‘Who here wants to take control?’

The story so far: Mammy is finally seeing Leon St James in the flesh as he delivers a seminar locally…

I think he was used to bigger crowds and more applause because he kind of walked around with his hands in the air, waving and smiling and saying thank you long after we’d all stopped clapping. I wasn’t clapping much but I didn’t want to look out of place.

“Gentlemen,” he said and then he spotted me “and lady of course” but I could tell he was hoping it’d be all men.

“Ladies and Gentlemen we are at a crucial juncture in our history and now more than ever is the time to take control!”

Again, I think he was expecting us to applaud after each sentence but a Kilsudgeon crowd would only have a limited amount of clap in them and we’d used it all up with his walk on.

You wouldn’t know what kind of an accent he had. I thought he looked Irish but then he had very good hair and teeth and the shirt button was undone at the top so the tan went down a bit. But that could have been fake. He was sort of American but then he said “right lads”.

But then he corrected himself and the accent was back: “Who here in the room wants to take control?”

About two hands went up.

“C’MON PEOPLE, WHO WANTS TO TAKE CONTROL?”

A few more hands raised.

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU and this is your problem people. No one is listening to you because they can’t hear you.”

A few people started muttering that they wanted to take control. Seamie behind me was saying something like: “I spose I do. Yerra gwan so.”

This American-type stuff wouldn’t suit us at all but bit by bit he was gathering us all up.

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU,” he kept on shouting until the end when we were all on our feet. I couldn’t help myself. Shouting “I WANT TO TAKE CONTROL”. Even Dinny Dooley was up and he was bad on his legs since he had a turn.

Leon points at me and says what do you want to take control of ma’am? And then before I knew it I was saying that I was tired of people taking me for granted and that a certain daughter-in-law needed to stop looking down her nose at me and that I wished to God my youngest son would get off his arse and start doing a bit of work in college and stop being an eternal worry to me and wouldn’t it just be nice for once if someone was to bleddy-well ask how I was doing and …

… I very nearly blurted out about how I wish my lovely, talented, smart daughter would stay away from that luadraman and what was he up to at all with the wedding and getting married in a fecking shed next to the M50. But then I remembered where I was and I sat down again.

“Do you see that everybody? Let me show you an example. Play the video Cornelius.”

I looked around to see who Cornelius was and he’d roped Connie The Farmer in to do ‘audiovisual’ for him and poor Connie doesn’t operate well under pressure, so he was effing at the laptop until eventually he got it to work and there was Declan up on the screen doing a testimonial.

“Before I met Leon, I was a nobody. People were laughing at me. I had a job that was going nowhere.”

They had Declan playing himself in a sort of a play in his life. There was music and the whole shebang. I could even feel myself sort of tearing up watching the poor divil.

“And then I met Leon. Leon told me how to take control.”

The next thing then there was video of him doing sales at the Ploughing and I think I might even have caught a glimpse of my thick head standing around in the background spying on him that time. I hope Leon didn’t see that. Or maybe he did and he’s watching us. Then he said: “And then I met the love of my life.” And I gritted my teeth because I didn’t want the whole town to be finding out but there was a roar from the back of the room and Connie was cursing at the laptop again, so the video was obviously not playing.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Leon “we are not prisoners of technology.” And he started asking others who wanted to take control. And it went on like that for another hour, then there were a few biscuits and we went home.

I still don’t know what the whole thing is about. But I bought a book anyway. Leon St James - My Road to Control. Whatever it is he does, he’s good at it or makes it look that way.