Another Fine Messi

I mentioned the Copa America last week and, like most other people in Europe I haven't been able to follow much of it on TV. I don't have access at home to any of the channels showing it and the time difference is a bit too punishing to go watch it in any of the bars where I might see it. Last night, two friends, one Argentinian, one Mexican, invited me to watch the semi-final between their two countries, which looked like it would be a great match, given the last two games between the two sides, in the Confederations Cup two years ago, and then in Leipzig in last year's World Cup round of 16. But, early work this morning deterred me and I have been hearing all day about yet another wonder goal by Lionel Messi. I managed to track it down on the copyright-infringing extravaganza that is YouTube. Sit back and enjoy.

Apple Lossless

A couple of months back I listed a number of items I have lost over the years, many of them things I have since managed well enough without, the loss of which having occasioned only a temporary frustration. The weekend just passed almost added my iPod to the list, as at the double birthday party of two friends in a bar near Porte de la Villette on Friday night, I returned to pick it up from where a friend was mixing only to find that it had disappeared. Being among friends I didn't suspect it stolen and the presence of a similar apparatus, with a similar cover suggested that it might have been taken by accident. It had in fact been mistakenly given by my friend to a friend of the owner of the other iPod in question. After about twelve hours' worrying and resignation to its loss, its whereabouts were located and I collected it off a personable Mexican filmmaker called Juan on Sunday evening.

There are few things I carry about that I worry about losing - my laptop is obviously one, whenever I have it out and about, as is my wallet, for equally obvious reasons; another is my notebook (or notebooks) and I generally have good luck with them when I do lose them, my mobile phone is another, more to avoid the hassle and expense of replacing it, and since I bought it last November, my iPod is another. These are the only things that I keep on my person whenever I go out, entrusting them to nobody, and when people lose phones and mp3-players that they have left in jackets or bags lying in corners of bars I don't have a huge amount of sympathy. Nor did I have much sympathy for myself after my rare lapse of vigilance the other night. Which makes me feel guilty that I should attach such importance to such a clearly unimportant thing. It is truly dispiriting to evaluate loss in terms of consumer goods, and the fact that it has come back to a stupidly piggish consumer (as I am wont to see myself) induces a sort of consumer's remorse at this level of effeteness that I have allowed myself to attain. I soon got over my angst by putting Icky Thump on the retrieved toy, as well as Richard Hawley's 'Cole Corner', which I have dallied far too long over getting hold of. Thanks once again, Tim.

Non-Stop Stopping at Shannon

A Dublin friend of mine, who is also a former resident of Paris, was over here for the weekend; he has been a tireless campaigner (along with many others) against US Military flights into Shannon for the past four years and he is currently engaged on a quixotic task to get electoral candidates to commit to a resolution that will ultimately apply the law of the land and put an end to the illegal stopovers. There have been a few takers, such as Michael D. Higgins, who has drafted his own statement on the matter, while Ciarán Cuffe weighed in with the wryly-worded 'we hope to be opposed to the stopovers'. The flights are clearly not an election issue - and there is no real reason (other than a moral one) why they should be as elections in any country are rarely fought on matters of foreign policy. I have tried explaining this to American expats living in Paris over the scant reference to such a thing in the French Presidential campaign.

More worrying however is the likelihood that the issue of the Shannon stopovers will be sidelined in an eventual coalition government, which is more than likely going to involve Labour, and possibly the Greens too. I cannot see Labour - no matter how strongly individual TDs feel about the Shannon stopovers - exhausting their policy trump card on a matter that the majority of Irish people have but a passing interest in. I would like to believe otherwise but this is the way it is probably going to be, and I can't say either that I would entirely blame Labour for such a stance. Instead I imagine that the world will watch as the Americans pull out of Iraq and in the wake of the Septics' reintegration into the less clamorous world, the issue of the Shannon stopovers will be quietly put to rest. That's politics for you, to paraphrase a former Taoiseach.

A Shell of Themselves

No time to post anything lengthy today due to a heavy workload but here's something I've just received from my friend Sinéad, her film for Al Jazeera about the Rossport-Shell protests. The episode showed both up once again the disgraceful behaviour of Shell in carving up oil and gas concessions the world over, the craven compliance of the Irish government and the phenomenal backbone and spirit of the Mayo locals in resisting the steamrolling over their community. Principles are something that have been thin on the ground in Celtic Tiger Ireland but this is a heartening example of the reawakening of the people. It would be nice to see Fianna Fail get a bloody nose in Mayo on the 24th of May but that might be expecting too much. Well done, Sinéad and kudos too to Al Jazeera for bringing this to an international public. It would be nice if there were a little more media focus on issues that the consensual Irish media would prefer to ignore.

Pete Doherty - Class A Muppet

I mentioned a few months ago the death of an acquaintance at a party attended by one Pete Doherty. The ex-Libertines singer has been cleared of any involvement in the death of Mark Blanco though he hardly covered himself in glory by leaving the scene of the fatality to continue partying in a hotel. Now he has confirmed to the world what a pathetic prick he is by posting a video diary on the web boasting about how Paul Roundhill's crackden - where Mark died - can be 'creative' for him 'if drugs and suspicious deaths don't get in the way'. The web and its new social networking receptacles have fostered a rather sad solipsism among many users (the most recent example is Cho Seung-Hu's rant from beyond the grave) but seeing a spoiled junkie rock star elaborating on his 'art' while mocking the death of someone else is perhaps the most distasteful manifestation yet. Stop buying this muppet's records and let's hope he's forced to bring Baby Shambles to Butlin's to finance his smack habit.

A Missing Friend

My friend Alan Templeton went missing four months ago this week; I have avoided mentioning his disappearance here thus far because I didn't think this was the place to speculate on why he went missing or on what might have happened to him while his family has been going through a terrible ordeal trying to locate him. Like his sister Kirsten, brother Callum and his parents Douglas and Elizabeth, I believe that Alan is still with us and there have been reported sightings of him in the past couple of months in both Aberdeen and Edinburgh, from where he went missing. He left a friend's flat on the 25th of November last without his wallet and passport and there has been no contact from him since.

I knew Alan for a couple of years in Paris - he was working in Stolly's when I arrived back here two years ago. He lived here for two years and I last saw him on the football field the weekend before he moved back to Edinburgh in early October, about six weeks before he went missing. A few people, myself included, knew that he had been depressed here, though we were nonetheless taken aback by his disappearance. It appears that he had been taking anti-depressants while in Paris and stopped taking them when he returned to Edinburgh.

Despite his depression - and the mood swings that often accompany such an affliction - Alan is a laugh, one of the funniest people I know, and a man with an ineffable ability to engineer a joke out of thin air. Early one morning a couple of summers back Alan managed to persuade the entire staff and clientele of a Parisian café to vacate the premises and give the place a Marie Celeste air to freak out a friend of ours when he returned from the toilet. Shortly afterwards the two of them, seeing the door of a refrigerated van open, stepped inside for no reason other than for a childish prank. Unfortunately their timing was awry and they promptly got locked in by the driver. Their efforts to get his attention resulted in them being greeted by the pointed guns of a police SWAT team, summoned by the panicked driver. There was also the humorous anecdote related to me by Alan about when he bought a ticket to see the only film on that morning in the Denfert repertory cinema, having arrived just as it was starting. The film was called Cendrillon and he knew nothing about it; he was surprised to see that he was one of the few audience members over six years old (and at 6'4" tall, he was a bit self-conscious about this), when the credits rolled, he realised he was going to watch Walt Disney's Cinderella dubbed into French. Ever the cinéphile, Alan stayed to watch the whole thing.

Alan's friends and family have set up a MySpace page in an attempt to alert people to his disappearance, particularly in Scotland and France, and Wales, where he went to college at the University of Aberystwyth. Though few people reading this will be from any of those places, please do pass the link on to anyone you know from there that might live there. It might help. We all miss Alan and would dearly like to see him again.