RADIO REVIEW:So, there I was in my kitchen on Tuesday afternoon, somewhere between the radio and the sink, smoothie jug in one hand, strawberries and banana in the other. Orla Barry's Life!(Newstalk 106-108, Mon-Fri) stopped me in my pantofole. (That's Italian for slippers.)
This was a deadly serious face-off between Lori Gottlieb, American author of Marry Him, and Claudia Carroll, author of I Never Fancied Him Anyway.
This was one of the biggest choices a woman over 30 who wants to have children can make in her lifetime. Should she . . . settle? Gottlieb is 40 and single and has a child through a sperm donor. As she says, "Baby now, soulmate later." She doesn't necessarily believe "settling" - as opposed to "settling down" - is a dirty word. It's about compromise, but the right compromises.
"Desperate but picky," she warned. "It's a bad combination." Carroll is single, 30-some'n'- some'n' and long ago hung up her Pamela Scott power suits from her days playing Nicola on Fair City. Before she said anything, she applauded Gottlieb's bravery in the choices she made. She said it because she meant it, but it had the added effect of disarming her opponent . . . if only momentarily.
Then the whistle went off. (In my head.) And the ping-pong match began. Carroll likened the wrong man to "a pair of shoes that don't fit". (I don't care what department store you're from, that's gotta hurt.)
She added, "I'd rather be alone than in a bad relationship." Gottlieb said she knows women who are 45, alone, no kids and unhappy. She was talking about settling for an 8/10, rather than settling for a 4/10 when you're 42, and said her friends who entered marriage with "grand romantic expectations" were mostly disappointed.
Just like table tennis, it was polite on the surface but had a fierce undertone. A way of life for millions of women settlers and women hunter-gatherers was at stake.
Barry kept it moving: "Lori?" "Claudia?" "Lori?" "Claudia?" She asked Gottlieb if their partners knew they were married to women who had "settled". Probably not, was the answer. Sometimes, Gottlieb said, even the settlers didn't know for sure they had settled. Carroll said she'd rather be on her own than with a messer.
"Lori?" Barry said, beckoning the ping-pong ball back across the net. "Settling could be with a guy you love, but who is not Prince Charming," Gottlieb said. Carroll shot back, "I am so in command of my remote control," adding, "I don't want Mr Ah Sure He'll Do."
With that, the ping-pong ball whizzed over Gottlieb's head and out of the studio. And Claudia Carroll probably got the title to her next book.
Today With Pat Kenny(RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri) interviewed Roberto Canessa, one of the Uruguayan rugby players on the plane that crashed in the Andes on October 13th, 1972, and one of two who courageously hiked through the mountains to a local village to raise the alarm.
There were 16 survivors, who were rescued after 72 days. The crash was recreated in Frank Marshall's 1993 movie Alive!I'm forgetting a detail here.
Here's a clue: tastes like chicken. Yes, the survivors ate the flesh of the dead to stay alive. They used turkey jerky in the film, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), you might like to know. I think I too would choose "turkey jerky" over starvation. But maybe human flesh over turkey jerky.
Canessa will be in Croke Park on March 12th to give a motivational talk: €125 each or a table of eight for €1,000. And his philosophy? "Sometimes you must wait and circumstances will change." Uh-huh. Anything else? "You will come out of the conference feel like you are rich." After forking out €125? And? "You will feel like someone has cleansed their soul." Turkey jerky for the soul.
They were crying in Japan at one of his conferences. (For their mammies?) Unfortunately, Kenny didn't question Canessa's lack of value-added insight. But he is a former rugby player. And he did eat his friends. My problem is that, 35 years later, he's still dining out on them.
After a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse, Brenda Power and her Your Call(Newstalk, Mon-Fri) crew finally took a bite out of Sean Haughey at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Tuesday. She had previously tried ringing his mobile live on the air to ask him why funding was pulled for the Young Mothers in Education scheme in Galway.
"Minister! Brenda Power from Newstalk," she hollered. His press officer - "a big large man," according to Power - replied, "No, Brenda. As the minister has explained, absolutely not!"
This is a good time to point out that Haughey's website has the slogan: "Honest, Decent, Hardworking." That may be. Lucky it doesn't say "Accessible".
After sitting it out, the press officer eventually said Haughey would be "delighted" to meet her. "It's not youth work in the strictest sense," he told her. He babbled on for a while and finally said he would meet the group "in the near future".
After being pushed, he conceded that the near future means within "three weeks".
Back in the studio, Eleanor, a single mother, told Power, "It is youth work." Power will be back on the case on March 20th. That's the near future. Tune in. It's already in her diary.