Herself and I were bored last night.

I had run out of reading material and Herself had run out of flies to pull the wings off. We decided with a sort of one sided mutuality to watch television even though all the programmes were crap.

We started with a sort of party type of show on RTE where we had a Young Wan [who I had never heard of] introducing celebrities [who I had never heard of either] and supposedly interviewing them, though most of them never got a chance to speak. Young Wan had a lot to say for herself, and when she wasn’t yapping she was singing. The only thing I can say about her is that she is able to play a guitar. The rest of the programme was a bit like toothache.

Anyhows, that programme mercifully ended and the next one up was a live broadcast from Dublin. We were promised an amazing event with fireworks, music and a light show. The presenter [who I haver heard of] looked like she was having an orgasm when she announced this. She said the atmosphere was “electric” [so maybe she was just being electrocuted?].

So the show started with a live band on stage beside the Liffey. I had actually heard their name before [“Jumping on Cars” or something like that] and they weren’t too painful. We stuck with them to see the promised fireworks display.

So midnight struck and the Custom House lit up with laser displays accompanied by an orchestra screeching away. There were a few fireworks but if you blinked you’d miss them. Also the vision mixer had a strange habit, that when a firework was launched the view would immediately switch to a view of the crowd instead.

After about two minutes the fireworks were replaced by dozens of searchlights swinging around at random. This apparently was the light show. It wouldn’t surprise me if half the crowd there collapsed with Photo Sensitive Epilepsy. It certainly made me dizzy. The band on stage struck up again and that was essentially it. The band played on for a while but there were no more fireworks, just swinging searchlights.

I didn’t hear any fireworks here either. The neighbours used to fire off rockets which invariably ended up embedded either on my roof or the lawn. There was nothing this year and I’ll miss my annual hunt for dead rockets around the estate.

All in all, I was distinctly underwhelmed.