ON THE first day of March, I saw my first honey bee of 1996. On the third day I saw my first butterfly. As winter departs, there is one thing I need to know before it is gone completely.
It is this: How do snowplough drivers get to their snowploughs? Maybe they sleep in them. But if they don't, what mysterious device gets them, chortling to their steering wheels, merrily despatching a bow wave of snow off the roads of Ireland? Or are they immune to snow, regardless, and are able to surmount the biggest drifts in order to clamber into the cab: and turn on the ignition, ho ho ho.
These things are susceptible analysis, you know, even if it's not immediately apparent to plain people like myself. Few things in life are not in this era of computers. A press release from IBM reports that computers are now able to analyse the most extraordinary things about supermarkets and about our behaviour in them.
IBM Ireland has a particular interest in such matters because an Irish programmer, Barry Devlin, has designed a software package which can analyse the most astonishing things.
Nappies and Wine
Computer analysis in England has found, for example, that if wines are placed next to nappies in a supermarket, sales of both increase. In America, they found a similar correlation, this time between beer and diapers as they call them. Why is this?
Does the sight of one move you to buy another? Does a glimpse of a bottle of wine provoke such bladderly insecurity as to cause fears of incontinence and to take steps to deal with it? Does the sight of a heap of nappies arouse such a dread of home and infants that the shopper turns to alcohol to forget?
What other items logically go together in a retail outlet? A Jaguar showroom should logically have a condom machine beside its new successor to the E Type, but one shouldn't be too exclusive about this.
A hill farmers' mart could quite as justifiably have a similar dispensing machine beside the wellington stand, the sheep dip and the sheep pens, a roaring - or rather a bleating - trade all round.
Once such associations have been discovered, would it not make sense for companies which specialise in one to specialise, in the other? Traditionally, brewers have concentrated in what they knew best, assuming that was where they were making profits.
But little did they know that the presence of their products on the shelves was causing nappy sales to boom simultaneously. Is it not time for Guinness to be selling Pampers?
Maybe when they have got into the gentler arts of babies bottoms, Guinness can learn the gentler arts of consideration. I yield to nobody in my admiration of Ireland's finest stout brewer, but its delivery drivers seem to have acquired a unique immunity to the traffic laws of Dublin.
If you see a lorry doubleparked at a junction, where there is already a double yellow line, you can be sure it is a Guinness lorry, the fine fellows on it hurling barrels about as if they are snowballs and the snowplough is on the way. Meanwhile, traffic comes to a halt for a half a mile in every direction. If it were a snowdrift, one of the unavoidable accidents of weather, there would be uproar that the Corporation were doing nothing about it - where the hell is that snowplough driver?
Yet this is not accidental. It is by design. The amazing thing is that nobody challenges the Guinness right to obstruct traffic. Maybe, at an unconscious level, just as we know nappies and Guinness go together, so do we assume that Guinness deliveries mean traffic jams.
Some immutable law of nature is thereby involved, we assume, and so we do not complain, merely sitting there like shoppers who see the beer and the nappies together, without wondering why, or choosing to do anything about it.
Commonsense Abandoned
One wonders. Does it need to be so? Certainly other European cities have rules about such things - deliveries when it makes sense, say, at a time when few cars are around. But not in Dublin or anywhere in Ireland that I know of.
Now here - I'm not knocking the gardai, who seen to be prey to the same association syndrome as the rest of us, you know winter cold weather; nappies beers; Guinness lorries traffic jams.
Has anyone ever seen a garda taking action against a Guinness lorry driver who has conveniently parked his lorry so that it is blocking two bus stops, a wheelchair ramp, an orphanage entrance, and the hearse for a funeral?
Something else. Is there some special course Guinness sends; its drivers on to ensure the maximum blockage in a city during a delivery? Are drivers on a bonus scheme, so that if they block the entrance to a hospital - and a fire station, they are put on double pay, and sent on a four week holiday to the Seychelles?
It need not be so. First of all, we, could enforce the laws that exist, maybe with the assistance of snowploughs. What, after all, do all those snowplough drivers do during the summer months? Would they object to getting in a little practice on illegally halted Guinness lorries?
I somehow think Guinness might have an opinion on a bow wave of its upended delivery trucks cascading through the city.
And not just Guinness - the other breweries are no, better. For whatever reason, I just expect better of Guinness.
The truly odd thing is that nobody does anything about these casually, cheerfully caused traffic thromboses - fine, burly fellows otten choosing to park where more inconvenience results, rather than a couple of yards away, with none.
Nobody protests, not even the taxi drivers of Dublin; yet Barry Devlin's computer shows an unquestionable correlation between taxi drivers and complaint.
But it doesn't explain why in law hackney drivers are not allowed taximeters. Instead, they invent their fares, conjuring up figures as mysteriously as the snowplough driver gets to his plough.