That'd Be Nora, James Brown And Charlie Chaplin, Then

I wanted this to be a nice post about a nice lady. But after too many drafts it's just a short post about a stranger, who made me feel better about my day.

She stood before us this evening in the Hospice mortuary and explained that she was a volunteer, that she would read a few prayers over my aunt Nora's body and that we would then have some time to say our goodbyes before her coffin was closed. What a thing to do - to give your time to strangers, to guide them with grace through some simple readings, to help them to negotiate their grief.

Her presence gave me faith. Not the hollow ring of her prayers (though she spoke them softly and with conviction) but her human compassion.

All Creatures Great And Small

Named not for the breakfast cereal but for the brave hound of an Irish legend, Bran was my first love. Fionn Mac Cumhaill had two, of course, but we couldn't pronounce Sceólan and so reckoned Bran to be a noble name for a brindled, snappy mutt. Once we realised what dad had brought home in the box, that is - my brother's first guess was a bat. Bran bit me one day (I was trying to feed him an apple) and shortly afterwards went to live on a farm down the country, where we couldn't visit. I was fifteen, traipsing around Superquinn in Sundrive with my mother, when I realised what this was a gruesome euphemism for.

We continued with the Fenian theme with the budgie, Oisín. Not a friendly sort, Oisín would complain all day, snap at small fingers and smash straight into mirrors upon release, leaving the house in a mess of shit and feathers. I loved her (yes, her) and didn't notice for a good four days that she'd died. "Where's Oisín?" I asked, over cornflakes. "Have a look in the shed". So I did, and there I found an empty cage. I'd missed the funeral. "But I loved her!" I wailed, fooling no one.

Dinny ran away. Named for Joe Lynch's character in Glenroe (we were big fans - to this day, Fáinne Gheal an Lae is the only tune I can play on the tin whistle) he couldn't run terribly fast, so I was bewildered as to how he'd staged this escape. When Storm ran away too, I wondered if we should tighten up on security. (Storm was panther black, with a jagged lightning strike of white across his shoulders. Truly a rock-n-roll rabbit). To lose one bunny had been unfortunate but to lose a second in the same manner simply seemed careless. Both breakouts had occurred on cold winter nights - my dad suggested that they might have been tunnelling. When Tupenny the guinea pig (named for the one in Beatrix Potter's The Fairy Caravan) "ran away" even though she'd been poorly for a few days, I wondered if there was maybe some conspiracy afoot. There was, of course, but not of the Sylvanian sort I imagined (where my rodents had set up a commune on the far side of the field). No, dad just got up earlier in the morning than I did, and put their stiff, cold corpses out for the binman before I could get upset.

Thing and Eclairs were different though. Thing was a long-haired guinea pig with dandruff, so the Addamsesque moniker was apt, and Eclairs had come in a purple Cadbury's Eclairs box - both from the pets' corner in Dublin Zoo. When we knocked on their hutch one winter's morning to find them cold and unresponsive, we learned an important lesson about the fragility of life, the finality of death. It was some years after the emotional funeral (buried side by side in a shoebox under the lelandia) before we heard that guinea pigs hibernate. What gruesome, crushing guilt.

Of course, I didn't have teh internets then. I've just asked google, and google says that they don't. But that hamsters do. So it's a comfort to know that I may have buried Fidget and Heimlich alive instead. It makes no mention of gerbils, however, so little Earl Grey may rest in peace.

I've made no mention of my fishy friends, but to be honest I found them difficult to bond with. Dead goldfish are too easy to dispose of, I think. You don't find them cold, just floating. There's a comic element to their tragedy. They flush.

All bar Dennis, that is. Named for Dennis Taylor, he was one of those googley eyed goldfish which are probably illegal to breed now. Huge bubble eyes which looked up rather than out, and a comically small body in a lurid shade of orange. He lived a long and happy life until dad dropped him in the sink while cleaning his bowl, he lived a little longer after that but it was a lopsided existence - one of his bubble eyes burst so he swam in a permanent sidestroke. We were sad when Dennis died. Still gave him a flush over a funeral, though.

BookEnds

I called him in the morning. Not quite first thing, as I (after some years of reprimands) realise that not all 27 year olds get up at excited o' clock on Christmas Day to see what Santa has brought. The sleep in his voice ("no, no, I was awake, it's okay") made me greedy for his warm embrace. He gives good cuddle.

He called me that night. Not quite last thing, though he is coming to realise that not all 27 year olds stay up until 3am on Christmas night, especially not those who have eaten their weight in pudding. I think the sleep in my voice ("no, no, I was awake, it's okay") made him think of my curly hair, and my cold feet. For I, I give good snuggle.

Things Not To Do When You're Premenstrual (At Least I Hope That's What's Wrong With Me)

Clear out your wardrobe.

I threw out 57 pairs of jeans last night, convinced that they made me look fat. I shall be spending Christmas in my pyjamas, which is just as well given that I seem grimly determined to spend much of it on Grand Canal Street.

Shop for shoes.

By the time I reached the third branch of the same shop in search of elusive size eights, my feet had swollen to a size eleventeen and the fucking things didn't fit anyway. Instead, I came home with a pair that cost me €8 and make me look like a glam rock golf enthusiast. Gold flats with beige laces. Fashion won't know what's hit it.

Purchase a party frock.

I came home with a cream lace babydoll number that makes me look like I'm making my first holy communion. It will go well with the shoes. In an admirable refusal to learn from my first mistake, I then went on to purchase a tartan babydoll number which makes me look like a Bay City Rollers groupie. It too will look only smashing with the shoes.

So they All Rolled Over And One Fell Out

I haven't bothered to switch on the fairy lights this evening, because there's nobody here but me. The Leitrim Lady is in Leitrim and the Swede is in Sweden, but I am here because I'm not really sure where I should be.

Tonight, Love Lane feels lonely.

At home, my family will have the fairy lights on and the fire lit. Home? Home. Nowhere on earth feels more like home than my parents' house. But.

But for my bed.

For my bed; a fold-out couch in the front room. Its rich leather seats fold out into a firm foam mattress, the whole contraption rolls on casters. I have never felt such irrational antipathy for an inanimate object.

I joke about my parents' unhasty refurbishment of their home, about the loss of my room to my sister and the loss of her room to their walk-in wardrobe. To lose one was unfortunate; to lose two, well. Now, come Christmas and all that comes with her, my jibes don't seem so funny. My stubborn streak has struck me dumb and I cannot tell them that that is why I am sat here instead of curled up on their couch.

Let's Spend Time, Not Money

Port Macquarie, New South Wales and my travelling companions, lily-livered with hangovers, are bedridden and moany. It's raining. My hostel bunk and tired book hold limited appeal so I decide to indulge in some retail therapy. It's been raining for days now and my optimism re the Australian winter is beginning to wane - I thought it would be just like an Irish summer. And it is. I leave the hostel determined to buy a sensible jacket and instead spend the afternoon shopping for sweaters with a little old lady who asked me to choose one for her son, then took a shine to me. She's about 147 years old, so I imagine her son as a pot-bellied and balding bachelor and choose the duds accordingly. Lovely! she exclaims. If only he could meet a nice girl like you... she says wistfully, as we finger some more argyle.

Fast forward two years and a wet Tuesday evening finds me in A-Wear on Grafton St. shopping in vain for Christmas Clothes. Everything seems to be covered in sequins. I am trailing around with a Peter O' Brien dress over my arm, imagining how like Gráinne Seoige I will look in it (ignoring the fact that I have neither her handsome face nor her hugglesome boobies). As I make my way to the changing rooms in order to effect this miraculous transformation, a wheedling American accent tugs at my sleeve.

"Hey miss!" Dum dee dum dee dum mumbles my face as I determinedly ignore her trills for attention. Shoo. I am not in the mood. "Miss!" she shouts, tapping me on the arm and smiling up at me through her orange lipstick and massive teeth in that sweetly formidable way that all ladies over seventy seem to master. Most people are suckers for puppies and small children. Me, I cannot help but indulge the elderly. Which is why I am always the one who ends up sitting uncomfortably on the oul lad's knee at parties, or trying on clothes for ancient American ladies who are shopping for their granddaughters and who surmise that we might be of a size.

I am too polite to refuse, so I reach out, horrified, and take the proffered items.

Mumble pants*. Sparkly mumble pants and, to strike Balance squarely in the knackers, a jumper the far side of dowdy. I pull the leggings on and the jumper over my head, hoping that it is just about long enough to cover all unsightly bulges. The changing room curtain is heavy with my humiliation but I step out, frumpy dumpy, to face ridicule. Instead I am faced with a little old lady, so enchanted by my appearance that she claps her hands in glee. I do a little flounce, a mortified taa daa! before I am allowed to struggle out of them again.

Relieved, I hand them back to her and slip the Gráinne gúna over my head. Seoige svelte and sexy in 3... 2... 1... Oh fuck. Dog's dinner does not cover it. I throw a strop, take a hump and cart my lovely lady lumps home.

*Leggings so tight that you can see the lips move... Blame Felix.

Soshall Netwroking

I have managed to hold fast against FaceBook. Why? Well, what everybody else said. My morbid curiosity would relish a rummage around the lives of the lovelies I've littered in my wake, but common sense reminds me that my life is short, too fucking short. My time would be (and is) better spent in the company of the 'cquaintances I've kept.

Twitter, though.

While FaceBook is all ugly photographs, pervy pokes and jacks wall scribbles, the twaddle on Twitter reads like other people's text messages. It's dirty. I'm afraid to sign up lest I submit to committing my every thought to the internets and eschewing real life altogether. I'm funnier on paper than in person, you see, as I suspect most who keep a blog are. I fancy myself as quite the brevitous wit and have no self control whatsoever - Twitter would allow me to fuel my illusions of an illustrious self, ruining me for real life company. And we can't have that.

Of course, I hate to be left out. So I did as I do with any shiny thing I find online - tried jamming it into my feed reader, like so many slices of buttery toast into a beleaguered VCR. It worked. I can creep voyeuristically through twits' days without befriending them at all. Follow me on Twitter! Fuck off.

Instead, I'll stalk them through the undergrowth.

More Tea, Vicar?

They eat scones in the afternoons. Not scones (which rhyme with stones) like I do, but scones. Probably with yoghurt. Which they pronounce yog urt, instead of yo gurt. It's far from that I was raised.

So I'm wide awake, fretting slightly about what to wear for an afternoon littered with social beartraps. I shouldn't worry, really. He's not. He's lying beside me, dozing fitfully, farting batterburger and chips.

And it's far from that he was raised.

Review: The Gaiety

Grim. Highlights included dancing to Dr. Alban's Tampax Theme Tune in the upstairs bar, while the prostitutes worked the floor and a rotund man in hoiked up pants and pink pinstripes tried to molest my brother.

Next week: Rosie gives it socks to "Whooooah, Bodyform!" in Copperface Jacks.

The Hills! My Eyes!

I spent Sunday afternoon in Athlone, in the recovery position. Watching The Hills on MTV. For the first ten minutes or so I complained. Loudly. Disgusted by their vacuousness and by the fact that I couldn't tell any of them apart.

Three episodes in, I got it. "Is it a hamster or a guinea pig?" Lauren asked Stephanie. "Because hamsters are, like, this big..." (makes circle with forefinger and thumb). Stephanie smiles confusedly.

"She used to be a hamster, but now she's a guinea pig".

I love her. I watched it from midday right through until 7pm.

And then I watched Run's House.

Ah Loan

Glasgow opened with a scene straight out of Trainspotting. On the train at that, all pish, chips and vinegar. Athlone opened, appropriately, in a garage. Not the usual piss and a Kit-Kat en route to Galway garage, but a suburban shop with petrol pumps and Polish counter staff. Ho, and indeed, hum. The shape of things to come?

The girls browsed the shelves, making noise about white wine spritzers and Pringles. Except for Strawberry Shortcake, who snotted herself on a yellow Caution! sign in her haste for the bathroom.

The shape of things to come.

Me? I was eyeing up the Bucky. Throwing it the kind of filthy, lustful looks you reserve for your lover after too much wine. Fingering the cans of Bulmers. I couldn't possibly. I was feeling insecure, you see. My hostess noticed me dithering like a dipso at a disco and pointed out that I was in Athlone, and that she was toting a six pack of Ritz. Bucky and Bulmers it is.

Two hours later agus mise ar mo shó, with Strawberry doing her best to get me on my ear. Maybe it's three hours later. We're in Karma, and it feels like we're in 1996.

I stood around looking cool, thinking cool, thinking I am too cool, for this school. Reality begged to differ. I may have looked every inch the aloof city sophistikitty in my head, but to him I looked approachable, and approach he did. You know him. The small, baldy, sweaty one with his creepy little hands deep in his sticky little pockets, rooting at his testicles. The one you hope isn't looking at you. But he was looking at me, and he fancied his chances. "Are you from Ah Loan yourself?" he barked at my nipples. No, I said. Dublin. "I was going to go outside for a bit of a walk" he said, licking his chapped lips. "I was thinking you'd want to come with me, like". Tempting? No. He broke eye contact then and resumed staring at my tits. "The wife's brother's missus is from Dublin" he mused, thoughtfully. "She's alright".

A Buke With Me In It

Click the picture!

There are other people in it too, and they are entirely to blame for my hangover today.

No, I Didn't

My name's Claude. I'm from Athy. I'm here on my own. Do you want to dance?

Drop The Dead Donkey Already

Back to the scene of the crime: That Post.

How do we feel about it now, 177 days later? I ask because I have just been asked by Niall Kitson on behalf of PC Live (I assumed he'd want to know which version of Firefox I use, or if I'd ever heard of Linux, but no, he wants to know about the troubles I've seen and why I felt compelled to pose naked in a bath of milk and publish the results on the web). He diplomatically enquired about the bit of a row I got myself into, and how I feel about it since.

Did you feel vindicated at the end of the debate?

I dunno. So I google 'vindicated' to make sure that it means what I think it means. I then google 'vilified' because I think that might be closer to my truth. Semantics matter to me (and before I publish this, I will have googled 'semantics'). I know that by the time I left for Bilbao a week later, I was glad to be getting the hell out of Dodge. I know that when I logged on to check my mails from a café in Donostia, my hangover goading my curiosity into submission, I regretted it instantly. I read FlirtySomething's riposte through splayed and shaky fingers, then penned an apologetic email. Then deleted it. Then penned an apologetic post. Then deleted that too. I remember that the post included a stock photo of a gerbil holding up a bunch of tiny flowers - it seemed to say all that I thought I should. Imagine! In my defence, I was really hungover.

So did you feel vindicated? Didya, punk?

I don't know that I did. Because I don't know that it made any difference.

Butterpigs

"I'm gaunnae kick yer fuckin' heid in, ya bam!" he roared, lurching down the carriage, spraying spit and spilling cider. He brayed laughing and punched his mate in the head. I was delighted.

Glasgow.

Saturday night saw us in the Buff, dancing to Pulp's Disco 2000. "I grew up with woodchip on the walls" I laughed. He pretended to be appalled. He loves his bit of rough with her swinging hips, swigging from a tin of Red Stripe, happy as a lark. The pub is called the Butterfly and the Pig and I like its dinky little ditty -

I’ll never forget falling in love with a butterfly,
a pig was I a pig not she,
you see to fly like her or be like me a butterpig you must be,
to care, to share, to love everywhere, to have curly hair,
is the meaning of the butterfly and the pig,
the odd pair.

Though no odd pair we.

On the windy way home we blessed an amiable drunk with a cigarette in exchange for directions to our warm bed. He wished us a merry Christmas and congratulated himself on being the first to do so. Aye, second turn on the left... into an industrial wasteland from which you may never escape. An hour later and a pish down a laneway - we were lost. The perishing cold gnawed at my cheer and my chips. I hate Glasgow.

But I didn't, not really. On Sunday morning I ate porridge with maple syrup in the Willow Tea Rooms and tried on every red woollen coat in Scotland. We trailed around GoMA, drank Glühwein at the fair, swung rosie cheeked with cold on the carousel swings. I eyed the Helter Skelter longingly but didn't push my luck - it's cute til the carnies have to pry your ample arse off the slide.

To the dreary Dows by Queen Street Station then to watch the football. I sat with a book as a beard, soaking up the locals. The miserable middle-aged women with their shopping, Bacardi Breezers brightening their smiles, the lone and lonely men. A Glaswegian L'Absinthe.

Before boarding the train from Central Station the Jaffa Cake dipped in to the chippie with a Mars Duo. We sat amongst the pigeons then, grinning, greasy with batter and banter. A fitting end to the weekend. Butterpigs both.