the Mourne Mountains, nice as they are, did not exactly excite me the same way. And sure there are worse things in the world than walking outside to see fields and maybe the odd gathering of cows, but after that being par for the course for my first 19 years, the experience of walking out into a relatively busy campus was one that was difficult not to miss. Suddenly I felt like an astronaut on a spacewalk who's rope broke off and was now drifting away into space. Crippling isolation. Craving human contact I turned to the Holy Book of Connecting People - Facebook. With uploading a few hundred photos of Chicago as my excuse I trawled its pages for craic, clicking on profile after profile. After one particular session, longer than I care to mention, spent semi-comatose in front of my little netbook, I decided enough was enough. I was going to have to do something productive, something I was putting off, something that might take a few hours and require some effort, the sort of heroic thing my mother would do if she had a free afternoon, something even more productive than throwing sticky darts at the wall.
I was going to raise myself mightily from my soft and warm seat in the living room, march down the all and... clear out my drawers. Hence the mound of crap on my bed, most of which was chucked out (sentimentality is so overrated).
I can honestly say that the whole process has so far benefited me in no way whatsoever. The crap hidden away in those drawers was hidden away in those drawers for a reason. It was crap. But I felt better afterwards. I admit, as shameful as it is for someone legally an adult, part of the reason for that was the metaphorical pat on my little puppy head from my mother for having briefly imitated her spring cleaning ways. Other than that, it took my mind of where I wasn't anymore for a little while. The question now is whether the slow-moving boredom and isolation of Aughlisnafin has put me back in touch with my senses or has aided my taking leave of them that little bit more. I think what me and a few friends did the next day to pass the time might give a clue as to the answer.
We drove 30 miles to play the playstation. 30 miles. And it was totally worth it.
The summer months of the Belfast university student whose origins lie in the countryside are largely spent at the parent's home (and so too, sadly, are the majority of weekends, but that's another issue). So after some organising (always difficult factoring in football trainings, etc.) a car-load of five of us took a trip up for the night to one of the student houses lying rented and dormant during the month of August and had a FIFA tournament. I fared incredibly poorly but that wasn't the point (it wasn't the point). We escaped our homes and did something, which is more than can be said for our average day during summer. Breaking things up a bit keeps us sane, but there always seems to be to be a bit of added mental to a guy who has been cooped up for an extended period of time. Exhibit A from that night:
My friend is wearing boxes on his feet because the floor is wet. I guess that makes sense. Empty beer boxes tell their own story however. Boredom leads to drinking. Fact.
On another note, boredom and drinking are both cited as factors in the current big news story: the London riots. There are many commentators who have, over the past few days, mentioned many different possible causes of the outbreaks of unrest, but as the trouble continues, it is clear that this is not the work of Anarchist groups or a reaction to police brutality, but the work of young guys who are spending summer sitting at home with nothing else to do. There is a culture of thuggery and bullying in England which has led these guys to jump at the excuse to go outside in the evening to rob, steal and destroy. The rioters are going out and tearing their communities apart where a sane person would just play angry birds or some other ridiculous iPhone game.
Maybe as more iPhones get nicked the streets will become steadily safer. All the tracksuits will be at home trying to slice fruit like a ninja (love that game). On Sky News now there is a woman saying that young people in these areas have a sense of unfulfilled entitlement. They might be from disadvantaged areas with limited prospects (some aren't particularly), and state cuts may have hit young people in these areas (I guess it could be a chav-led movement to destabilize the coalition government). Somehow I doubt if asked one of the enterprising fellows trying to pull a monitor of the wall in Ladbrokes why he was doing that he would tell you he had a burning sense of alienation from the Big Society. The rioters are not fighting the police, or society, they are looting. They are smashing in windows and kicking down doors because the only other thing they have done that day was eat a bag of chips in a 'suped-up' Volkswagen Golf.
Of course, the rioting is about more than just overflowing boredom, there is a strong element of opportunism behind what's going on, as well as that ever-present human need to destroy. Today I saw footage of a young man dazed with a head injury being helped to his feet just so his bag could be rifled through. Last night a furniture business over 100 years old was burnt to the ground. No amount of boredom, no amount of alcohol, is an excuse for that type of behaviour. Another man on Sky News has just called it 'aggressive late night shopping'. More like it.
The moral of the story is: if you want to escape your boredom by all means drive 30 miles to play FIFA, or wear boxes on your feet, or clean out your drawers, or even have a few drinks; but by no means take it out on another person. Don't blame those around you, don't blame society, don't mope (unless you are into that sort of thing). Do something, or just enjoy being bored. And (you would think this was obvious) don't riot.
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