Mammy Walsh’s A-Z of the Walsh Family: An e-book Short

E is for ‘Eejit-stick’ I’m laughing here to myself but at the same time I’m a bit ashamed, because I don’t know if I should tell you about this, I’m afraid it might show me in a bad ‘light’ but at the same time, we have to have a laugh now and again.

Right, I’ve made my mind up, I’m going to tell you what an Eejit-Stick is. You see, myself and my sister Bernadette were going to Lourdes and we were at Dublin Airport and the carry-on of people! They were all walking at the wrong speed. Much too slow, like.

Bernadette muttered, “God forgive me, but I’m itching to kill the lot of them. I wish I had my axe.” (Bernadette married a farmer. Sometimes she has to chop wood. She’s very attached to her axe, the way other people are attached to their ‘mobile’ phones.)

And there and then the idea of the Eejit-Stick was born!

We decided it would be like a walking-stick except it would have a small ‘doobry’ on the end that would deliver a mild electric shock to a person – only a mild one, now, we’re not trying to hurt people. Not exactly. Just to give them a bit of a start. And a small sting, maybe. We’re not trying to get revenge on people exactly. It’s more like we want things to be efficient.

So, say you’re at the airport trying to get to your ‘gate’ and a crowd of people are walking ahead of you and they’re going too slow, but there’s too many of them for you to get past and you’re getting ‘irritated’ and thinking, “Would you speed it up there, for the love of God!” And it’s not like you’re worried about missing your plane, it’s just because it’s vexing.

Under normal circumstances you’d have to shuffle along behind them, going at their speed, letting them ‘set the pace’ as it were. But if you had your Eejit-Stick, it’d all be different. You’d simply give one of the slow-coaches a touch of it to the back of their leg and they’d get a small electric shock and they’d realise they were being an eejit and they’d thank you for drawing their attention to it and they’d start walking faster. And once they were walking at the speed that suited you, you could stop giving them the shocks.

Well, the laugh Bernadette and I had about our ‘invention’! We decided we were going to go on Dragon’s Den with it and do a ‘pitch’. “We’re here to ask for 4 Euro 70,” says she. And I said, “For a 90% stake in our company.” Because we weren’t being serious, like. Then we were thinking of how people go on Dragon’s Den to get investment in their chocolate company and they bring around a little plate for all the ‘dragons’ to sample. And we decided we’d ‘demonstrate’ our Eejit-Stick by giving each of the ‘dragons’ an electric shock with it. Well, ROAR, as Helen says on the Twitters. Myself and Bernadette were laughing so much, tears were coming down our faces and we came to a standstill and a young woman with a pink wheely bag bumped into the back of us and said, “For fucks sake. Why don’t you try walking, you pair of old boots.”