The pollsters don’t know, the Don’t Knows still don’t know, and now I don’t know either
OPINION polls have a bit of a shabby reputation these days. It wasn’t so long ago that politicians and commentators alike lapped up these snapshots in time as if unimpeachable gospel.
Then there was Brexit, Trump and Theresa May’s June gamble.
Should we ever trust them again? Well, yes.
It’s just that when the western world is having a collective meltdown and doesn’t know what it’s doing from one bad decision to the next, it’s next to impossible for pollsters to keep up.
And in a way, by getting things so spectacularly wrong, they have inadvertently stumbled upon a greater truth: nobody is in charge of our world or knows which end is up.
For instance, that Red C poll on Sunday told us that, slight shifts in voting allegiances aside, an unwanted election wouldn’t change anything.
But voters had been polled midweek.
By Friday and the weekend, the whole political landscape had changed shape and colour after days of shameful and tawdry brinkmanship by the Shinners and the Soldiers of Dither.
So hardly the fault of the pollsters.
For the first time ever, I have a certain sympathy for the Don’t Knows, those meek maybe-maybe-nots who are a steady constant in every poll everywhere.
I often wondered are they the same people each time, never having an opinion and genuinely knowing nothing about anything?
Now, though, I kind of get them. Because after the high farce and low standards exhibited by crass opportunists in Leinster House this past week, I have to admit I don’t know either.
I don’t know, that is, if I’d bother to vote for another farce parliament made up of too many showboaters and charlatans more interested in the tribal spoils of war than actually doing right by the country.
A terrible tail to tell
BRUTALLY killed a little mouse I found scurrying around the hall.
It wasn’t pretty and the details are between me and my Maker. In more than 25 years living in this house we’ve never had mice, but around the time of Hurricane Ophelia they seem to have been blown our
I called in the experts straight away and trays of poison were laid at strategic junctions in the house, most particularly the hotpress.
This warm little cubbyhole, according to the man from SqueakBusters (not the company’s real name but I like it), is the migrant mouse’s M50. They keep nibbling the stuff, dying unpleasantly, only to be replaced by legions of others legging it along the warm pipes in search of Utopia.
The two women I share the house with (a wife and a 21-year-old OMG) are not coping too well.
My daughter, normally a compassionate save-the-planet millennial, has gone all Pol Pot on me. She’s demanding immediate and total extermination.
Up to now we had only heard them busily padding about, an unnerving pitter-patter that has woken us in the dead of night.
A bit like ‘Scream IV’ without the popcorn.
I knew the sight of one could perhaps send OMG over the edge. So I did what I had to do. Wham.
But now I lie awake thinking of the little fella’s family anxiously waiting, somewhere under the floorboards, for Papa to come home. Like cute little Fievel in ‘An American Tail’.
‘Of Mice and Men’, indeed. John Steinbeck didn’t know the half of it.
A Black Friday lemming? Not I!
ISN’T Black Friday a truly vulgar example of consumer avarice and greed? I couldn’t contemplate participating in such a trash marketing contrivance.
That’s why we waited until 9am on Saturday before rushing out to snap up one of those sleek flatscreen beasts at a truly cracking sale price.
If we bought it a day earlier, we would have just been another of those zombie lemmings transfixed and hypnotised by advertising spin.
By waiting those few hours, we showed that we’re, really, above all that.