Manuel & The Never Ending Search for News
It was 31st of August 1997 and I was drunk, oh crikey mummy was I drunk. I had been imbibing cheap red wine from early the previous evening and the blotto hour, 1am, was upon me. For imbibing please read, nailing with care free abandonment. I had knocked the TV off and was now enjoying my wine whilst having a jolly sing-a-long along to Mr Tom Waits. Cheap red wine and the early works of Tom Waits deserve each other. I mean it would be in poor taste to be drinking anything worth more than a fiver whilst listening to Blue Valentine or Franks Wild Years. But back then I valued my wine in terms of alcoholic content rather than price - as long as the former was a significantly higher value than the latter then we had a winner. It was a simpler and more drunken time.
I had to sit on the seat next to the stereo with the volume set low as by now my wife’s patience had run out and threats had been issued with regard to what would happen if I didn’t, “TURN IT FUCKING DOWN AND GET TO BED!” This wasn’t a demand for late night nookie, snookums, or anything remotely sexy-fun-time related time let me tell you. We were moving to Dublin two days later and needed every moment of the remaining days to get packed and sorted. There wasn’t any time available for rolling on the floor complaining about sore heads, sore tummies or questioning the probity of the Bulgarian wine industry. I had previous, it has to be said.
I drained the last of my cheap Bulgarian booze into my oversized wineglass/mini fishbowl and assured myself that I would pop of to bed just as soon as I had licked the final drop from the bottom of the glass. But as I crooned along to $29.00, “Alligator purssssse….” I managed to knock the glass to the floor. I stared at the puddle of wine for a moment wondering how it had got there and how best to conceal it but also how to get it back in my glass. I stumbled to the kitchen to retrieve a cloth to sop up the spilt wine and as I past it I threw my drunk heavy hand hand out at the radio to switch it on but instead I knocked it into the bread bin. I grunted at it and moved on in search of an appropriate wine drying cloth. Failing to find anything that wouldn’t land me in trouble, again I had previous for using things like bath towels, bed linen, t-shirts, I opted for the cloth tied to the back of the toilet. I mean what could go wrong? I made a half assed attempt at cleaning up my mess and headed to bed doing the drunk-man-quiet-walk-that-is-in-fact-really-loud-mainly-due-to-the-commentary. “Just take my shoessssss off….there’s the first one off…oooh hello Mr Left Foot” and so on. As my head hit the pillow I felt assured all was well with the world. Little did I know I was missing breaking news, major breaking news, a fact that has haunted me ever since and changed me irreparably…
I was awoken a few hours later by the shrieking of Mrs Manuel.
“Manuel…..Manuel get in here”, she shrieked.
“Oh shitty puffs, what did I do last night?”, I thought as I lay there with the pillow over my head. I was not ready to face the new day nor the untold hours of packing contained therein. The door burst open just as I remembered the whole wine-floor-cloth incident. Christ I hoped it was a cloth and not some expensive lady shirt.
“Manuel….”
“Yes my poppet?” I was a big shaky bag of fear and sweat.
“Manuel….Princess Diana is…..well she’s dead!”
I took her statement of fact as an accusation and responded immediately with, “I didn’t do it…” It was a coping method I had developed over the course of our relationship.
“What?”, she looked confused, well you can understand why.
“What did you say?”
“Diana? Princess of Wales? Once married to old jug ears? Yeah, she’s dead…..are you getting up?”
“Christ…eh yeah….did we do it?”
“What?”, again with the confused look.
“The Jon Bon Jovis, the Ra, The chucks…..did they do it?”
“NO….sake….it was a car crash…..right, get up”
I spent the next few hours sat on the couch in my boxer shorts watching blanket coverage of the news. TV cameras flicked from one sombre faced expert to another, all justifying their appearance fee by repeating the same pointless opinions over and over again. Royal experts, such as the toad master general James Whittaker, gave us their insights into how the royals would be feeling and the constitutional implications. I had already assumed the answers to be sad and none as she wasn’t a royal any more but it was good that this was confirmed by an expert. Toady fuckwit.
My eyes never left the screen. With a coffee in one hand and a big fat lovely dirty cigarette and remote control in the other I flicked and smoked my way from BBC to ITV and back again to BBC (obviously) for an age. These were the dark days before BBC NEWS24 and when the only available rolling news channel was Sky News. The Manuel’s don’t do Sky News out of respect for the dead and our own intelligence.
I was grief stricken, mortified, overcome with emotion, not with the death of the former Mrs Windsor, sad as it is when any life is taken in such a way, but because I had missed the breaking news. I hate missing breaking news stories. I mean I really fucking hate missing breaking news stories. And the fact that I missed it by maybe 20 minutes due to being drunk and in charge of a stereo compounded my anguish. Mrs Manuel assumed my doleful demeanor was out of sadness at the death of Diana and I did nothing to discourage this as it got me a bacon sandwich and out of having to deal with the contents of the cupboard under the stairs, for it was a dark and scary place filled with broken and forgotten electrical goods.
But I swore to myself that I would never miss a breaking news story again.
So now I am news addicted, I yearn for “unconfirmed reports”and ache for, “news reaching us from…..” and honestly I squeal with an excitement only comparable to that of a fat lad as the kebab man cometh with a delivery of large doner and associated sundries when regularly scheduled programmes are interrupted. My home has become a news gathering media centre that can rival even the most dedicated news outlet. From the moment I awaken the television is on and set to BBC NEWS24. If for some reason I have to leave my bedroom/media hub then I engage the numerous TVs and radios placed in logical locations along the route from bedroom to bathroom. The radio mumbles away 24 hours a day at a low setting only becoming audible when I reach the kitchen. Being digital it takes about 20 seconds to spring into life, 20 seconds is too long man, way too long. I could miss something. So it stays on.
And what is the point of all this news gathering? Why do I need to know so much so quickly? Does it do me any good? Do I learn anything? Am I wiser for knowing what the up to the minute situation in Iran is, do I make decisions based on the current price of oil? No I am not any wiser. I make few if any decisions based on what I see and hear on the news. I have not set up a facebook group nor made my twitter avatar go green in support of the Iranians. No, my quest for news is based on far less wholesome reasons. It’s simply my need to be first. I need to know before anybody else knows. By anybody else I mean The Cousin.
We have this unspoken competition you see, The News Breaker. The simple rule of the game being, “He who breaks the news to the other first, wins” and he who wins has the powa! Power over what or who I am not sure but still, they have the powa! It has to be said I am lagging behind at the moment. The Cousin broke the news to me via text message of the death, possibly via danger wank, of actor David Carradine. That’s a good story to break. I was left to text the further scandalous revelations with regards to mp’s expenses which stopped being interesting weeks ago. That said I was able to add a twist to the Carradine story and hopefully restore his credibility (and my own) by forwarding The Cousin a link suggesting that he had been killed by ninjas. And who doesn’t like a ninja story? I know the link was tenuous at best but still, it got me the powa for a while.
But in our race to break news first we sometimes get it wrong, very wrong. For example I got a phone call from The Cousin one evening telling me that The Allman Brothers had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US. I thought it sounded a bit queer and chortled with uncontrollable delight when I was able to correct him, but not after letting him ramble on about the potential effects on their back catalogue and future album sales. Lehman Brothers/Allman Brothers, you can see hoe he got it wrong. But then again in December of last year I also fired off a fantastic text message in his direction stating that Irish pork was being withdrawn as it contained Dixons when I should have said dioxins. This caused The Cousin to panic as he was in a Dixon’s shop at the time and fled fearing he would catch some sort of pig bug as he deliberated about the best set of headphones to purchase. I let that one go for a while, well you would wouldn’t you?!
So there you have it, my name is Manuel and I am a news addict, and you knew this before The Cousin, Tremendous.
I recognised the date immediately. Woke up at about 5am from a toothache, was only 7 at the time so that was very early y’see. Tried to distract myself by watching television, was surprised to find loadsa stations broadcasting.
Eventually I went up the house to get my mam and dad to get me some whiskey, told them I had a toothache and Diana died.
Never got me the whiskey.
and that’s why Diana’s a bitch.
…f*ck it, this would’ve done as a post on mine these days.
BTW congrats on the new site, still a bit confused about the layout, but seems to have everything in it, just see the recent comments now.
I’ve been pretty fond of what I’ve read by Flann too.
Flann, like my other cohorts, is a great writer….quite odd but still a great writer…..
And where was the cousin when JFK kopped it from the grassy knoll?
I remember the ex-Mrs Windsor’s demise, I walked around Limerick that Saturday morning and there’s wasn’t a sinner to be seen ( and in Limerick too………)
Manuel, excellent stuff, the best of luck but I don’t think you’ll need it. I like the cousin already.
Cheers Sniffle……plenty more to come from The Cousin….so so much more to come…..he’s the family member that just keeps giving, much like a benevolent aunt….
Tell me the cheap red wine was from a box. It just seems like that’s the way Tom Waits would have it.
Dixons! Brilliant!
Loving the site, good luck.
bwahahahaha…….I was cheap but not that cheap…..
There is no hope for me, can’t even spell my own name and I laughed at you spelling dioxins wrong.
Ellie/Ells: ah it’s good to see you back……cheers
I remember when Diana died. I was a single mom with insomnia..was the middle of the night here, see? And drank and smoked and sobbed like the pitiful girlie I was.
But I got over it.
I can relate to the obsessive following of breaking news. I did it with the whole 9/11 mess, (TV, drink, open mouth gawping at the screen) and when the latest little skirmish out in Iraq kicked off (ooohing and aaahing at the whole shock & awe thing). And I get like that on the last night of the football transfer window - right up until midnight I’m sat in front of Sky news and my little laptop scanning for the latest breaking story of who’s going where. It’s obsessive enough to be quite scary. Not for any
patheticfun games of one-upmanship, but for me it’s just the massive nature of some events that you know will change the world (and no, that doesn’t include some third-rate footballer signing for some second division club!)Keep it clean? Arse.
I remember the outpouring of grief on Diana’s passing to be somewhat confusing. Last I’d heard, she was some foreign ould wan who’d been shagging Will Carling.
Death makes everyone like you, I decided.
Wasn’t Mother Theresa driving or am i confused? (That’s one question)
wendy: we all got over it…….quickly at that
galwaywegian: bwahahahaha…..that’s right…poor old Mother T, died and no one cared, no one threw roses and no one changed shit songs in her honour….
Oh - this is where you all are - i have been over on The Cousins site - its been up for a few weeks now. I digress, jesus i remember that morning too, and it was a very scarily similar story, rubbishknitter jumping on my head shouting ‘princess diana has been squished’ and me wracking my brains trying to remember whether this was likely to have been my fault - i have to say no one in manchester particuarly gave a fuck that i could remember and the odd thing being the amount of coverage that was being given to people who had clearly spent most of their lives living beneath stairs.
congrats on the blog - its a beautiful thing
Getting used to the site……..do be liking it sir.
Loved the “I made a half assed attempt at cleaning up my mess and headed to bed doing the drunk-man-quiet-walk-that-is-in-fact-really-loud-mainly-due-to-the-commentary. “Just take my shoessssss off….there’s the first one off…oooh hello Mr Left Foot” and so on.” so many times & I always manage to pay a visit to every creaky floorboard in the house on my way to bed; it’s only polite.
Very good manuel.
**frets about other stories involving me**
Hola Other Manuel!!
A big long article on the death of Lady Di and not a single mention of the Freemasons!
It just show how good they are.
Candle in the wind is a classic
I well remember that night as well.
We were in the middle of some lesbionic action in ‘Bound’ when I was stung on my big toe by a muthafuckah of a wasp.
Wasn’t there some mad story going around about the SAS whacking her?
That was fun for about 2 minutes.
“Keep it clean“?! FTW?! Can you not just put up a curse jar, or something?
I was at Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation in Riverside with my ex-husband, and when we came out to the car we heard the news of Di’s demise.
Henceforth, I will blame you for her death, you heartless (fill in appropriate profanity here).
I was driving to work on 9/11 when the Spouse Sparrow called me on my cell to tell me the news. Since it was the Spouse Sparrow, I did not believe him, as the morning drive talk shows were not interrupted with any breaking news (the only thing SoCal drive-time radio shows get interrupted for is traffic reports, if the terrorists wanted attention in California, they should have plowed a plane in to a freeway). I didn’t really believe it until I got to work and heard about it there. We all worked our regular day, and I didn’t see any TV coverage on it ’til I got home that night. It really isn’t as heartless as it sounds; the East Coast’s 3,000 miles away, and a 4 hour time difference.
Due to the length of this comment, I will exempt myself from posting on my blog for another year.
Congrats on the new place here.
Can empathise with the news junkie bit though the rolling news stations piss me off something shocking.
Remember where I was when I heard the Diana accident news - still up after a vodka and Red Bull induced frolic.
It went WAAAAY over the top after a couple of days and I remember wanting to stab every so-called reporter and interviewee who came on the tv or radio as the same “What did Diana meant to you? question came up for 2000th time. “And how did you know Diana?” “Well, my brother’s friend’s workmate once met someone who’d met her, for 3 minutes, five years ago.” And then they conducted a live fucking interview for ten minutes based around that until the researchers found the next no-name.
News. It’s very over-rated.
I’m off to find a TV news camera team and then swat a fly.
Simon: yeah but lets be honest until just recently cittee haven’t exactly been flooding the the dwindling hours of final transfer day with bids….
sweary: so death then it is……I need to be loved….really need to be loved…
toast: “people who had clearly spent most of their lives living beneath stairs” heh quality…..I having that, obviously…
AnFearBui: it’s almost impossible to miss it……and crashing into the tv too it has to be said
The Cousin: ha, you are so fucked……
You want a news service that insults you inteligence you gotta try Fox news, Its like the tv’s version of the Weekly World News
Breaking news: Ed McMahon carked it!
Ha, totally pwnd you.
I was thinking how many times we’ve moved house since 1997.
It’s 5.
In August, it’ll be 6.
Ugh.
It takes genius to be funny about such a time.
BTW try adding kir to cheap red wine.
His stuff is generally too long for me to read, but I do agree.
David Carradine was more than just the princess of whales he taught me Cane-Fu for now i am deadly with my walking stick. I was working when the news broke and an underling first told me she had broken her arm or something, later I heard she was dead, to quote Larry of Arabia ‘nothing good cums from Arabs’.
I also worked the next day and the radio station my work was tuned into played pan pipe music all day in mourning …….. the bastards.
Medbh, I’ve actually lost count of how many times I’ve moved home…….the move to Dublin though was ill fated from the start…..ho hum…..but that’s a different story for a different day….
I remember that day I was in Victoria BC at a friend’s house when the news came on. Wow that was something. Stayed up all night for that one.
The U.S. news makes me crazy and after the last election, I stopped watching, only reading the news.
And blogs. I get most of my news from blogs. That’s probably bad, right?
Steve: cheers man for popping by…..
Boxer: yes…..probably not smart……some blogs are wiser than others…..Knudsen is defo in the second camp……heh
Like the lazy mofo I am, I’m still getting oriented to the new site. Its making me woozy with all the animated banners and stuff… but Congratulations!
Diana? I didn’t have a television at the time so I was spared all the angst. I was sorry she was dead and all that, but still…
I remember that night, was at a housewarming party when the news hit.
I was all about getting the news first until OJ drove his damn Bronco all over the California highways and interupted my highly entertaining and edge-of-seat episode of The X-Files. Never did see the last 10 minutes, the fucker.
Oh, and glad to you back!!
who’s bad? who’s dead you mean!
Diana accident my arse.. Diana murder is nearer the mark.
Hell what do I care anyway? Bloody royals.
I remember the day like yesterday. My sister in law lives in England, after she passed away she called she was crying. I felt bad for her too, but everything comes from god good or bad.
Nelly
wha? diana died too? i thought these things happened in threes… that’s what all my facebook friends have been saying.
oh. 1997? i missed that… it was a difficult year for me, with the infamous goat incident and all…
nice web site how did you make it???
we’ve all had a goat incident or 2 over the years…….heh….good to see ya Daisy
Senor, I was unemployed and stranded in the silicon valley, California, and caught it on the breaking news. I too am liking the site and your fellow writers.