CRITIQUENT

So I just came from Dublin, and while previously skeptical about the rantings of a certain person, I now know these things to be indelibly true. Knackers are real and oh, so horrid. I have never in my life met more fit candidates for experimental drowning.

Sure, bogans are unpleasant. Chavs are somewhat grotesque. But knackers are something else. Imagine, if you will, a woman dressed in a pink tracksuit. The outfit is ill fitting, such as to reveals a torturously stretched playboy bunny tattoo at the base of her spine, and another tasteless ink figure on the back of her squarish neck. Her hair is a mess, and partially bleached. Her mouth spews words of not-quite-formed English in an utterly incomprehensible and charmless accent. She is complaining about the price of a bag of bread rolls on her bill at the counter of a corner shop.

While she is doing this, her overweight, pug nosed, monstrous progeny is destroying a stand of toys. Her own mother, with skin like a badly damaged leather handbag and dressed in a matching pastel green tracksuit, is smoking a cigarette.

Multiply this by thousands and you begin to understand the horror that is the knackers. I saw mulleted, betrack-suited, obese 8 year olds abusing total strangers in the street. A family of knackers with two pre-school aged children, drinking, swearing, and laughing manically at the back of a bus. I was overwhelmed by the chatter of a half dozen knacker-juniors chatting obnoxiously and unceasingly in their horrid rendering of English in the middle of a crowded internet café. I unknowingly ordered food from one of the knacker snack bars, and was rewarded with the most inedible rendition of greasy spoon fare I have ever encountered.

Dublin was not without it’s charms, but certainly it possesses one of the most loathsome underclasses in the civilised world. It almost makes you understand why the Irish were so persecuted for such a long time, if it weren’t really the Irish that were persecuted, but some forbears to the present day knackers. And if that sounds shocking to you, don’t get up on that high horse until you’ve experienced the horror for yourself. Or better yet, just don’t.

I’m not an animal person usually. But very few in the kindom of animalia receive as much of my personal bile as the insect kingdom. Whether it’s bed bugs, crawling over a wafer-thin mattress in the hostel from hell, or wasps assaulting you in an outdoor cafe, insects manage to take any situation and turn up the irritating by a notch or two.

The current bane of my existence is the mosquito population of all of Europe. Apparently my blood has become the it thing this summer, with the little blighters following me from Milan to Budapest to sample the most recent arrival of Asian fusion cuisine. I don’t even know when they’re biting me, all I know is my right foot is itching like mad.

If only spiders weren’t as equally detestable. I wonder how much a bag of geckos costs in Hungarian forints?

Dear respected proprietors of this hostel (Bluesky Hostel in Glasgow, UK). I wished to share with you some selected thoughts that crossed my mind whilst staying in your lodgings:

1. Trusting your employees to choose appropriate music to play at a volume of their own discretion in the reception/communal kitchen/dining/only area with available power points is a courageous and probably well founded decision. Some may dissagree, but I think that the rewards speak for themselves.
2. Blinking/scrolling/flashing blue lights in a plastic tube make a bold and aesthetically pleasing choice of decoration for the aforementioned area. The disco ball is also tasteful.
3. Bunk bedding allows one half of your guests to see the underside of the mattress above them. I was delighted to see that you pay attention to, and take advantage of, such nuanced channels of communication. Nothing quite says “welcome” like unidentifiable liquid stains.
4. A big sign saying “NO REFUNDS — sorry for any inconvenience” may be too subtle a message. Especially when that sign is the first thing your guests will see on entering the premises.
5. Posters, paint smears and adult hand prints in primary colours not only decorate your walls, but also cover up any deterioration and unrepairable damage to your building — very successfully.
6. The bag of bread, paint-buckets full of Fruit Topping & What, not butter! and unflavoured bran cereal has equalled if not far exceeded the included breakfast I have been privy to at other supposed “hostels”. That must have cost you at least four pounds a week to put on. What beneficence!
7. A ratio of 1 toilet to 30 people makes perfect sense to me. As does the lack of power points in the dorms.
8. It is great to hear you are an equal opportunity employer. It’s laughs all round when you have two non-native English speakers trying to work out their problems. “She becomes boss in few minutes…” “If you have books for 6 nights” — so professional and constructive towards conflict resolution.
9. Organisational charts which depict a stuffed animal as the supervisor of your organisation, completely allay my fears that this has all been an elaborate candid camera style set-up.

Thanks for the memories.