NEWTON'S OPTIC:THE SMELL of onions hit me before I opened the front door. "Could you not chew garlic instead?" I asked Jack Beggar, head of the Irish Columnists' Trade Union, as he barged past me into the house.
“Garlic?” he said. “That bourgeois bulb? Certainly not. I’ll stick with onions, an honest working man’s vegetable, strong yet many layered, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Oh come off it, Jack,” I said. “You’re on €170,000 a year.”
“That’s why I have these special red onions imported from Cuba. Anyway, it’s only €169,000. I haven’t taken a 3 per cent pay rise in months.”
He slumped down at the kitchen table, suddenly looking exhausted.
“Are we alone in here?” he asked, eyes darting around the room.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s just you, me and the hidden microphones my publisher’s solicitor has presumably installed in all the light fittings. What’s on your mind?”
“It’s our 10-point columnists’ plan for a kinder, gentler recovery,” Beggar sighed, starting to peel another onion. “Just common sense, really. The first point says we should get everything we want, the second point says everyone else should pay for it, and the last eight points are some stuff about Sweden to make the length up to 1,000 words.”
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
“It’s our members. They just don’t get it; we don’t have much time. That’s why I’ve dropped in on you at midnight for some outside-the-box advice, seeing as how you’re not a proper columnist.”
“Steady on there, Jack.”
“Now who needs to come off it,” he snapped. “You just coin contrived alliterative phrases while flaunting your boyish good looks.”
“I am one of those people whose earning power is linked to their youthful appearance,” I agreed, running a hand through my short yet still surprisingly luscious hair. “You could call us Baby-Faced Bringers Home of Bacon.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Beggar said. “The question is, can you come up with a way, between ourselves, to sell this plan?”
It was a tough one alright.
“The first thing you need to do is buy some time,” I said. “Claim that allowing a few more years for recovery will make it happen faster. People love a perplexing paradox. You could call it a counter-intuitively convincing chronological conundrum.”
“I see,” Beggar said, now hanging onto my every word. “Does that mean I can also demand recovery by bringing the country to a standstill?”
“I suppose it does.”
“Then time is up for the Anglo-American model of share-owning capitalism.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly the sort of thing you won’t hear if the columnists go on strike.”
“It’s all sorted then,” Beggar said. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you.”
“You could say ‘Thanks shallot’,” I joked.
In the silence that followed, we both had time to contemplate the bleak future facing so many families across Ireland. Finally, Beggar leaned over and in a hoarse voice, almost whispering, said: “Just the thought of cuts is enough to make me cry.”
“That’s awful,” I said. “Have you tried slicing them under the tap?”