Finding the perfect club to fulfil all your expectations

Everyone should have a hobby, a passion, something that takes them to a happy place – a diversion from the ordinary, an escape from the mundane. But there are some people whose alternative interests suggest they need to re-evaluate what they do with their down time.

This came to mind recently with the winding up (or down) of the Apostrophe Protection Society in the UK, an organisation that had gamely tried to protect this humble symbol from the sea of texting.

And it’s fair to assume that, while its members might be passionate pedants on punctuation, they also had their tongues close to their cheeks.

Equally, they didn’t meet up weekly to dot their i’s and cross their t’s; this might well have been a one-man band, with its 96-year-old founder John Richards campaigning for the proper use of the punctuation mark since 2001.

He acknowledged that, four years out from his big birthday, he was ‘cutting back on commitments’ – but also lamented the fact that ‘fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English language’.

The long-retired newspaper sub-editor put that down to ‘ignorance and laziness’ – but might it also be just because people have too much to get on with?

There’s an Irish organisation called the Irish Patients’ Association, headed up by a man called Stephen McMahon, and every time there’s any sort of a health story, he’s paraded out in front of the RTÉ cameras as though he speaks for all of us who’ve ever visited a doctor.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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