Why Caravaggio is to blame for sending me off the beaten path

TWITTER gets a lot of stick. In existence for 11 years, it has been accused of everything from facilitating Nazis to allowing anonymous abuse. But its enduring contribution to modern culture is the hashtag.

Used as a means of linking discourses across the platform, the hashtag turned 10 years old recently, but it was one this summer that showed how Twitter can be a force for good.

#NoWrongPath allowed Twitter users around the world to share their stories of how they came to their current careers, with the vast majority showing that few school leavers have a clear idea of what they want to do with their lives. It was a hashtag I can relate to. All I wanted to do in college was art but, after failing to get into art college, I committed to an arts degree. I dropped out after four weeks. I went back to college in my early 20s, got my masters and started working in the media. I wonder what path I would have taken if I had been accepted into art college, but that’s something I will never know, largely thanks to Caravaggio.

‘The Taking of Christ’ had been hanging in the dining room of the Leeson Street Jesuit Community for decades. Considered a copy of the original, in the early Nineties it was discovered to be the actual work of the great master, and was handed over to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1993. Art was one of the few subjects I was good at and we were guaranteed that Caravaggio was going to come up on the higher paper when we sat the Leaving Cert in the summer of 1994.

Caravaggio’s short life was easy to study – he was a drunkard, a violent thug, an outsider who seemed utterly at war with the world. In his paintings he used labourers and prostitutes as life models for religious figures, wrapping the divine in the pasty flesh of profane humanity. All his paintings remind us that we are just haunted meat, and everything passes. Being typically difficult, Caravaggio didn’t come up on the Leaving Cert higher paper ergo I failed to get the points to study art. Yet here I am. My favourite quote about success come from Dicky Fox, the sports agent mentor of Tom Cruise’s character in ‘Jerry Maguire’: “I don’t have all the answers. In life, to be honest, I failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my wife. I love my life. And I wish you my kind of success.”

More proof Trump’s not the brightest

OUR mortal enemy the moon also proved that there is #NoWrongPath by moving its enormous mass directly into the path of our sun, cutting off our meagre supply of Vitamin D and attempting to give us all rickets. The occasion provided for many stunning images, but few were as beautiful as the one of Donald Trump staring directly into the eclipse, presumably because someone told him not to do that exact thing.

Perhaps we should all start telling him that he is doing a great job and to stay in the White House forever.

Although something tells me that it won’t work like that, and that impeachment is the best way to drag the whole sorry mess of the White House into sunlight.

I swear, my son’s showing signs of artistic greatness

ASTUDY this year by Marist College examined the correlation between verbal fluency and swearing, with the result that those who were more adept at swearing had greater language skills.

I tried to console myself with this thought on Monday night, when I happened upon my two-and-a-half-year-old son shouting ‘f***ing tractor’ over and over again.

It’s one of those moments where you try to a) hide your laughter and b) try not to get too angry, before turning to your spouse and declaring ‘this is your f***ing fault’, because clearly, swearing is an equal opportunities employer.

This week the popular site Mumsnet has advertisers concerned over their ads appearing next to posts with snappy titles like ‘I can’t f ***ing do this anymore’ and other howls of despair from parents at their wits’ end.

Perhaps my son will decide he wants to go to college, and will eke out a career as a sweary, boozy artist like Caravaggio.

Hopefully, he will be a more sane version, as, despite all his talent, Caravaggio killed someone over a game of tennis, went on the run and died from fever aged 38.

So perhaps there is #AWrongPath after all.