Overheard in ... an internet café

Party Soldier is back in the blogosphere, after ten days or so devoted to more mundane matters, like putting food on the table. A major change in one's life - like starting a new job - has a way of making the world's problems seem somewhat less threatening. The world will limp along another day, you think, without my posting an article on this Irish Times editorial or that idiotic comment by the German Bishops' Conference.

However, the new day job having been successfully begun (and, so far, kept), I decided to return to the battlefield. This evening I seated myself in an internet café, feeling like I could take on all the bogeys of the web. Then someone else sat down beside me, and I heard a rustling noise that I knew only too well. Knew and dreaded.

I don't know why it is that when people sitting near me in public places are eating something, that something always has to be crisps. Crisps are the most irritating and most useless food imaginable. They make noise when their packet is being handled, and they make noise when they're being eaten. They smell strongly. They leave your fingertips all salty. They can make you hyperactive. And they don't even make you full. There's nothing to them. Bite into them (annoying everyone within a ten yard radius in the process) chew once or twice, and they're gone. You're left feeling just as hungry as before.

And yet all over the place - in internet cafés, on the Luas, on the bus, on trains, in the cinema, in the library, in the lecture theatre - people have to dig into these pointless things. As did the young man sitting near me on this occasion. I soon noticed, to my dismay, that he was a "relisher". That is, he didn't gobble the things all down at once, which would at least have brought a swift end to the torture, but ate them lingeringly, lovingly, over a long stretch of time. Every few minutes, in would go the hand, rustle rustle, crunch crunch, munch munch munch. Oh yes, he munched. With his mouth open.

I am ashamed to say this got my temper up more than any Tablet editorial or neocon war manifesto that could possibly have caught my eye on the web. "Cretin", I muttered to myself as I surveyed the Catholic blogs, "moron. Should be thrown out." Before long I was harbouring all sorts of uncharitable thoughts against my (literal, on this occasion) neighbour, and decided to put off the business of saving humanity from Bolshevism, Liberalism and the EU for yet another day.