Reggie's Guide to Social Climbing E-Book

Reggie Blackrock Road

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 158

Beschreibung

Do you know how to pronounce turbot? Is it lemon or lime in a gin and tonic? What do you wear to a barbecue? Is it ever okay to shop in Lidl? Reggie has all the answers to help you climb the social ladder. A beautifully spoken billionaire, Reggie is president of COCI (The Captains of Cork Industry) and owner of a 6.2 million euro mansion on the Blackrock Road. (In Cork, not the frankly shabby one they have up in Dublin.) It's one social climbing nugget after another, laid out in 24 simple steps, so even you should be able to follow it. (No offence.)

Leseprobe

‘For my accountant, Scobie Comerford. Thank you old stock.’

REGGIE’S GUIDE TO SOCIAL CLIMBING

First published in 2023 by

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Pat Fitzpatrick, 2023

The right of Pat Fitzpatrick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-902-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84840-903-3

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Edited by Mariel Deegan

Typeset by JVR Creative India

Cover design by Mariel Deegan

Cover image: Original design created for The Everyman, Cork’s 2022 stage production, An Evening With Reggie. Graphic design by Coolgrey. Photo by Miki Barlok.

Printed by L&C, Poland, lcprinting.eu

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

Set in Minion Pro in 12 pt on 15.3 pt.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction

The social ladder

Who do I think I am?

Step 1Watch what you eat and drink

Step 2Your house, my rules

Step 3Art in the house

Step 4Don’t have three kids

Step 5Punish your mistakes

Step 6The do’s and don’ts of supermarket shopping

Step 7Get on your bike

Step 8Exercise with style

Step 9Impressive holidays

Step 10 Watch what you watch

Step 11 Drive carefully

Step 12 Work your way up

Step 13 Know your beans

Step 14 How are your politics?

Step 15 Marry up

Step 16 Call her mom

Step 17 Watch what you say

Step 18 Less of the Yank-speak

Step 19 Keep the faith

Step 20 Social media climbing

Step 21 Serving drugs with dinner

Step 22 Choose your words

Step 23 Show some poise

Step 24 #Humbled

Introduction

I have an open marriage with my wife Marjorie – I’m just waiting for the right moment to tell her.

I was enjoying the fruits of this arrangement recently, entertaining a very open-minded woman from Stuttgart, Anneka. We were below in Ballymaloe House. It’s a country home and fine-dining institution in the rolling east Cork countryside, I’m not sure you could afford it.

We were down in the restaurant, I was halfway through my perfect steak, when a family of four was seated next to us, two kids and the parents. The father’s name was Dermot, I’d heard his name muttered around town, builder made good, 100 million net worth, Bond villain mansion just outside Schull, loves squeezing small local businesses on price, you know the type. Actually, you probably don’t – but I do, worse luck.

Anyway, he called the waitress over and said, ‘I love fish, I’ll have the tur-butt.’

Jesus.

The waitress, to her credit, didn’t correct Dermot’s pronunciation, she just carried on.

Anneka tried to stifle a giggle, but I could see she must have been thinking – what kind of place is Reggie after bringing me to now?

Dermot turned to his freckly daughter and started talking about some match, as if I paid 55 quid for a fillet steak just so I could listen to a Dermot-Come-Lately banging on about camogie. Then the daughter called the waitress over and asked if they have ketchup. In Ballymaloe House.

I kept my focus on Anneka, but I could sense she was losing interest. A crying shame because she’s an incredibly good-looking woman, as you’d expect.

The table on the other side of us was occupied by Tricia and her friend.

Northsiders.1 You couldn’t mistake the accent and I heard Tricia talking about this nail bar she was running up in Ballyvolane.

She called the waitress over and said she was going to try the fish.

The terror. What is she going to call the fish of the day?

‘I’ll try the turbot,’ she said, pronouncing it tur-bo.

And I thought to myself, Isn’t she a great little person now? She obviously doesn’t belong here – don’t ask me where she got the money for Ballymaloe. I suppose she must have won a voucher at a dinner dance for the Credit Union.

But she has gone to the bother to learn that turbot is pronounced ‘turbo’, in the right circles. Tricia showed me that anyone can be made acceptable. There’s hope for everyone.

Even you.

Social climbing isn’t about money and circumstances. It’s about appearances and behaviour. You don’t fake it until you make it. When you fake it, you make it. There and then.

Let me show you how to fake your way up the social ladder.

1Northsiders are people in Cork city from north of the River Lee. They are commonly referred to as Norries. (And I mean common.)

The social ladder

The traditional social ladder in Ireland has four rungs, with Rung One at the top.

No need to waste your time – you are never going to get to Rung One. Unless of course you are a member of the Captains of Cork Industry. And I doubt you are, because the typical Captain of Cork Industry is too busy to read a book. I’m busy myself, but not so busy that I can’t help people less fortunate than myself make their way up the ladder. #GivingBack.

Anyway, Rung Two on the ladder is the best you can do.

The definition of Rung Two:

Detached house, Volvo XC90 plus an electric runabout (Nissan Leaf), holidays in France, kids go skiing on school tours, salary north of 200 grand a year (take-home), doctor, lawyer, dentist, engineer from a university but not an RTC or whatever they’re calling the technical colleges this month.

The definition of Rung Three:

Semi-detached house, Kia Sportage plus an old Opel Corsa, holidays in Portugal, kids not allowed on foreign school tours, salary between 70 and 200 grand, engineer from RTC, IT worker, bank, guard.

And Rung Four:

Northsiders, provincial towns, Dacia Duster and your wife gets the bus, holidays in Canaries, What’s a school tour?, salary under 70 grand, lorry driver, plumber, Revenue official.

Read those definitions a few times and see where you fit in. Be brutally honest, there is no point in fooling yourself.

So now you know where you fit in. And here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter. Seriously. It’s fake news. That old rigid social ladder is gone. It’s a shame, really – I can’t go out for a fillet steak now without sharing a room with a nail-bar manager or a bricklayer with notions. But there is no avoiding the facts. Ireland is awash with the nouveau riche. The land of fur coat and no knickers. (And it’s fake fur.)

We all know who to blame – the Yanks. They came over here with no knowledge of Irish society and started spraying out their multinational salaries to people from the lower orders. All of a sudden, Sinéad from Kanturk is Chief Vision Monkey for a Silicon Valley start-up, earning 300 grand a year. It’s plain reckless to give that kind of money to someone who probably grew up in a crannóg, but I don’t make the rules. Next thing you know, Sinéad is sitting next to you in the bar of the Royal Cork Yacht Club, wearing a Kanturk GAA jersey.

It doesn’t stop there. I’ve heard stories of beauticians playing golf. A Kerry man, Seán Mike Seán Mike O’Shea O’Shea, bought a mansion next to me on the Blackrock Road. My son Hugo is friends with a guy from Glanmire! (For those of you not from Leeside, Glanmire is the Cork word for disappointment. They couldn’t even afford Montenotte.) This tsunami of new money has swept away the old social ladder.

The shock was enough to put my good friend Bunty Harrington in hospital. (Bon Secours. Private room. Our Super-Platinum health insurance policy in the Captains of Cork Industry guarantees us a phone call from the Taoiseach within fifteen minutes of admission to check that everything is okay. We usually don’t answer – why would you bother talking to a politician unless you wanted pedestrian lights installed outside your mother’s 7.3 million euro mansion on the Blackrock Road?)

I can’t turn back the tide on this surge of the lower orders. All I can do is show you newcomers how to behave at the upper reaches of polite society. And no better man for the job.

Who do I think I am?

Let me present my credentials. People talk about old money in Cork city. You’ll hear references to the merchant princes, who made their money bringing spices into Ireland from across the British empire. Their giant houses still line the hilltops that run along the northside of the north channel of the River Lee. From there they could see across to the port area of the city, so when their boat was safely docked they could say, ‘The molasses are in from Jamaica, Irene. I’m off down to Leonard’s house to boast about my incredible wealth. He’ll probably start ribbing me about the slaves that were used for this shipment, he’s an awful man for the teasing is Leonard. We might go out for a few pints of claret after, Irene. I’ll see you Tuesday week.’

Merchant princes. Awful people.

Leonard and his friends were nothing more than a pack of langers. (Langer is the Cork word for asshole AND penis. There are still people in counselling over the emergence of a world-class golfer called Bernhard Langer and that was nearly fifty years ago.) Honestly, Leonard was a parvenu. I say that because using unnecessary French words in a sentence is a mark of elegance – remember that as you go up the ladder, or échelle as we call it on the Blackrock Road. The Merchant princes were just new money.

Our family is an entirely different vintage. I’m so posh, I don’t even have a surname. Our money is so old, it has a picture of Julius Caesar on it. (He’s a distant relation from the poor side of the family, thank God we managed to breed out the nose.) We’ve been the most refined people in Cork for over 5,000 years, which of course means we’ve been the most refined people in Ireland during that period.

It’s unknown when my family first set foot in Cork, although one source (Wikipedia) contends that my ancestors were one of two families to escape from Atlantis as it slid into the ocean. The other family settled in County Waterford, but after two years in Dungarvan they decided that they’d be better off living under the inky black sea, so they headed back to Atlantis. I’m not saying I believe this, but I’m not saying I don’t believe it either.

We have lived in huge dwellings on the Blackrock Road in Cork ever since. (This is not to be confused with the shit version of Blackrock they have up in Dublin.) We’ve seen off the Vikings and looked down at the Normans, with their awful longbows and show-off cathedrals.

Our problem with the Normans is that they arrived here and decided to become ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. That’s grand until you realise a lot of them went to Kilkenny. Sorry now, but who goes to Kilkenny and says ‘Let’s be more like these people’? Even the people in Kilkenny kept telling them it was a terrible idea. ‘You’d want to take a long hard look at yourselves, lads,’ the locals said, but the Normans hadn’t a clue what they were on about because of the accent.

Next up on the invasion front we had the Brits. Pack of weirdos. Seriously, they had this thing called the aristocracy, where you looked up to someone because their ancestors stole your land in the Middle Ages. (I presume they’ve abolished this aristocracy by now, it’s hard to imagine a country holding onto that in the twenty-first century.)

Anyway, it was all fun and games until their aristocracy turned around and stole our lands. One of my ancestors fled to France. He wasn’t part of what’s known as the Wild Geese – that’s a very common bird. He was known as the Wild Peregrine, the most regal bird in the sky. His descendants are still considered to be posh and haughty, even by French standards. My branch of the family stayed put in Ireland and sucked up to the English by pretending to be Protes­tants. (It’s easier than you think – just turn up on time for things and keep a tidy hedge.)

The British were finally persuaded to leave the country by people from Cork. The most famous of these was Michael Collins, a highly intelligent man from Clonakilty. Honestly, what are the odds of that? Independence arrived in 1922, but not for everyone on the island. Unfortunately, Cork remains part of Ireland to this day.

Mind you, my family didn’t get where it is today by being wrong-footed by a change of the name over the door. My great-grandfather bought a couple of newspapers and used them to recast our family as rabid republicans by inventing a fictional ambush in West Cork at a place called KilBritish, led by himself and his brother Seán Óg. (His brother’s real name was Sidney, who was as English as pretending to be polite. It’s amazing what you get away with when you own a couple of newspapers.)

And so we come to my father. What is there to be said about my old man that hasn’t already been said by People before Profit TDs under Dáil privileges, so we can’t sue them, the bastards. Let’s just say when it emerged that Bertie Ahern didn’t have a bank account as Minister for Finance, the old man considered suing him for bringing non-bank account holders into disrepute. He was all set to go to court when a very open-minded woman from Gothenburg distracted him at Cork Week.2

My mother still hates anything to do with Sweden. Not a huge issue really, she was never going to buy a sofa in IKEA. Or anywhere else, before you ask. All of our furniture is inherited, as it should be.

The old man remains a legend in business circles on Leeside, doubling his inheritance without ever doing a day’s work. He created one job in his life when he appointed Scobie Comerford Snr as his Financial Alchemist (actual title). And he was an alchemist too, the way he could turn a tax liability into a government grant at the stroke of a pen. Scobie was at home anywhere, particularly the white-collar unit in Mountjoy Prison, which was a bonus when you consider the amount of time he spent in there.

His son, Scobie Comerford, my own accountant, is cut from the same cloth. No greater love does a man have for his friend than to sign off on his accounts in the knowledge that it could put him in a minimum-security facility. In Dublin!

Anyway, my old man passed away last year after a short illness. It was a mercy to all of us that he went quickly – there was a one-way system in operation up by the hospital, and you could be stuck in traffic for hours every day, just to make sure you could pop in and confirm your place in the will. He died as he had lived – making inappropriate comments to a young nurse.

And I stayed in the will! What a result. I thought it was my bedside manner, but learned later that his solicitor couldn’t get up to him in time to make the change that would have given it all to my brother Lochlann. That traffic – every cloud has a silver lining.

Enough of the unpleasantness. I am now the richest man in Cork by a huge margin. When I’m not yachting with a minor German aristocrat with incredible cheekbones, I’m thinking of ways to help you all up the social ladder. I’ve distilled my knowledge into 24 simple steps that will propel you up the social ladder.

Trust me, I can make you as acceptable as Tricia in Ballymaloe.

Let’s get climbing.

2A prestigious sailing event held in Cork harbour every second year. The year in between is to give you time to recover from all the showing off.

Step 1Watch what you eat and drink

I’m very proud of my country estate, Castle Reggie. It straddles four counties. Some days I drive my limited-edition Range Rover to the Kerry end of the estate and listen to the locals gibberishing away at the other side of my 10,000-volt fence. It reminds me how lucky I am to come from Cork.

I was at Castle Reggie recently, entertaining a gorgeous woman from Clonakilty. (Who knew?) We were standing near my giant drinks cabinet, so I said, ‘What would you like?’ She replied, ‘Sex on the Beach.’ I said, ‘I’m not driving down to Fountainstown3 this hour of the night!’ This woman was dating up and it showed.

Dating up is where you are dating someone higher up the ladder. Get it right, and you get your hands on their money. Get it wrong – ask for a cocktail popular with hairdressers while being entertained by a beautifully spoken man – and you’re back trawling Bumble for a project manager who got his degree from one of the makey-uppy universities in Limerick. If you want to succeed when you’re dating, you need to get your food choices right.

For drink, play it safe. Never ask for cider, it suggests that you’re from Tipperary.

Actually, Tipperary (never call it Tipp) is a funny one. Sometimes, while driving through there, I’d pass an impressive mansion with a sweeping gravel drive, expensive-looking racehorses in the paddock, his ’n’ hers Range Rovers parked outside. And I’d think to myself, Reggie, you should knock on the door there, your man might be away on horse business and a lot of these posh country women are très relaxed when it comes to a nooner. (A nooner is sex at noon – news to you I’m sure because you’re probably at ‘work’, as I believe they call it.)

So, up the drive I’d go and knock on the door, unleashing my favourite line: ‘Hello, is this the place where I’m supposed to pick up the Vermeer?’4