Surrealing in the Years: We've found out we know nothing about a lot of Very Important Things |
IF THERE’S ONE surefire way to get yourself into the hallowed inches of Surrealing in the Years, it’s to be a weird animal that has escaped from something. Even better if you are 15,000 weird animals, and you’re on the loose in Donegal.
Perhaps it is fair to say that the ill-fated crab escape of January 2026 is but a fleeting fancy. That several years from now, nobody will remember the time that 15,000 crabs made a mad dash for freedom after a lorry crash, and emergency services had to close the roads to collect all of the crabs like some kind of video game.
The story ends with the crabs being reloaded into the lorry and sent off to Portugal, where one assumes they’ll be eaten. I actually don’t know anything about crabs. I don’t know if they have feelings. If they yearn for freedom, as mankind does. Still, when the rest of the world has forgotten about the time that 15,000 crabs nearly made it to freedom in Donegal, Surrealing in the Years will remember.
Breaking up with Enoch
In the interest that this column might some day serve as a time capsule for some future generation wondering about the pervasive themes and throughlines in Irish society at this moment in time, it seems fair enough to note that Enoch Burke is outside that damn school again.
I don’t remember what the gates of my own school looked like, but I could probably draw the gates outside Wilson’s Hospital School in Westmeath from memory.
Truthfully, there is very little joy to be had in writing about Enoch Burke. There’s barely even schadenfreude. At the end of the day, we’re talking about a young man wasting his life behind bars (prison or school gate, take your pick) in order to appease an outermost fringe interpretation of an ideology he was raised with.
There is an argument to be made that Enoch Burke isn’t worth covering at all anymore. That’s actually where I tend to come down on the issue, most weeks, which is why I have often ignored it as a topic even as he stands forlornly outside of those schoolgates, deserving nothing but........