Hello 2021! Please be substantially less shit than your predecessor.
I cannot begin to think about football this morning, we all need a day off, but I did think about Irish actors. Let me preface this by saying I am not, and never have been, a violent man. However, if it came right down to it, if we lived in a world where we were forced into fist fights to survive, who could I take out?
I reckon the most high profile casualty would be Michael Fassbender. I had always assumed he was a big guy, but just before the pandemic struck I was invited to a film premiere. He wasn’t in the film but he was there. The film was called Calm with Horses, by the way, and it’s really good, so if you’re searching for something to watch today give that a lash.
Anyway, Michael Fassbender was there and he is a teeny-tiny man. Slight, obviously very good looking, but in spite of my years, I reckon I could take him (unless he’s a biter, which I don’t put past him). If we’re in the ring, or some other kind of fighting arena like a cage, a gravel pit, or something else, I feel confident that I could emerge the victor.
Although he was born in Germany, Fassbender grew up in county Kerry, which is the perfect segue into the next bit of this blog. If he is the Irish actor I could almost certainly duff up, there’s a man from that part of the world that I could not.
Many years ago, when I was in college (not university), I ended up on Leeson Street after a night out. For those unaware, this was at a time in our society when late drinks could only be found on this one particular street in Dublin. It was home to many nightclubs who found a way around our stupid licensing laws. If you had entertainment (a DJ) and also served food (baskets of cocktail sausages and chips served by a ‘chef’ who had gout), you could also serve drinks.
Not real drinks like beer and spirits, but wine by the bottle (the cheapest was Liebfraumilch at £20 a pop), champagne (haha), and glasses of port (the cheapest drink you could get at £5 per glass). So, we college people had been out and our youth meant going home and passing out wasn’t an option. We end up on Leeson Street, we come to a club called ‘Monkey Business’ and on the door is a tall, ridiculously handsome man who for reasons best left unexplored actually lets us in.
My pal, drunker than I am, asks him if he needs any DJs and he says he does. The next night in fact. This is great. Except my pal has no intention of following up on this but I feel a sense of responsibility. I turn up the the following evening (these clubs opened from around 11pm and stayed open till 5am or thereabouts depending on how busy the night was).
“Howyadoingmotherfucker?!”, he says as I rock up with my boxes of records, the most important of which is Moving on Up by M People, because try as people might, they cannot resist it and it always gets them dancing.
I spent the next three or four years DJing at various clubs down there, but it all began with ‘Monkey Business’ and the man on the door who gave me my first gig was actor Tim Murphy (Timothy V Murphy on his IMDB). You might remember him from such shows as Sons of Anarchy, CSI, 24, Glenroe or NCIS.
“Howyadoingmotherfucker?!”, he’d say in his broad Kerry accent every evening, and I’d say I was fine. Which I generally was. Soon, Tim left. He obviously had greater ambitions than being the manager of a pretty terrible nightclub, and who could blame him? The point is though, he’s a big man. A solid man, and as much as I reckon I could sort Fassbender out with a good open handed slap, that wouldn’t make a dent on Tim.
He’d ruin me without even thinking.
It just goes to show, eh?
Show what? That’s not the point here. The point is it’s the first day of 2021 and I’ve somehow managed to lash out nearly 700 words when I should still be lying down.
I hope this new year brings you and yours everything you need and want, and many wins for Arsenal. But let the record show that if it comes right down to it, I’d take on Fassbender, but throw Murphy in the ring and I’m taking a pounding.
xFootball, and the rest, tomorrow.
