This is why you should buy the Bray People #1

Our local news gazette, the Bray People – 5%news, 35%sport, 35% entertainment, 25% advertising – never fails at delighting prospecting voyeurs in delivering high quality two dimensional mug shots with Totterdells point-and-shoot cameras.

It comes then as a slippery fish as you should look for that golden gem of a photo hiding deep down somewhere under that titillating hood. Like searching for Wally, you just have to cover one eye and look hard, real hard, and prepare laughing jets (and sexy time faces?) for go. It’s in there. And usually in the sports pages.

This is why you should buy the Bray People.

Give Greystones back to the Irish

The Cranley Twins – touted as “Bray’s heroes” who happened to kill 10 men before they were 10 – are an online sensation.

The 21st Century anti-jam rag Rebels are on a mission to save Greystones (and Bray) from the excesses of modern Ireland. Currently unsigned, the pair (Ruaidhrí and Diarmuid) have released their latest single to coincide with the momentous state visit of Queen Elizabeth II. While the single doesn’t make any direct references to Her Maj, were the twins hoping to ignite their own rebellion under the Royal wreath that was respectfully laid that week?

Judge for yourselves.

Bins of Bray #1

Harmony was restored to the animal kingdom earlier this week as the drumbeat of change rang out from Pride Rock/Bray Head [insert choice analogous Lion King metaphor here]. It has been almost 5 years since the town council, in one of it’s regular sage-like moments, decided to remove the basket drum bins that had lined the full spread of the seafront and protected it from the day tripping litterati since the Pale’rs of the 1300s. The full glory of that decisiveness  was captured and on this blog back in 2009.

But fear not. Scroll on:

To mark and celebrate the long awaited return of Bray’s iconic hardest working bins we are commissioning a regular feature called Bins of Bray. Feel free to sit back, relax and bask in that iconic black plastic bag bobbing in the baskety breeze with the rugged well trodden Bray Head swallowing up the skyline to your hearts content.

Enjoy.

Feel free to send us your champion bins of Bray shots and we will post them up as part of this on going feature to celebrate Bray’s hardest workers to the.vicarofbray@gmail.com or else link them from your own blog in the comments section below.

Would you have preferred dirty laundry in public?

Town council meetings are, as we know, always rammed in October in the lead up to the deciding which lucky sod will be bestowed with turning on the Christmas lights in December. I was as surprised and impressed as you were to learn that the Councillors were compelled to break off from the planned agenda in the middle of a meeting to discuss an emergency issue in James Everett Park (minute of the meeting available here):

“There is a tenant hanging their clothes out of the front window. The residents here have sufficient back gardens. Can the council write to the landlord asking for this to be rectified?”

Following the administrative officer’s assurances that she would contact the landlord regarding this wildly belligerent tenant it appears that this matter has fallen off of the scope of the council’s interests in recent months.

What happened? Was the council successful in demanding the removal of the clothes from the front window? Did the tenant stage a dirty protest?

***Link/send in pictures of the James Everett Park standoff if you are passing by – and feel free to take pictures of your own freshly cleaned clothes in your own front window, send them in and we will post them on the blog.

Solidarity with smooth, huggable clean nonbio fabrics with a gentle fragrance in James Everett Park!

Something to look forward to – Bray means marketing posters using MS Word

Following a long stint of meditation, collecting abandoned kites and engaging in some much needed thought and observation up by the Wicklow gap you will be delighted, I’m sure, to read that I have returned and it is an incontrovertible truth : the Wicklow mountains are alive with the sound of music. Which is mostly acid house. Mostly.

As we scan over the last couple of months and look to the future there is plenty to talk about, but for the moment I shall leave you with this doozy : Bray retailer’s “new” shop local poster as part of their shop local campaign, designed in June 2009 and only now getting to see the light of day. Let’s take a look.

Feel free to turn away and down a couple of Rennies, for those with weak stomachs.

Is this actually meant to be inspirational? Who is responsible for butchering the copy-editor and presenting this industrial decree that makes commands rather than informs readers?

While the question ‘but how so?’ hangs on every line of this ten point capitalist manifesto, these can be easily overlooked for the excruciatingly bland visual representation of six ‘members of the local community’ that are delightfully wielding over-priced shopping bags (hello manifesto point no.6 – does really communicate reducing the carbon footprint of the town by reusing shopping bags for instance?) and held together at the center by Chad, or Rick, or whatever that chargrilled hunk is called. AND no jackets or jumpers!

Seriously? Bray? I can’t say that I have ever guffawed in any comparable way as this enthusiastic bunch when picking up longjohns on sale from Dunnes or over that head bangingly reluctant emergency shirt buy from Alans.

The saddest part of this charade has to be toneless, flat, all white shoppers that the poster carries as reflecting the town. It shows no signs of the diversity or brilliantly multicultural community that Bray has become. Instead, we are left with 6 white mid-twenty year-old-so-and-so’s that are on loan for the summer direct from istockphoto.com (that’s a hard left turn on the road to Roscommon when passing through Longford, for all you geographers). Probably.

Who’s to say that a photo of people visiting the town wouldn’t have worked any better or had more of an impact? A collage of these maybe?

A statement from the Bray Town Council newsfeed clears matters up for us:

The Bray Retailers are currently preparing a campaign which will run in conjunction with the posters. This campaign will consist of a voucher book which will be distributed to 14,000 homes in Bray and will be launched shortly. Any retailers interested in getting involved in the campaign or getting a poster please contact Bray Chamber at 01-282848.

Oh well.

For those not familiar with Bray I suggest you completely ignore this poster and bring a packed lunch and some disappointment if you are visiting. The coffee and icecream are alright I suppose, but that’s about it.