Charlie Savage by Roddy Doyle

Author:Roddy Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

27

Being Ireland’s foremost elderly social influencer is a full-time job.

It’s all go, from the minute I wake up – earlier than you, Varadkar – to that dog-tired decision at the end of the day, ‘Will I bother with my teeth or just brush them really, really hard in the morning?’ There isn’t a moment in the day that isn’t a potential opportunity.

Or so I’m told.

By the daughter.

She has me shouting at everything.

–I’m supposed to be retired, love, I tell her.

–That doesn’t mean your brain’s retired, Dad, she says.

She’s right, of course. But I wish my mouth was – retired, that is. Or even working part-time. When the doctor said he thought I needed an interest, I think he had stamp collecting in mind, or hill walking, or having a go at the garden. I don’t think he expected me to go home and start shouting at the radio, live on Facebook.

But that’s what I’m doing – I’m shouting at the radio. I’m in the kitchen every morning, washed and shaved, standing or sitting in front of the radio and I’m shouting right through the News and on into Seán O’Rourke and Pat Kenny. (I skip Ryan Tubridy; he’d kill me.) And I keep going, right through the Angelus.

–Bong, yourself!

It’s a big online hit, that one, the daughter tells me, and we’re selling about twenty Bong, Yourself! T-shirts a day.

Anyway, I stop about ten minutes into Ronan Collins, after I’ve hurled abuse at the birthday requests, and I’m given permission to go upstairs for a nap, so I’ll be fit and fighting in time for Joe Duffy.

Talk to Joe.

–I will in me hole!

It’s not a sudden thing, or a late vocation. I’ve been shouting at the eejits on the radio all my life. Some men learn how to play the uilleann pipes from their fathers; others are taught how to mend fishing nets, how to keep bees or maim cattle. My da showed me how to shout.

He spent long happy hours instructing me on the correct use of the word ‘gobshite’. He didn’t know he was doing this; I was just looking at him, and listening. But, nevertheless, that was what he did. I sat in the kitchen with him and learnt all about the different categories of gobshite. There was the ‘bloody’ gobshite, the ‘out and out’ gobshite, and the ‘complete and utter’ gobshite. There was a gobshite for every occasion, a label for every man he shouted at. A younger man just starting out in his career as a gobshite – a newly elected TD, say, or an economist just home from America who wore a cravat instead of a tie – he had ‘the makings of a gobshite’. There was still hope for him, but not much. The makings of a gobshite almost always rose through the ranks to become a complete and utter gobshite.

He never shouted at women. Now, there weren’t many women on the wireless back then but he wouldn’t have shouted at them anyway. In my father’s world there was no such thing as a female gobshite.

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