Upfront

BLACK THURSDAY WAS a day for thinking about things we’d rather not think about. Our own part in the country’s downfall. The loans we couldn’t really afford. All those nice people in the banks doing somersaults for us around our mortgages. Backbends, really. Pirouettes.

They weren’t just throwing shapes for fat-cat property developers, whatever some of us would like to think. We thought bankers were lovely then, as I recall. Every one of them was the bank that liked to say yes and they said it loudly and brightly when they probably shouldn’t have to many of us ordinary Sean and Saoirse Citizens in the boom years.

How clever we thought we were. How loaded. We spent ages thinking about what kind of wood to put on the deck in the back and whether the space was large enough to incorporate a Zen garden and was that Buddha slightly over priced or completely worth it? Worth it, we decided. Because we were convinced we were totally worth it then.

For a while everyone we knew was getting an extension. There was going to be vast amounts of glass, obviously, because we didn’t know what our parents were thinking having cement walls when you could have floor-to-ceiling windows. Even if we didn’t have much space outside, just a rectangular patch of untreated oak decking, we needed lots and lots of glass because, duh, the award-winning architects who came on board (we loved that expression) said that was what we should do.

Where there was a wall in the dining room, a cement one, they wanted it to be covered almost entirely with a mirror to make the space deceptively bigger. We drew the line there, thank goodness. On Black Thursday it was hard to look ourselves in the eye as it was – a mirror wall in the dining area would have been a disaster. It would have been impossible to avoid ourselves while eating a corn-fed chicken that cost €3 more than the perfectly good ordinary one, because in some ways we still haven’t copped on.

Basically, Black Thursday made us add up the amount we’ve wasted over the years on taxis and sparkly bathroom tiles and shudder. Sorry, me. This is my confession. It made me add up the amount I’ve wasted on taxis and sparkly bathroom tiles. Black Thursday made me shudder.

Like most people, I’m angry at the Government. But I’m not angry on my behalf. The pain of a belt tightening across my expansive gut is nothing compared to the pain of the people in dole queues. Negative equity? Who cares? If you are lucky enough to be able to scrape your mortgage payments together after you pay for food and electricity and make the payments on all the loans you shouldn’t have taken out in the first place, then negative equity is meaningless.

I am not DIY inclined. I am more than a little bit ashamed to say that more than once during the boom years I used the following phrase with only the faintest hit of facetiousness: “Ah, let’s throw money at the problem.”

Up until quite recently, when I needed help with a bit of flat-pack furniture, I called up a civil engineer I found online who does this kind of thing for a reasonable rate in his spare time. I’m not saying he won’t be around here again (he’s a nice guy and he would probably teach us some tricks if we asked), but I am going to try to fix things myself first before I pay someone else.

There is always Sugru. Invented by Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, Sugru it is a mouldable silicone play doh-type material that sets in 24 hours to a tough, flexible silicone rubber that allows users to modify or repair just about anything. Ní Dhulchaointigh and her partners spent seven years developing the product, which now sells all over the world. It’s inexpensive. And it allows DIY dopes like to me to fix stuff and to make things work better.

The inexpensive sachets, which come in a variety of colours, sit on my sideboard – a metaphor for part of the story of how we lost our way. Throwing stuff out that could have been fixed. Buying new products, when we could have found ingenious ways to make the products we had work harder for us. The fancy cup I bought in France for my daughter, the one with The Little Prince on the side, cracked the other day. I was searching for another one online and was about to add it to my basket when I remembered Sugru. It took me five minutes to mould a piece over the leaky crack, another 24 hours for it to harden so that it doesn’t leak anymore.

There isn’t a piece of Sugru big enough to fix the country. But it’s still a little product from which we can all learn a lot.

THIS WEEKEND: Róisín will be reluctantly finishing reading Ghost Lightby Joseph O'Connor, a book so beautifully written she doesn't want it to end