When calling you pal doesnÕt make them your friend
Date Published: {J}
When someone who has a neck like a small tree trunk addresses you as ‘pal’ you can safely assume it is not designed to suggest he wants to be your friend – no, this pal is normally the closing word in a short statement that begins with ‘you’re not getting in this gate....pal’ or ‘move on there...pal’.
It’s a uniquely Irish term of endearment – indeed rarely heard if truth be known outside of our capital city – but it’s up there for inappropriate use of a friendly term with, say, sunshine – a word often used in a similar circumstance.Both were deployed with magnificent freque
ncy by the sumo-style bouncing staff deployed by Aiken Promotions to ensure there was no messing at the Paul McCartney concert at the RDS last Saturday night, an event that – despite the best efforts of the suited monkeys – will live long in the memory for the best of reasons.The ordinary stewards were models of good manners and decorum, showing the middle-aged fans to their seats as a waiter might show you to your table.
They presumably realised that an audience with an average age the wrong side of fifty didn’t present much by way of violent threat – unless you got a clip in the side of the head from an old guy enthusiastically playing his air guitar.
But these goons in black suits, hired straight from central casting, carry with them an inbred (a most appropriate word indeed) threatening aura about their very being.
It’s not that they’re necessarily fit – indeed one bloke appeared to be suffering from an advanced case of furniture disease. His chest has slipped into his drawers.
They all have knuckle tattoos – normally it’s ‘hate’ on both hands – and a buzz cut to accentuate the size of their enormous necks.Some have pinstripe suits which give them the air of an extra in some Bugsy Malone musical – and all of them have impenetrable Dubbalin accents.
Most of them went to the University of Leeson Street, those dingy underground nightclubs where - unless you were a model or a footballer - you were greeted with the sort of look that suggested you had inadvertently stood in something and the smell was still on your shoe.
As for getting in, apparently it was more than their job was worth - which seemed strange given that they were paid to work as doormen and that presumanly involved letting people in.
The alternate reply was that you were getting in over their dead body, which initially seemed like a win-win result - until you realised these geniuses also boasted a rich line in irony.
For more, read this weeks' Connacht Tribune.