Pirish Night

Disclaimer for the Irish: this post has big words that you may misconstrue as insulting. No I won’t tell you what misconstrue means. Anyway, it’s all rather complimentary, ok? No need to ask anyone about it, just take my word for it.

Glossary: janken is the Japanese term for the ‘paper, rock, scissors’ game .

A Brief History of Irish Pirates

One thing I have always wondered about pirates: who thought it would be a good idea to combine heavy drinking with the high seas?

There’s only one type of people I know who are A) foolish enough to completely discount the ravaging effects of seasickness and B) do it for the love of drink. Those people are the Irish.

It’s true that you don’t hear a lot about the Irish as highly desirable recruits for the pirate lifestyle. In all fairness, your average Irish pirate spends most of each day a-pirating sleeping off last night’s bender in the crow’s nest.

The most famous recorded tale of an Irish pirate is that of “Bleary” O’Leary, said to have the alcohol tolerance of a bull elephant and the mental wherewithal of a broiled barnacle. Rumour has it that his breath alone caused the mysterious death of thirteen of his ship’s parrots before the Captain caught on and had him banned from bunking below decks. He met his ignoble end during a robbery at the hands of his own pistol, too drunk to realise that pistols don’t have hands and, more importantly, that he was holding his gun the wrong way around. On the matter of O’Leary’s death, the Captain was quoted as saying, “Thank Christ. Them parrots is bloody expensive.”

Phew!

As you can see, the link between pirates and the Irish is tenuous at best. So you can imagine my consternation when I was invited to a Pirish Night, ‘Pirish’ being a portmanteau of the words ‘Pirate’ and ‘Irish’. My secondary concern of how you can possibly hope to survive a party in honour of a people who celebrate the news they are pregnant with an open bar paled in comparison to my main concern. I asked the host what the hell an Irish pirate actually wears and was instructed to ‘wear our own interpretation’. That’s like telling a bull to go fetch its own China. Oh, I’ll interpret it, I thought. I will interpret the shit out of this bitch.

No one ever became a Pirate overnight

In the process of creating the ultimate Pirish day extravaganza, I was going to need a few things:

A crew

A flag

A costume

I immediately struck the flag off my list because I got invited to this thing the night before and it seemed like it would be hard work. So I needed an extra-awesome crew and costume! If I was in an actual pirate crew, my wife would be the cook. So she’s in. Pirate crews also usually have some kind of cute animal crew member, so we called in the Randy the randy monkey (Randy). The crew was assembled!

Finding a costume of any kind should have been easy, because Japanese people dress in one of two ways: 1) like a salaryman, and 2) like an insane clown. But where they find their demented outfits is a mystery. So we went to a 100 yen shop and loaded up on piratical goodies. It was agreed that the idea of an Irish pirate crew was ridiculous. A ship entirely crewed by the Irish would have run aground six minutes into its maiden voyage. So we chose to emulate a nation that was renowned for their quality pirates. The Chinese! This had everything to do with the Chinese reputation for incredible piracy, and nothing to do with the fact that happy coats came in a variety of bawdy colours at this particular store. Next was weaponry. Historically, Chinese pirates used firecrackers and Irish pirates used their own singing when committing dastardly high seas crimes, but both of those things were currently out of stock at our 100 yen store. So we got a sword with an extendable handle and a bazooka that fired confetti. Much of a muchness. Since we had such kickass weapons we were obviously going to be extremely infamous extremely quickly. We needed masks to protect our beautiful faces and our identities. We also needed armour to protect us from envious sneak attacks, mutinies, ninjas and suchlike. I threw a Somalian influence in on that one, opting for a white golf glove and matching white shin guard. I felt massively fortified, but everyone just said I looked like a Michael Jackson video. We’ll see who’s laughing when they get mutinied in the shin!

We topped the whole pirate crew ensemble off with three plastic rods with janken gestures on the end of them. With a janken rod each, the janken pirate crew was ready for action!

I was scissors.

No one ever sees it coming.

The Irish Pirate Party of the Century!

Then we went to the party. We forgot the confetti bazooka, but just passed that off as being terribly Irish of us. Then we went home, because my 40 inch widescreen isn’t gonna watch itself.

In retrospect, perhaps the most Irish thing I did in this whole adventure was to completely forget to write and publish this blog until a month after it happened!

I wonder what next year’s Pirish Day will bring?

In honour of my most fervently Irish reader.

Who is so drunk right now.