Doctor Benway Consulting

You never know the day or the hour…so there are still copies of Going Postal mouldering away in files of “Best Bits” in people’s attics. I always thought of it as being utterly disposable, a folded sheet of A4 distributed anonymously in small piles on the counters of record shops and video rental places. The name was neither original nor apt - I don’t think a single copy was posted anywhere, to anyone. It was just a chance to rage, a kitchen-sink broadside, two Hunter Thompson fans living out gonzo fantasies on coffee and hash. He provided the rage and the ideas, and I tried to translate from spleen into English. The DMC Championships piece that Paul mentions was our purest collaboration, and the best thing to appear in GP. It’s amazing to hear that people outside of Dublin were reprinting it off their own bat. It was also the last issue - I don’t remember why; fecklessness, probably. We should have kept going. The gombeen commercialism of that mid-90s dance scene is replicated on grotesque scale across Irish society in the 2000s. Nobody is supposed to utter a word of complaint against boomtown Dublin - sure, aren’t we all better off now? Oh, we are, but some of us are much better off than others. The economic windfall of the last decade has been squandered for the benefit of a few, and the looming recession promises the edifying sight of the man behind the curtain pulling the same old levers on a machine that is still running on patchwork parts from the ’80s.

Further Reasons Heathrow Must Be Destroyed

I arrived into Heathrow from Bangkok around 8:30 to discover that, entirely predictably, my flight to Dublin had been delayed until 11. In keeping with the general policy of refusing to tell you anything you might need to know, the gate announcement was set for 10:20. I settled down for a quiet pint, weathering the manifest displeasure of the bar staff who evidently had better places to be on a Friday night. But then, so did I. Eventually the bar closed, leaving me with nothing to do but sit and watch the minutes tick away on the departures screen. A handful of other passengers joined me. At 10:30 the gate still hadn’t been called but I knew it had to be one of the ten gates that all flights to Ireland leave from so I decided to start walking that way.

Only to find that the doors to the gates were locked, with no sign of life visible through the glass. After ten minutes’ increasingly agitated searching (i.e. at 10:45, fifteen minutes to departure) we managed to find a lone security person lurking in a darkened office.

“The people who do the biometrics finish up at ten so we close the gates then.” she explained. “We made an announcement that all passengers on domestic flights should go to their gates at the time.”

“Ireland is NOT domestic!” we shot back, with varying degrees of nationalistic fervour.

“We consider it to be domestic.” she replied.