SQUINTER sorted out the loft on Saturday. He didn’t mean to – he only meant to sort out the garage, which he does two or three times a year. But a kind of space synchronicity developed – with positive results all round. Perhaps an explanation is in order...
Squinter hasn’t sorted out the loft in the 25 years he’s lived in his house. And why does it need sorted out? Well, because when he climbs up the ladder and opens the loft door (loft lid, if we’re being entirely accurate) there’s nothing to be seen except boxes, bags, and more boxes and more bags. So much so that it’s an intensely intimidating experience.
Saturday morning and Squinter’s in the garage dealing with the latest four months of extreme clutter. If you have a garage attached to the house, you know how it works: everything goes in there because it's so bloody easy to open the door, chuck something in and close the door again, not bothering to turn on the light because you know it looks like the back of an Amazon van on Christmas Eve. This latest garage clean-out was prompted by electricity meter man almost doing himself an injury trying to access the box – and not for the first time.
Normally Squinter merely rearranges the chaos. Everything is pushed to the side to lean against the walls, box is balanced on top of box, bag on top of bag, until there’s a semblance of order and a modicum of access somewhere around the middle. But this time there was just too much. And since Squinter’s better half won’t let him throw out a Christmas card from the year of the first ceasefire without a lengthy and impassioned debate, somewhere had to be found for the boxes and bags – and that place was not the Blackstaff recycling centre.
Squinter knows the problem is solvable, but the solution is one that he has successfully avoided for a remarkable amount of time. That solution lies in the fact that those loft boxes and bags that Squinter just mentioned weren’t judiciously and sensibly arrayed up among the joists and girders – no, no. They were placed in the only way that someone who doesn’t actually get into loft would place them; they were placed in the way that someone whose legs are on the ladders and whose torso alone is in the loft would place them: heaped high in a semi-circle around the entrance and taking up only about 10 per cent of the available space.
So Squinter went to work, heaving himself with age-appropriate grunts and moans up into the loft and beginning the task of moving the bags and boxes from their chaotic home around the loft entrance and placing them carefully at the back. Then it was back to the garage to take the bags and boxes arrayed along the walls up the wooden hill, up the metal ladder and into the suddenly available loft space.
Result: the garage job got done and the electricity guy can now get to the meter without crampons and a rope; and the loft is now a House and Home photoshoot model of pristine orderliness.
Not bad for an oul’ lad hurtling towards retirement age. And it can only be supposed that age was a factor in what happened next. Turning the lights off in the kitchen on his way to bed, Squinter couldn’t resist opening the garage door and taking a last peep of the day at the wondrous changes he had wrought in there. That’s not so unusual – he does the same with the fridge and the oven when he cleans those. But as he reached the top of the stairs and prepared to hang a right to the bedroom, he was drawn as if by a magnet to the left and the loft entrance above the landing. 20 seconds later he was reaching for the loft light switch in the familiar position: legs on the ladders, torso in the loft. And he stayed there for a couple of minutes admiring his work.
Picture that scene: 12.20am and there’s a bloke of a certain age up a ladder staring at girders and joists and hardboard and insulation and boxes and bags and extracting more satisfaction from it than he has from anything he’s done in his life in the past month.
Squinter can only suppose it’s all down to the law of diminishing expectations. And if, as we grow older, we do indeed extract extraordinary pleasure from the crushingly ordinary, that can only be a good thing.
Right?
Please say yes.
A feast of contradictions as Jamie takes that first legal step
JAMIE Bryson is a Bachelor of Laws. Fair play to him – lifelong learning is where it’s at.
He’s been celebrating his new LLB status at home and he put up pictures online of the finger buffet he laid on for friends and family. It included the usual selection of delicacies you’d see on the kitchen table at any party: cold meats, crisps, dips, chipolatas, mini-sausage rolls, chicken goujons, a UVF card. (What dip goes best with a UVF card, by the way?)
It wasn’t the only celebrating that Jamie did. As soon as he got up the next morning, and after he’d countered his hangover with a bottle of Milkman’s Orange and a leftover Peperami, he marked the completion of the first leg of his long journey to the Law Library by firing off an angry letter to the judge in an active murder trial.
TABLE TALK: Jamie Bryson celebrates his LLB with finger good and (below) a UVF certificate of proficiency
No, you didn’t read that wrong; yes, Jamie did communicate uninvited and unilaterally with a judge during a live case.
What’s the best and most colourful way to describe an act of such jaw-dropping hubris and stupidity?
An ‘R’ driver doing a handbraker on the M1 in front a police car?
An apprentice plumber searching for a gas leak with a candle?
Whatever way you choose to look at it, it’s not a good idea. It’s so not a good idea and it so mightily hacked off the judge that the letter is now in the hands of the Public Prosecution Service, who will decide whether Jamie receives a ticking-off, a yellow card or a red card. And that takes some doing when you’re not even on the pitch – or even in the dug-out, for that matter.
But he’s only a newbie, is our Jamie, and while sending an ex parte communication to a judge in a live trial is the legal equivalent of doing a Gerald Ratner, shouldn’t we all be hoping he learns his lesson, takes on board a little humility and moves on with his career? Yes, we should, but it’s Jamie we’re talking about.
Jamie has now written another letter about the case. Since he’s already in imminent danger of having his collar felt over the first letter, he hasn’t sent this second one to the judge, which on the face of it is an excellent idea. But since the second letter is a prima facie addendum to the first, and since it’s been placed on an open-access social media platform, the judge is not likely to be impressed by Jamie’s legal acrobatics.
Who knows what way this is all going to turn out? But the legal community in the city of Belfast is not so much a village as a hamlet, and while Jamie is doubtless continuing to enjoy attracting attention, the legal firms and chambers with whom he will soon be seeking to work with, for or alongside in his two years of qualifying legal experience may not be so keen on a would-be lawyer who’s more Better Call Saul than Boston Legal; more Johnny Knoxville than Johnnie Cochran.
