The propa entry

Driving from Ashbourne to Killarney is a monumental undertaking and I’m starting to feel the effects of doing two return journeys a month. It’s 320km each way, so well over 1,000km a month. It doesn’t feel so long until I realise I’ve been driving for 3 hours and we still have nearly 2 hours to go.

Now I know Americans could pipe in and say “5 hours is nothing; I once drove from Seattle to Miami and raised a family of 8 in the back of our Buick Roadmaster” and they’d be right. But Ireland is small. Or is it?

The total land area of the world is 148,940,000 km2. There are 233 countries, territories, dependencies and whatever you’re having yourself. So if you divide the total land area by the total number of countries (this is everything that could be considered a separate state; Guernsey, Vatican City, Pitcairn Island etc.), you get the average land area of a country.

639,227 km2, which is around the size of Somalia (or a bit bigger than France if you can’t picture Somalia). So America is freakishly large (9,522,055 km2 if you just count the land and not the waters as some do), the UK is small-ish (242,900 km2) and Ireland is smaller (70,273 km2). BUT – of all those 233 countries, territories, dependencies and whatever you’re having yourself, we’re number 119 in size (smaller than Sierra Leone, bigger than Georgia) – so we’re one of the biggest small countries in the world.

So what does that prove? Ireland IS small and me collapsing into bed at 8pm last night “for a snooze before the Late Late Show” (which starts at 9.30, not so late late really), only to sleep until 6.30am is pathetic.

Life is good these days. Apart from our house being in a state of disarray (one of my pillows took the brunt of a random, unprovoked nosebleed two weeks ago and I just turned it over rather than washing it), my work being overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time and my sister moving to New Zealand for a year on Wednesday, things are good. We got a new car in February; more, a swapped car. My Mam didn’t want her new Astra (too big, too low, too thirsty) so once we had our Corsa paid off in January, she was up for swapping them. It’s a good car, very strong with a bit more power but it has a very annoying habit of vibrating at 2,250-2,800rpm. It’s something behind the dashboard, something that’d probably be more trouble to fix (and attempting to fix could just cause a louder vibration), so I’m hoping I can just ignore it. These things never annoy Catherine, but apparently an unconscious coping mechanism I have for this vibration is annoying her. Yesterday in the car, she said I started making a buzzing noise whenever the car starts the vibrating, as if I’m trying to cancel it out. Never noticed it before but there ya go, one more annoying trait! Needless to say, if anyone else sat in our car, they’d never notice this vibration in the first place…..

Speaking of vibration, our trip to Bristol (small city in south-west England) was a roaring success that didn’t require any vibration. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by something I saw in Boots (http://www.boots.com/en/Boots-Vibrating-Ring_859142/); their own-brand cock ring. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the first store-brand sex toy, like, ever? There’s been plenty of store brand condoms and lube, but they’re functional – people sometimes buy lube for practical reasons and not just for backdoor love. Tesco have had own-brand pregnancy kits for years – two in fact, the regular Tesco one which is 97% reliable and the cheapo Tesco Value one, which is around 60-70% sure.

But there’s no other use for cock rings – in fact, Boots categorize them as “Sexual Enhancements”. So what next for Boots; own-brand vibrators seem an obvious, er, extension – maybe a Boots dildo. A Boots travel eye-mask could be re-branded as a blindfold, a fetishwear range could include rubber Boots boots. No wonder their ad had the chorus “Here come the girls”.

And on that bombshell, I must leave. My phone, which I’m using as a modem, is getting rather hot after 4 hours on the go and I have a big entry to put up about the Irish financial crisis tomorrow. Yes, you’re that lucky – you’re getting two entries in one weekend, you dirty bitches!

Joe