There is a company somewhere which makes small signs for the back of juggernauts which read; DO NOT OVERTAKE ON THE INSIDE IF TRUCK IS TURNING LEFT. The sign does not add, GRASSHOPPER: for space reasons, presumably, and understandably - the signs are so small that you have to be overtaking the lorries on the left to read them. (When did anyone ever last see a lorry driver use his left indicator?)
The maker of the warning-plate presumably runs off all sorts of plates bearing comparable Zen-wisdom. Purdeys have little signs on the buttstock declaring DO NOT PUT THIS SHOTGUN WHEN LOADED IN MOUTH AND PULL TRIGGER, this sign only becoming legible when the barrels are in the mouth and the trigger is being pulled. Iarnrod Eireann has installed thousands of tiny warnings around the country: DO NOT PLACE HEAD ON TRACK IF TRAIN APPROACHES. These signs are activated by the approach of the train and are only visible if your head is resting on the rail itself.
Guide through life
There is no reason why similar such guiding profundities are not sign-posted everywhere to guide us through life. DO NOT TURN ON THIS TWO BAR ELECTRIC FIRE WHILE IN THE BATH. DO NOT TRY TO WARM A COLD BABY IN THIS DEEP FAT FRYER WHILE COOKING CHIPS: REMOVE CHIPS FIRST. DO NOT CLIMB INTO JUMBO JET ENGINE INTAKE AT TAKE-OFF. DO NOT CURL UP IN SLEEPING BAG ON FAST LANE OF M50.
The more sophisticated of you might contend that only the most irredeemably stupid would need such signs. Maybe so. But there are certain days in the calendar when people find themselves being impelled into doing the strangest things, which they would never otherwise do. So even as a tiny voice within you shrieks No, no, no, you unfold your "Lee Clegg Is Innocent" banner in Crossmaglen main square and call for locals to come and sign your petition. And even as warning flares light the sky within your brain, you beamingly lower your trousers and expose yourself to the passing-out parade at Templemore.
These special days, by careful calculations based on the movements of the moon and stars and tides, are as predictable to experts as are the ley-lines which guide Chinese life. Auctioneers employ these experts to choose their auction days, when otherwise shrewd, conservative, tight-walleted citizens, like corpses from the night-of-the-living-dead leaving their graves, are drawn mumblingly towards the auctioneer's hammer, arms extended, eye-sockets empty, bank balances flapping open.
All right, it's highly likely that even if auctions had signs warning, DO NOT ENTER THIS PLACE UNLESS YOUR ARMS HAVE BEEN AMPUTATED AND YOU HAVE A CORK IN YOUR MOUTH you would still enter, gob unstoppered and arms flailing like someone trying to catch butterflies. But at least you could say someone had tried to rescue you: and that I cannot say. I went to my doom unwarned.
Compulsion
But of course, that's the thing when you open your "Lee Clegg is innocent" banner in Crossmaglen, or as the trousers flop around the old ankles in Templemore and you're reaching for the elastic of the underpants: you know you're doomed. You can't help yourself. Compulsion, your honour. Uncontrollable compulsion. Guilty as charged.
Take this recent auction attended by Kildare's finest, including my friend Mairead. Mairead is a very shrewd businesswoman who nightly turns REM into YEN. She makes George Soros seem like Wurzel Gummidge; yet within half an hour of this particular auction beginning, she was bidding against herself, lustily bawling offer upon her previous untopped offer and was only silenced by a sharp rap on the forehead with the gavel.
Young Turners
As for her companion, the author of this piece: he found himself bidding for three watercolours he had never seen before - not merely bidding for, but in due and deadly course, owning. On a good day, in poor light and held up with their back to a setting sun, you might think them worth a couple of pounds. But at least I had the excuse that I had not seen them, and that my £45 might have been about to net me a couple of hitherto undiscovered young Turners. It didn't.
But no such excuse could be made for my strenuous and ultimately victorious quest for an oil-painting which my absent (and soon to be utterly incredulous) wife and I had already agreed might have been executed shortly before the painter responsible for it most deservedly was.
There might be an explanation for that acquisition - that I liked the green bit in the middle - but there can be none at all for the purchase of a collection of forks with encrusted egg-yolk (circa 1957), or a dozen assorted socks, some nearly matching and perfectly acceptable if boiled for a couple of hours, or the selection of false teeth collected on the floors of pub lavatories, for which even now I am trying to find a home: but still, a snip at £50.
But I only became fully aware of my final and most crushing acquisition on that unspeakable occasion known as the morning-after. It was of a little sign, declaring: DO NOT OVERTAKE ON THE INSIDE IF TRUCK IS TURNING LEFT.