When everything is vexatious to the spirit...

WE haven’t a chance really. A recent report suggested that most of us never get beyond two minutes into our day, without hearing or seeing something from the outside world that is —as Desiderata put it — vexatious to the spirit.

And by the way, I just made that up.

But I’m pretty sure that most of you had no trouble accepting the validity of that “recent report” anyway, including the bit which I have now introduced, whereby you don’t even know for sure if what is vexing your spirit is true or false.

As for the bit about the “outside world”, really there is no outside world any more, no place in which you can avoid hearing or seeing something about, say, Brett Kavanaugh, before you have wiped the sleep from your eyes.

Leaving aside the fact that I wouldn’t send Brett Kavanaugh out to the shops for a bottle of milk, let alone put him on the US Supreme Court, I have a special interest in him, echoed in the words of the author Stephen King, who tweeted that “his angry performance corresponds closely to what people in AA call a ‘dry drunk’.”

Followers of the “50 Ways…” column in this paper’s magazine will know that a recent episode dealt with this “dry drunk” syndrome, how it describes the kind of person who stops drinking but who hasn’t stopped being essentially the same person who used to drink.

So while Kavanaugh’s anger might remind Stephen King of the anger of a dry drunk, King would also know that Kavanaugh is not actually a dry drunk, because he is not dry — “I liked beer, I still like beer” — and he was not drunk when he was telling the Senate Committee how much he liked beer and still likes it. He just gave you a sense of what he might be like, if he was drunk.

So we’re hardly out of bed in the morning and we’re trying to deal with our bewilderment about this man whose activities do not directly concern us, or at least would not have directly concerned us in a simpler age — now it seems that everything directly concerns us, so that I could be standing on a Dart platform in Greystones the other day, listening to two women having a long and well-informed conversation about the life and times of this Brett Kavanaugh.

He was vexatious to their spirits too, and probably had been for most of the day, during which it was almost certain that we would also be trying to process the latest information about Boris Johnson — not only do you have to hear the latest from “Boris”, you have to get past that little frisson of excitement which the political reporters inject into the item, because he delights them so, with his sense of “mischief ”. They just can’t help it.

So is there any peace to be found?

Of course there is, though at times it is hard to tell if it is indeed peace, or just the absence of war.

If you were looking at that short film on Claire Byrne Live in which Shay Healy spoke about his struggles with Parkinson’s Disease and about the meaning of life in general, you would almost certainly have felt this unfamiliar sensation — this was not vexatious to the spirit, it was uplifting. And yes it had taken until after 10’clock at night for you to get there, but for the few minutes that Shay was telling his story, you devoured it and all its goodness.

And then there was a completely different kind of peace, but peace all the same, on Living With Lucy with Ivan Yates — yes, I know that the Buddha made no mention of Lucy or Ivan in his otherwise impressive teachings, and he would rarely, if ever, be seeking the answers to the big questions on Virgin One, yet I found that somehow it was working for me.

The issue of Ivan’s character was settled on the morning he was talking about some football matter to Chris Donoghue on his radio show, and I realised from a reference he made, that he must have been looking at Goals on Sunday on Sky Sports — which just happened to be on at the same time as the Marian Finucane radio show.

This will always put him on the right side of history as far as I am concerned, so I had no fear about him “living” with Lucy and with his excellent wife Deirdre — though she has coped for many years with the knowledge that some day someone will come to the house, and Ivan will start describing the workings of the old-fashioned toilet to them, in totally unnecessary detail. On television.

I would disagree with Ivan on some of the great issues — I was on his TV programme with Tony O’Reilly, my co-author of Tony 10, with Ivan expressing dismay at the craziness of the bets that Tony was making. Which was a bit like being annoyed that an alcoholic would be drinking all that whiskey when he knows it’s bad for him.

But there is always this tremendous energy that he is giving out, even in his own home as he gets on with the important work of incessantly watching sport on television.

Maybe it’s some Protestant gene, that enables him to manage the guilt he should be feeling — wherever it’s coming from, it is relaxing to see him there, so relaxed.

There is also this sense that terrible things have happened to him, but he is still doing fine — apart from his bankruptcy, he was a bookie who missed out on the online gambling racket which is perhaps the greatest money-printing operation in human history.

Yes, terrible things have happened to him, and great things have happened to him, but for him the really important thing is that his beloved City are playing Liverpool today, on Super Sunday.

Peace... such peace.

‘Yes, I know the Buddha made no mention of Lucy or Ivan in his otherwise impressive teachings...’