By 
It’s no secret that Flann O’Brien was fond of a drop. And sure is it any wonder, he being the same man that wrote: ‘When things go wrong and will not come right.
Though you do the best you can.
When life looks black as the hour of night.
A pint of plain is your only man’.
And in this absurd, uncaring world, things, in Flann’s words, are constantly going wrong.
Take for instance a woman I’d know very, very well.
Driving up the road to Belfast the other day, she sensed something not quite right with her car.
Just this side of Ballygawley, the nebulous problem became clear.
“Frigging flat wheel!”
Her being a conscientious motorist, she pulled into a filling station to administer some air to her deflating tyre.
She attached the nozzle to the valve, dropped 50p into the slot, and watched hopelessly as air raced from her tyre.
Try as she might, the tyre continued to go down rather than up.
Turned out the only thing inflating that day was the price of the most abundant matter on the planet, with air from this pump having recently doubled in cost from 50p to £1.
She had, in effect, interrupted her own journey to release some vital pressure from her already soft tyre.
Had she been listening to Flann O’Brien’s collected works on Audible that morning, she might well have abandoned the wagon and spent the remainder of the day on the high stool in Quinn’s Bar, exaggerating her footballing exploits and drinking heavily to Flann, the Patron Saint of Things Gone Wrong.
Further evidence of life being more rigged than a Bundoran slot machine fell upon a friend of mine just after Christmas.
It was the second week of January and still he had not received a present from his girlfriend.
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have bothered him, he being an understanding fellow with an appreciation for the absurdity of life and its imperfections.
However, his girlfriend, he claims, does not share his c’est la vie philosophy, and instead believes people should be held to certain standards.
On Christmases, birthdays and anniversaries gone by, this has manifested in her giving him quite a bit of grief over presents he has, or has failed to, buy.
So, Christmas comes and goes, he says next to nothing, and eventually the box lands.
She carries it into him, immaculately wrapped and perfectly presented.
It is a cube, about the size that fits neatly into a cupped pair of hands.
He shakes it. Nothing inside rattles, as if he had been given a Rubik’s cube wrapped like Rolex.
Then he starts to smile.
“Aww, I think I know what it is,” he says.
“Yeah?” she says, her expectant smirk growing into a full teeth exposing grin.
So he opens it, expecting to find inside a piece of glass with a holographic 3D image of him and his late dog inside it.
(How he knew this, I’ve no idea.)
His girlfriend never had the chance to meet Skippy, the family pet having died a short time before they got together.
As he carefully peels off the paper, his hunch seems to be right.
He is met with a glass corner.
He looks up and smiles at her. She’s crying.
Further peeling shows yet more cleanly cut glass. These things cost well over £100.
And when the final shred of wrapping falls to the floor, inside the transparent box there is indeed a picture of him and a dog – but it isn’t good old Skippy.
“That isn’t my dog. That was taken at some house party. I can’t even mind whose dog it is.”
She had just lifted the picture off Facebook.
She starts to cry, and that is where his story ended.
Perhaps he consoled her.
Or maybe she took a leaf from Flann’s book, told him she didn’t care whether he put the lump of glass on the mantelpiece or shoved it somewhere
utterly
out of sight, and headed to the pub for a rake of pints.
As she went out the door, I like to think she shouted: ‘Sure why not? It’s still Christmas after all!’
