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I'm back, with a new flat, reconnected to the world and settling in very nicely, thanks for your concern. It's been an interesting couple of weeks what with the phone hacking at News International, the tragedy in Norway and most recently the death of Amy Winehouse. A common thread in these events has been the role of the press in modern society: how news is gathered, sold and consumed. What exactly is it that we want from our press? A fair and balanced, to borrow from another of Murdoch's august organisations, reflection of what is unfolding in the world or a corrupt unscrupulous fourth estate with tentacles flexing and intruding in every strata of society. The line where public interest ends and private lives begins has been fudged to the degree that we would require a high powered microscope to locate any particles that remain.

I must admit I did feel a giddy excitement as the phone hacking scandal unfolded, any chance to chip away at the power, control and influence of News Corp should be welcomed by any advocate of plurality in the press. Remember that Murdoch was a matter of weeks away from controlling over 40% of the British press. For this to happen on the Conservatives watch is of course no surprise, Thatcher became so adept at bending rules for the advantage of the Murdoch clan that if the premiership of Britain did not work out, then surely a career at FIFA awaited her. Quiet apart from the worryingly close relationships between the press, senior police and politicians one element of this whole affair that struck me is what it took for the world to sit up and take notice of this story. The Guardian newspaper had broken this story a couple of years ago and since then had continued to write articles about private citizens, guilty of no crime apart from being in the public eye, having their phones hacked. Granted the story had begun to build up a head of steam but it took the hacking of a dead child's voicemail for the moral outrage of the public to unite against the News of the World and for politicians to find their voice. With this revelation the wind had changed and politicians thought "Crikey time to stick the boot in". I am not for one second suggesting that the hacking of Hugh Grant's phone to find out which woman is being subjected to his baffled English toff routine is as objectionable as the hacking of a missing girls phone during an on going investigation . Rather I am bemused by a culture which engenders a press that feels such a sense of entitlement which allows it intrude in to peoples private lives. 24 hour news stations and instantly accessible news online has meant that actual news has been diluted down to such a degree that people are just talking so as to fill the time.
Watch as Sky News jumps into hyper drive with the live unfolding of some new disaster. Helicopter shots of nothing much, with a reporter saying ... well ...  nothing much. Experts are wheeled out to give opinions and frame the events for the viewer at home while yellow banners repeat the half truths, assumptions and guess work that your very hears have just borne witness to. I must get off this train of thought before Charlie Brooker's lawyers crash through my living room window, abseiling from helicopters whilst firing rubber bullets wrapped in writs of plagiarism. The point is that, this 24 hour service means that the news is mostly guess work on these sort of networks, prone to hyperbolic statements and shamelessly misremembering what you had earlier reported. The tragedy as first reported as an Islamic attack, based on nothing other than it was a terrorist attack. When the facts have emerged it still doesn't stop the networks shamelessly pushing their own agenda. This week I witnessed a survivor of the Norwegian massacre being interviewed on SKY by Kay Burley, her of the "chicken licken the sky is falling" school of journalism. During the interview Burley pushed and pushed the man to make sweeping comments on the rise of far right nationalism and the failure of multiculturalism in Europe. To which this reasonable individual responded that, it mattered little what the politics of this madman were, he was a madman who would have felt justified in what he was he doing no matter where on the spectrum of political ideologies he claimed to represent.

With the passing of Amy Winehouse I found myself agreeing with a friend that she was a victim of the time that she had lived. A wonderful talent, today I heard a recording of "Back to Black" she did for the Other Voices show with just a bass and electric guitar that was breath taking, who, if she had been recording in the 1950s all that we would have is the recordings and some classy black and white photos taken in smokey nightclubs. Unfortunately she lived in an era when not only is every mistake under constant scrutiny but is reported in real time. Fall out of a nightclub at 4 in the morning a little worse for wear and the photos will be uploaded in a matter of moments. Think that you are amongst friends taking recreational drugs, think again as grainy photo of you and a crack pipe taken with a mobile phone is front page news. How would other members of the 27 Club have stood up to modern scrutiny. Jim Morrison found dead bloated and fat in bathtub in Paris as tweeted by Perez Hilton, Jimmy Hendix choking of his own vomit on the home page of TMZ. I could go on with other members of this lamentable club, I dare say that the sheen of this cool rock star club would be stripped bare by the modern press and the unfathomable sense of ownership society has for celebrities.

Back away from the pipe

It must be almost two years ago that my girlfriend and I went to see the brilliant comic Stewart Lee in the Town Hall here in Galway and this week a part of his set came flooding back to me. The part in question was about a Bulmer’s Pear advertisement that was running in Britain at the time. I’m not going to try and recreate Lee’s dry repetitive monotonic style in print, youtube doesn't even do him justice, he is not a comedien for soundbites. The content of the joke is not what matters here rather the overarching message within it. In this instance it pertained to the fact that the advert in question used the song “Galway Girl”. This song meant a lot to Lee, the Steve Earle original I'll assume and not the version by cowboy hat sporting buffoon from the midlands who covered it recently, as it evoked memories of meeting his wife. A Galway girl funnily enough. It was the misappropriation of the song by advertisers that had aggrieved Lee so much. Why, I hear you ask, did this memory come back to me? Well as I sat in the library staring out the window contemplating the common features of agrarian secret societies and food rioters in late 18^th and early 19^th century Ireland, I happened to notice three young men, in the range of 19 to 22 (the older I get the tougher it is to put an age on anyone else), sitting on the ledge by the Concourse smoking pipes. This was followed the next day by two young girls of about the same age engaged in the same activity. “The hipsters have taken to the pipe!” I thought in my horror.

I guess at this juncture I should make it clear that the drug of choice in these instances was tabacco but never the less I was agast.You see pipes and pipe smoking have a special place in my heart. Neither of my parents smoked tobacco in any form but I did have an uncle Michael, my father’s brother in law, so smoked a pipe. He was a 6ft 4” gentle giant of a man with hands the size of Christmas hams, who, on spotting an unattended niece or nephew would pick them up spin them around several times and return them to earth dizzy and nauseated. I spent a few Saturday afternoons waiting in his living room for my father to finish work enveloped in the smell of his pipe tobacco and staring at his collection of pipes above the fire. Out of reach and even more desirable for it. He indulged my curiosity once and needless to say that was my last experience of smoking a pipe. On the other side of my family my mother also had a brother in law who smoked a pipe called Michael. I considered entering into an exhaustive research project to find out if there was any correlation between the name Michael and the instances of pipe smoking before thinking the final semester of  your degree was perhaps not the right time. A summer project perhaps. Now I would only ever see this Michael at Christmas due to the fact that he lived in Dublin, and every Christmas without fail he would walk the mile or so up the road from my cousin’s house to visit my father and discuss greyhounds, GAA and other such important matters. Michael unfortunately succumbed to cancer last year and the world is a less gentle place for his absence.

So you see pipes have a special place in my heart and to see them misappropriated by these hipsters breaks my heart a little. Now, I don't want to get bogged down in maudlin nostalgia for lost uncles, pipe smoking probably did little to keep the the grim reaper at arms lenght. I guess for me, there is a certain amount of gravitais required to smoke a pipe and this is a quality rarely found in those in their twenties. I don’t have a problem with hipsters either, in fact I find them quiet amusing. I find their ability to elevate and cannibalize aesthetics into a way of life, endlessly entertaining. My own housemate is a self confessed hipster. Only a couple of weeks ago she returned home in what she half jokingly referred to as a “pikey hipster” hat. She has since then asked if I’d like to buy a gate and to go halves on an internet business selling retro Fisher Price tape decks as jewellery. I have no problem with them wearing skinny jeans, glasses that aren’t prescription or having a complete irony bypass. Go ahead knock yourself out with those particular affectations but please back away from the pipe.