Reflection

Morning.

Sometimes you get to December 30th and you think you need to reflect on the year that is just about to end. Not this time. I’m not in the mood for reflecting or reflection. If I were highly involved in the mirror industry, there would be no escaping it, but I’m not so nobody can force me.

That’s not a world I’d care to be part of, by the way. We’ve all taken for granted how Big Mirror has become such a fundamental part of our lives. Bathrooms, hallways, living rooms. They’re everywhere. Cars. Even bikes these days. Some of them anyway. I will grudgingly admit that when I see someone who has fashioned a wing mirror for their bicycle, it makes me laugh. It also makes a bit of sense but as someone who cycled for many years, I can understand it.

I think back to the days when I would cycle from my house on the southside of Dublin to a grey business park on the northside and wonder how I didn’t get into a serious accident of some kind. I definitely didn’t have wing mirrors, but it’s fair say the cycling infrastructure in the city wasn’t what it is today. There were no such things as bike lanes. Just roads where you were up against cars, buses, lorries, vans, articulated trucks, motorbikes, mopeds, ambulances, other cyclists, and pedestrians. And taxis.

You know you see in a war film where a fighter pilot stencils a plane on the side of his own after he makes a kill? I swear there were taxi drivers who did the same but with bikes on their car doors. I know some people who cycle don’t pay much attention to the rules of the road but most of us do (mostly), and here’s the thing: I’m a very breakable human using the power of my own muscly thighs to propel myself to or from work – you’re in a Toyota or a Peugeot, smoking a John Player Blue, and you just have to sit there and lightly tap a pedal to go along at high speed. Just relax.

I can also tell you this: if a taxi driver almost knocks you off your bike when you’re pedaling down the quays, and you catch up to him at the lights and knock on his window and he tells you to fuck off and then you boot his door he doesn’t much like it when you tell him to ‘relax’. Just some advice in case you ever find yourself in that situation. I hope you don’t but if you do, boot it really hard because he’s a prick and he swerved at you on purpose.

Anyway, look at me reflecting on things. Those mirror bastards have done it again. I said I wouldn’t do it, and then without realising it’s happening I’m going all in. That was not about 2024 though at least. If I had to put on year on this period in my own mind, I would say 1997 or 1998. Good years for Arsenal, it’s fair to say. The last one in particular. 98.

Do you know what was number 1 at the UK box office when we won the title that year? I have no idea either. Let me look it up.

Scream 2. There you go. It knocked Titanic off the top after that film had spent months at number 1. I’ve never seen it. I feel like I know how it all ends, and it’s not great for lots of them, in fairness. One thing you never see when they send those submersibles down to the ocean floor to film the wreck of the Titanic? Skeletons. Where did they all go? Food for thought, eh?

Anyway, that’s quite a morbid way to end this blog post. So let’s go back to 1998, to May, to that Tony Adams goal when Martin Tyler said ‘Would you believe it?!’ as if he couldn’t get his head around the idea of an accomplished professional footballer scoring a goal. Do we blame him for the continued trend of commentators trying to come up with lines that ‘go viral’? Probably.

I mean, that wasn’t even a concept when some people were on the pitch and they think it’s all over … it is now. Simpler times in 1966, I suppose. Not as many mirrors, but probably way more chandeliers than there are today. And if that doesn’t sum it all up, I don’t know what will.

Have a good one.

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