Well, well. Bertie Ahern, the well-known sterling magnet, has decided to step down. His statement says (after an interminable prologue about his magnificent achievements) that

It is a matter of real concern to me that the important work of government and party is now being over shadowed by issues relating to me at the Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters and Payments. The constant barrage of commentary on Tribunal related matters has and I believe will continue to dominate the political agenda at an important point for our country.

We face uncertain economic times and challenges and we are soon to cast our vote on the Lisbon Treaty. The vital interests of Ireland demand that the national dialogue of our political system address these fundamental issues and not be constantly deflected by the minutiae of my life, my lifestyle, and my finances.

The decision I am announcing today — like all other decisions that I have taken in a lifetime in politics – is solely motivated by what is best for the people.

He goes on to say that he has “no doubt that a simplistic analysis will suggest that my decision has been influenced by most recent events at the Tribunal”.

Simplistic, my eye. Last Saturday’s Irish Times had a scarifying analysis of all the money that has cascaded into his many bank accounts over the years.

So that’s one down. Now for Robert Mugabe…

Thirty years ago today, at 7.15am, my father died.

This is a photograph of him as a young man — around the age when (as I recounted in my book) he was teaching other people Morse and dreaming about becoming a radio ‘Ham’. The photograph was in my mother’s possessions when she died in 1989. My youngest sister, Margaret, discovered it and sent it on to me. It was the first time I’d ever seen the picture, and it moved me beyond words because of the way it captures the essence of his optimistic, phlegmatic spirit.

It’s not often that Quentin falls for hoaxes, but the USB pregnancy testing kit caught him fair and square!

The other neat April Fool’s caper was Gmail’s new feature which enables you to send email into the past.

How do I use it?

Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?

Yes. You’ll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk.

From Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox…

Between the ages of 25 and 60, people’s ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year — mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties.

Now, where did I put that ‘delete’ button?

My favourite movie title of all time is Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead. I’ve been there only once, and the nicest thing about it seemed to be the distant view of the Rockies. But then again I’m not the adventurous sort of urban explorer. Anyway, it seems that the city is more interesting than I had supposed. Forbes magazine has compiled indices of which US cities score highest on each of the seven Deadly Sins. The survey of “America’s Most Sinful Cities” concludes that Denver scores highest for lust. The metric, however, is rather unimaginative: it seems to be per capita sales of contraceptives. Phooey.

Galway is my favourite Irish town, and for decades an essential part of every trip was to walk down Shop Street and turn left into High Street to visit Kennys Bookshop. Inside, one would spot an imposing matron sitting alertly behind a till and watching everything that went on, talking to customers and keeping staff in order. This was Maureen Kenny, co-founder of the business (in 1940) and the woman Seamus Heaney described as “the Madonna of the Manuscripts”.

The word ‘formidable’ might have been coined for her. She built the business into one of the world’s great independent bookshops (and successfully took it online long before most independents perceived the threat of the Internet). It made sense because Kennys had built up an impressive mail-order business. In the 1980s the Library of Congress appointed Kennys as their Irish suppliers and the business now supplies three hundred other libraries throughout North America. When my book on the history of the Net was about to come out in 1999, I sent her a copy and in the ensuing telephone conversation she made it clear to me in the nicest possible way that for her this Internet stuff was quite old hat! This was indeed true: the shop’s first web site was launched in 1994, and the family has always maintained that only one other bookshop in the world beat them to it. In 2005, the Kennys took the next logical step, closed the shop and took the entire business online.

Which of course is a shame in one way because Kennys was a lovely shop, with a stupendous collection of Irish literature, and jumbles of literary treasures in every corner. I never came out of the place without having bought something, and always tried to snatch a word with its presiding genius.

There was a nice obit in the Irish Times. Excerpt:

Maureen was born in Glebe Street, Mohill, Co. Leitrim, the eldest of three children. Her father died suddenly when she was four years old, leaving her mother with three young children and a business she knew nothing about.

Next door was a Royal Irish Constabulary barracks which was taken over by the Black and Tans. On a couple of occasions they took the infant Maureen and used her as a human shield on top of their truck while driving round Mohill, randomly shooting in through windows.

She went on to win a scholarship to University College, Galway in 1936 and on her first day there met Des Kenny. As Des often said later, “that was that”.

Kennys was — and remains — a real family business, employing 40 people — including most of her children. This photograph (from the company web site) shows Mrs K flanked by her offspring.

She is survived by six children, 21 grandchildren and 13 great-grand-children.

Clipped from this week’s Connacht Tribune.

She was buried on Thursday. I bet it was some funeral.

Most of my American friends are solidly behind Barack Obama. In an interesting LRB piece, Jonathan Raban explains why…

Even when Obama’s at his most public, firing up an audience at a rally, one notices about him a detachment, a distinct aloofness, as if part of him remains a sceptical and laconic watcher in the wings, keeping his own counsel, as he appears to have been doing since infancy. In more intimate and less artificial circumstances, his capacity for empathy and his innate reserve work in consort. He’s hungry for the details of other people’s lives. He conducts each meeting with his trademark ambassadorial good manners, sussing out his companions and playing his own hand cautiously close to his chest (when he was a state senator in Illinois, he was a leading member of a cross-party poker school). In the heat of a fierce election, he could be mistaken for a writer doing research for a book.

Hillary Clinton, armed with a relentlessly detailed, bullet-pointed position paper for every human eventuality, is a classic technocrat and rationalist; Obama is that exotic political animal, a left-of-centre empiricist. The great strength of his writing is his determination to incorporate into the narrative what he calls ‘unwelcome details’, and you can see the same principle at work in the small print of his policy proposals. Abroad, he accepts the world as it is and, on that basis, is ready to parlay with Presidents Ahmadinejad, Assad and Castro, while Clinton requires the world to conform to her preconditions before she’ll talk directly to such dangerous types. At home, Obama refuses to compel every American to sign up to his healthcare plan (as Clinton would), on the grounds that penalising those who lack the wherewithal to do so will only compound their problems. Where Clinton promises to abolish the Bush education programme known as No Child Left Behind, he wants ‘to make some adjustments’ to it (like moving the standardised tests from late in the school year to the beginning, so that they are neutral measures of attainment, and don’t dictate the syllabus like an impending guillotine).

Raban points to an intriguing video of Obama having dinner with four of his constituents. You can see why people take to him.