Things that annoyed me intensely this week. Magnificent seven.

• When you get your car fixed, spend an absolute klondyke getting the thing ready for the MOT. . . get it home and something still isn’t working.
• People raising objections to things and nit-picking, yet not offering a solution themselves.
• If I am doing something for a particular reason, I don’t really need someone questioning what I’m doing.
• Those in team sports that suffer from the disease of me, and fail to understand the true concept of the team.
• My children’s school has introduced a late book for children that are late for school to sign. I have instructed them never to sign any admission of guilt.
• Tom Humphries article about camogie in the Irish Times last Monday was good in parts but patronising nonsense elsewhere. Show me the evidence Tom.
• Being slapped on the wrists by the Powers That Be in a large sporting organisation. Control freakery gone wild.

My daughter recently took part in a show organised by the dancing school, of which she is a (minor) part. The particular troupe of Irish Festival dancers regularly attend shows abroad showcasing their undoubted talent. And each summer they put on an event in the local theatre offering parents such as myself the opportunity to pay and watch their little treasures dance to their heart’s content.

And so the last eight weeks or so of the summer have been occupied with the logistics and time of running these would-be stars of the stage back and forth to rehearsal. Among the casualties of that particular exercise were either my points-free driving licence or my wife’s points-un-free licence. Those eagle eyed boys in blue or their camera operators clocked our car doing the wrong speed in the wrong place but for some reason sent the ticket to the guy we bought it from over four years ago. Time will tell if efficiency rules among the Traffic Wonks and it gets sent to us. Let’s see how efficient you are boys!

Anyway I digress. The tickets for the aforesaid show were £11.00 each, not a lot you might think but steep enough for a troupe of amateur dancers. When you factor in the in-house marketing job my daughter did to unsuspecting aunts and grannies seven people were signed up to go. No discount was offered to those parents who had already paid for the lessons to enable their would be Jean Butlers to take part in the show, having paid in time and Speeding points to get them there and back. Is it too simplistic to suggest that without our children there would have been no show or is that a tad curmudgeonly?

We duly took our seats in the second row for the marathon two plus hours of Irish dance, and  various other tunes from the shows and pop hits given the same  treatment. At times the dancing was absolutely brilliant, in particular the sequences of tap.

Girls in their twenties, teenagers, prepubescent and early primary school kids whirled, jigged, reeled and tapped round the stage with great vigour some looking positively miserable, maybe they were thinking of all the time and money their parents had invested to get them there. Others jigged, juggled and wobbled their stuff with great abandon. Some had more to wiggle than others whilst some of the younger dancers seemed to wish forlornly that they could thrust, wiggle and jiggle just like the older dancers. We just wished they wouldn’t try.

Frankly there was something disconcerting and overly three dimensional  and dare I say it in your face, about the serried ranks of dancers heaving and thrusting about on the stage, embonpoints all a shudder. No doubt some lads would have enjoyed it –  I found the sight of the younger girls acting older decidedly uncomfortable and incongruous, especially set alongside some of the innocence of the very young dancers. These ones of course will have been looking up to the older girls and the way they conducted themselves.

The highlight for me was when one girl’s hair grip flew off, landing on the stage. And as we watched for one of her colleagues to stand on it and possibly injure herself, one of the stars of this year’s show, and last year’s, swept across the stage, feet a jigging and expertly hoofed the offending accessory sideways stage right at a rate of knots, before karooming off in the other direction in a flurry of black tighted legs skipping an intricate jig with the odd buck lep thrown in.

What was it like then? Well, with some judicious editing of some of the more self indulgent pieces that went on, and on, and on. . . it would have been a tighter and more enjoyable show. But sadly in most cases each production piece was emphasised, over emphasised and reinforced and consequently went on too long. And the main dramatis personae were always the same which became a bit tedious and over familiar.

Anyhow, in the end my daughter enjoyed her five or six minutes on stage each night. I couldn’t help but think she isn’t one of the in-crew in many ways. She loves her dancing and skips about our kitchen without a care in the world. She goes to classes and rehearsals and seems to like it. But. . . hard to know.

After the latest show it’s much easier to separate the dancer from the dance. The former is an innocent wee girl who loves to perform and dance. The latter? Too knowing. Too adult. Too grown up. Too self indulgent. And probable a dance too far. Won’t be there next year, that’s for sure.

The ash and the oakleaf: Micheal Scullion with Gráinne McGoldrick.

One of my favourite clients is Scullion Hurls. I love the craft part of the business. Micheal Scullion is a young hurley maker and like myself is making his way working for himself.

We hooked up almost by accident a few years back when I was over buying some hurls off him for our club Eoghan Rua.

Since then I have been helping him out with bits of marketing and advertising. I write copy for ads and articles for him and he bounces a few ideas of me from time to time.

In turn I have done a coupld of marketing plans that we have tried to work through.

Micheal works out of a workshop over at the family place at Loughgiel in Antrim, the business is located directly across the road from the Loughgiel Shamrocks Hurling Pitch.

It’s as if you could break your stick, run over to Micheal and lift a spare and be back on the hurling field before play resumes.

When you gonna take the photo Joe?

We had a nice wee bit of profile in the Irish News, Micheal supplies hurls to Derry Camogie All Star Gráinne McGoldrick who’s a niece of mine through marriage.

Gráinne and I had a very pleasant morning over picking up sticks and generally shooting the breeze with Micheal.

It was all the more gratifying when the piece we prepared appeared complete with pic in the Irish News the day before the Ulster Camogie Final.

Unfortunately Derry didn’t win the match but Micheal was a winner. Since then he has had further success with a number of Antrim team using Scullion Hurls in their defeat of Dublin to make the All Ireland Hurling Quarter final. At the time of writing who knows what might happen next for Antrim and Scullion Hurls.

This week I spent a considerable amount of my time working on a tender submission. I will mention neither the tenderer nor what we were tendering for lest I breach some sort of small print. That would be as heinous a crime as is possible in tenderland.

Suffice it to say, anyone who is involved in trying to get work, to make a living for themselves, especially if you’re self employed like me; to pay the bills; to pay for a holiday; or a forthcoming child’s birthday party or simple things like Jordan’s fruit muesli and yoghurt for breakfast. . . tenders are a necessary evil. I found out recently I lost one on price – I dunno how the successful bid can do it for what that suggested but that isn’t my call. . .

So why is it that the people that write the tenders appear to have no concept of what goes on out in the real world? They are the refuge of large public sector organisations, drawn up and drafted by committee, by wonks, tallymen, beancounters and geeks that have nothing better to do with their lives.

And do you know how I know this? Because I was one of these wonks and I worked with the geeks, tallymen and beancounters. I sat through interminable meetings over the years thinking up ingenious ways to baffle potential suppliers at the behest of my superiors and the Buying Wallahs in the Department of Box Ticking, Procedure and Ridiculous Shite.

Did we get the best suppliers? Dunno. Did we have the best procedures? Probably.  Is this keeping a load of people in jobs? Definitely.

If there is reincarnation, then this is probably bad karma and I’ll probably come back as an accounting type person. And see if I do? Woe betides the first person I meet with a creative bone in their body. I will suffocate them with the twin pillows of procedure and petty bureaucracy. Hell Yeah!