Forget Everything And Remember

I had a nightmare on Monday night that stayed with me til morning. I woke at 3am in a slick of sweat and turned the lamp on, tilting it to shine out into the room rather than down onto Andrew's sleeping face. The shadows still stained the corners of the room like a seeping damp. He mooched, rolled over and asked me to turn off the light. I whispered that I couldn't, that I'd had a bad dream, and he wrapped me up in his arms, still asleep, and held me tight. I lay as still as I could, trying to shake the feeling that something else was moving in the room. I needed to go to the bathroom, but that meant passing the glass-panelled front door, which looks out into the black dark stairwell outside our basement flat. Leave the light off, and the shadows outside move. Turn it on, and it lights up whatever's lurking over your shoulder and shows it in your reflection. I stayed put until 4.57am, when the dull ache in my bladder started to make me feel ridiculous, so I scurried to the bathroom and cursed the blown bulb in the hallway.

The flush is the worst, isn't it? If I was waiting to pounce on someone in the bathroom, I'd wait until they'd just flushed the toilet.

Back in bed, I fell into an uneasy sleep, the lamp still burning white-hot beside me. My alarm went off at 7.27am and I reflected (not for the first time) that Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells is perhaps not the best thing to wake up to after a bad night. I hit snooze and then lay there, fretting about how I'd manage a shower without pulling the curtain in case whatever it was that had stalked me through the night would hide behind it while I washed and then surprise and/or stab me as I soaped my diddies. I managed just fine, in the end. The bathroom was fucking drowned, but. Breakfast, then a queasy drive to work, checking my rearview mirror a little more often than strictly necessary to make sure that there wasn't anything hiding on the back seat, waiting to surprise and/or stab me as I negotiated the right-hand turn onto North King Street.

"So what was your nightmare about, Pussycat?" Andrew asked when I got in that evening, pasty-looking for want of sleep. I tried explaining to him about the elderly lady who'd been beating schoolgirls from the Convent to death with a rock, filming it and posting it on YouTube and then telling the Garda that I'd done it (when in fact I had killed one over a year ago, but it was totally an accident and anyway they never found her because I stuffed her into a hedge) but it sounded ridiculous. And a small part of me worried that she might be in the pantry, listening in.

Review: Winter's Bone

One of the film's happier moments.

It's kinda like The Road, but set in the here-and-now Ozarks, and all the bleaker for it. "You want it fried, or in a stew?" Ree asks her little brother Sonny, after she's taught him how to shoot and clean squirrels. Fried, I nodded, so immersed in her world that I forgot to think eew.

Balayés Les Amours, Avec Leurs Trémolos

"Do you want to come for a walk?" I asked Andrew last night, and then I made that same face that Fat Rosie upstairs makes when she presses her snout to the window as we pass. It works every time; we're two fat, happy Rosies. We set off north towards the river, my tail wagging and my hand in his. We passed the Barge pub as we crossed Charlemont Bridge and I thought of the college crowd I used to work with and their Friday night drinks. I never went, and eventually they stopped asking. I was content enough to make smalltalk over scones in the mornings.

I wasn't always so sensible. Before them, back when I worked part-time for the bank, I was the most convivial of colleagues. Always out, always drunk. I behaved appallingly at office parties, but never so's you'd notice. I was quietly self-destructive, losing shoes and cameras, confidence and large chunks of our nights out. I fucking hated that job, and I loved that everyone else there hated it with me. I also loved Philip. He had a girlfriend, of course, but he was planning to leave her for me. Yeah, I know. Or at least I know now. Then, the Social Club facilitated our disappointing affair with morale-improving bank-sponsored drink-fuelled nights out and weekends away. I should have had more sense, but that sad truth of it is that I had so little self-respect and so much vodka in me that I sunk all my hope into that hapless hoor. I'd love to say I got sense and walked away from it once I realised that things weren't going to improve, but I didn't. He had to dump me.

I let myself down so badly that it still smarts. The last two years or so have seen a sea change in how I think about love (something even PC Live saw fit to pass small comment on) and I've spent a lot of time reflecting on what those earlier destructive relationships meant to me. I'd take so very much of it back, I think. I've gone with the je ne regrette rien line before; these experiences have made me who I am and I think I've turned out pretty well. But while I am what I am and I deal my own deck, etc. I wish I had played some of those cards closer to my chest and not left myself so exposed.

I hadn't thought of Philip in a long time, but as Andrew and I passed the Barge a second time on our way home on Thursday night, I saw Philip walking in the door with his brother. I thought about shouting over a hello, introducing him to my husband. But I didn't. I didn't even mention him to Andrew. It no longer seemed important.

On Friday morning I read about Katy Perry's "revenge" on her teenage crush. He turned up at one of her gigs last week and she had a go at him for turning down her advances as a teenager. 'Oh yeah, you really chose right, honey! What’s up! What’s up now, player! I’m going to dedicate this next one to Shane Lopes, everyone!' she said, before dedicating her song Ur So Gay to him. And, for the first time in my life, I felt grateful that I am not a 25 year-old popstar in a latex minidress with a massive chip on my shoulder.

Review: Cyrus

All the other photos in my Google Machine were of Miley in her knickers.

Funny, and knuckle-chewingly uncomfortable.

Do You Like Pina Coladas?

We went out for cocktails last week, after a slight misunderstanding. We were supposed to go to a party at four, so I'd put makeup on and blowdried my hair and bought what I thought was baklawa to bring along with us. Then I'd sat at home with my party dress on me, tick tocking, til Andrew arrived home at six with five pints on him. "We'll leave at seven" I had said. "We'll leave the party at seven with an invented excuse so that I don't have to spend more than three hours straight playing nice with strangers" is what I meant. I'd planned to leave home by half three.

I was cross, but there's little point in being cross with a genuinely apologetic man full of Guinness. Still, I was cross. I'd been sitting on the couch feeling like a pig in lipstick for two hours at that stage, and I was hungry. Green Nineteen, I decided, for a mojito. Because if I don't, my patience will wear off at about the same time as his beer.

I ordered the burrito and a mojito, because they rhyme. He ordered a mai tai, and the waiter snickered. It tasted like dissolved boiled sweets. After dinner we moved on to Solas. While the mojito had taken the edge off my crankiness, I was still skirting dangerously close to a hands-on-hips stereotypical wifey strop of the you-never-listen-to-me-when-I'm-talking-to-you variety. And sure if he'd wanted that he'd have married a teacher, and I'd have married someone who never fucking listens to me when I'm talking to him.

I ordered a caipirinha. He ordered a Turkey Lurkey; a horrifying red, green and brown striped concoction in a long glass. I ordered a second caipirinha. He ordered something purple with prosecco in it. I ordered a white russian, which came with a flake. "Do you want me to wait til you've ordered before I go to the bathroom?" I asked. "I can pick my own!" he spluttered. When I came back, he was sipping from another long glass full of disappointment, this time filled with white wine, elderflower cordial and pear vodka. I laughed at him and ate my flake.

On the way home, we stopped at the offy so that he could buy some Baileys and Kahlua to make some white russians of his own. Yes, I know (and he knows) that you don't put Baileys in white russians. And he didn't, because there on the shelf by the Baileys was a bottle of Maloney's Irish Cream. You should have seen his little eyes light up when the shop assistant scanned it in at €7.99. We got home, I got into bed, he got busy in the kitchen. He got stuck into the tray of what I'd thought was baklawa, only to discover that they were marzipan cakes. Disgusted, he brought a half-eaten one in to me as proof of his disappointment (and he was right, they were very disappointing) before returning to the kitchen to mix his drink. And then "PUSSYCAT!" came the horrified bellow "IT'S A MIXTURE OF CREAM AND WHITE WINE!" Undeterred, he slopped a load of Kahlua and milk in on top of it, added a Cadbury's Twirl and brought it to bed with him. "White wine, Pussycat!" he wailed between sips. "What Machiavellian bastard thought of mixing cream and white wine and bottling it to sell to... to..."

"Protestants" I offered.

Joe Le Taxi

I pulled over in Drumcondra on my way to work this morning, to pick up bread and bananas for lunch. I was halfway out the driver's door when some drenched oulfella heaved himself into the passenger seat of the car. He looked at me, all pissed off, and I looked at him, appalled that I'd forgotten to lock the door and was about to be robbed by a pensioner and would have no money left for bread and bananas. "Are you not a taxi?" he said. "No!" I squeaked. Then I sat there and waited for him to hoist his arthritic frame back out into the rain.