Don't You Just Know Exactly What They're Thinking?

I won't let myself go to seed just because I've gotten married I told myself, as I rinsed the only pants with an elasticated waist I'd brought on honeymoon with me out in the bathroom sink of our room in the Ritz. I'll still shave my legs and stuff. Uh huh. I totally haven't let myself go at all. I bought an epilator for my legs, and I've even used it a few times. It hurts like fuck, though. And the stone I've put on around my middle (and by "middle" I mean all the bits twixt tits and knees) is just padding for the winter. In case I fall in the snow. And the moustache was for Movember.

December is fast approaching, however. I slathered on some randy red lipstick last Tuesday evening, playing dress-up in preparation for a forties-themed party on Saturday night and discovered that there's nothing quite sets off a ginger-blonde 'tache like a streak of Rimmel. So I decided I'd copy Annie and have it threaded. I think I'll just have it beaded next time - I would be far less painful and I'd only look marginally less ridiculous. The nice lady in the salon held the thread between her teeth and thumbs and with a few deft flicks, ripped the offensive little ronnie off my smush. "Do the sideburns too, willya?" I asked her, losing the run of myself entirely. Thinking I will be only fucking beautiful! and imagining all the lipstick I'll wear. Like something from Smack the Pony.

Two minutes later, she was done. "There!" she said, showing me my roaring red face in a little handmirror before smoothing on some cold cream and making soothing noises. "Great!" I said, because that is what I always say when I have just been physically mutilated by healthcare or beauty professionals. "I have very delicate skin" I said "but it will be fine in a little bit, right?" "Right!" she said, and she swiped my credit card.

I pulled up outside the house, my face smarting and radiating an unnatural heat, and I called Andrew to warn him. "I'm home" I said "and Kitty, you're not allowed to laugh." He didn't, to be fair to him. He looked fucking horrified. "Your moustache really wasn't that bad" he said, and now, four days on, as I rub Eurax cream into my raised and bumpy rash, I suppose he was probably right.

These Riots Are Just The Beginning

Anyone coming for a stroll with me this Saturday?

I Wanna Die With You, Wendy, On The Streets Tonight

I went for a jog last night. Go me! Well, go me, and go Andrew with me because I dragged him along too. "Mr. Motivator" I'm going to call him, though my true motivation is to be fit and sexy and able to buy clothes in stylish high street shops that are not sized "OMFG HAHA FAT!".

Andrew didn't want to come. It was blustery, cold and wet outside and there was rugby on telly and I can't run and he knew I'd whinge and we'd just come home from a four-course dinner in my nana's where he'd been introduced to roast lap of lamb and we'd all eaten too much cabbage. So you couldn't really blame him. But I made big eyes at him and he reluctantly dragged on his hockey shorts and a pair of runners. "We'll walk to Harold's Cross bridge" I said "and then run to the bridge in Portobello, and then walk home!". I was reasonably confident I'd manage that much, having done it before and not died. He didn't say anything. The doubt started to seep in as we mounted the steps from the basement flat into the piss and bluster of the evening. "Tired now!" I giggled and then, to my utter horror (and comic surprise) he broke into a run. I had no choice but to follow him, scampering down the road like a fat Labrador chasing a biscuit.

I made it as far as the bridge before slowing to a walk, and then gasped my way across it while he waited up for me, careful to stay out of arm's reach lest I climb aboard his broad back and demand a piggy-ride home. We rounded the corner and he took off again, with me huffing and puffing in his wake, wondering if I might perhaps have undiagnosed asthma. Halfway there, I slowed my trot to a tottle. "Did I say you could stop?" he shouted over his shoulder. I didn't say anything, because I couldn't breathe, but I was shocked enough by my mild-mannered husband heckling me like a hardass to start running again. I made it as far as the lock and stumbled across the wooden gates, giving him a cheeky wave as he ran the extra minute or two over La Touche bridge. He caught up with me by the Lower Deck and told me to run the rest of the way home, that I'd feel better for it. "Two deep breaths, Pussycat, and then go" he said. I obeyed, too oxygen-deprived to be anything but obedient, and gulped down a ganky mouthful of secondhand cigarette smoke as we walked past the pub door. And then I fucking ran.

My calves ached when we got in. I stripped off and wrapped myself in a towel, my skin rising in red welts, reacting to heat, sweat, cold. "I'm allergic to yogging!" I whined, flashing my mottled diddies at Andrew. "Just a healthy glow, Pussycat" he reassured me "you're still beautiful". I lumped off to the shower, reassured that I was now svelte and lovely (if a little rashy for the effort) and scalded my sore muscles. I am strong like an Amazon, I thought to myself as I dried in front of the mirror, and hairy like an ape. I should epilate. Mindful of the other patrons of the Rathmines swimming pool, I decided to start with my bikini line.

"Kitty!" I roared "I've found something more painful than yogging!"

Every Time I Tried To Tell You, The Words Just Came Out Wrong

Reading about Philip Larkin's letters in the weekend's paper set me thinking about my own letters. Presumably I will have to do or write something of worth before anyone deigns to publish mine (or indeed desires to read them) but given that I put more time into my correspondence than I do most anything else, I'll be hard pushed to find the time.

I love written communication. Always have. It's the only way I feel I can properly express myself, be that expression good, bad, or mildly indifferent. I wonder, though, would my collected works reflect on me as Larkin's did on him? His Selected Letters saw him branded an “emotionally-retarded misanthropist”. I wouldn't want to be one of those (I looked "misanthropist" up) though I suspect I might well be on most Tuesday mornings. I don't get to write letters all that often any more, but my collected texts, google chats and emails amount to a substantial body of work. Or evidence, depending on your point of view. O'Driscoll's article in the Irish Times centres on Letters to Monica, which shows Larkin in a far more favourable light. It's a collection of his letters to his love. Not necessarily love letters, mind, but letters to someone he could be honest with, if not true to. Those are the letters of mine I'd like collected.

I remember writing to my mother as a child. Not happy little missives that you'd stick to the door of the fridge, but heartfelt little letters about sads and sorries. I remember leaving them on her pillow, with the timidly passive-aggressive tenderness of a ten-year-old child. I've never been very good at letting someone know if they've hurt me. Instead, I apologise to them and hope that they'll say sorry right back, and mean it. It doesn't really work, and though I still do it, I recognised that even then and wrote the deepest of my sads down. I hope she hasn't kept those letters.

Genuinely apologising when I've more than good reason to sticks in my craw too. They made up the rest of my letters to my long-suffering and endlessly patient mother. "I'm hurt" and "I'm sorry". What a legacy. I wouldn't mind if she'd kept the remorseful ones. I'm sure those sorries were hard-won out of me, and well-deserved. I only remember writing one to my dad, when I was 14. I outlined (in bullets numbered 1-10) the reasons I should be allowed to dye my hair. I wanted his permission so badly and was so emotionally invested in his response that it just seemed easier to write to him than to ask. He got it though. He still does. He told a story at my wedding and referred to my writing as my "gift". "Her magic with words found expression not through pen onto paper but into the mystical world of the web. No Maude Gonne, but yet perhaps she had something of what Yeats described as “the burning cloud” in her presence. Her anonymous words reached out for contact into the new world of virtual reality, virtual friends and virtual possibilities" he said. I sniffed, and so did the table of bloggers across the room who knew what he was on about.

My first boyfriend and I wrote to one another twice weekly. We were 15, he lived in Clondalkin and I in Kilkenny. Our relationship was made up of maudlin moments on railway platforms and miserable ones in the Bus Éireann shelter on the Naas dual carraigeway. Our letters were long, banal and tortured in the way that lust-sick teenage letters are. I've kept them, sellotaped up in a shoebox in one of my parents' cupboards. Even though he dumped me, took me back, dumped me again, took up with one of my friends, dumped her and then ran away to join the circus Garda Síochána, I kept them. I wonder did he keep mine? I'd say so. I was 18 when we broke up, and I haven't read his letters again since. I'm not sure that I will or that I would ever want anyone else to, but I won't throw them out. I didn't love him (though I'm sure I thought I must at the time) and I don't believe he ever loved me, but he was a much gentler critic of my teenage self than I could ever be, and if someday I read his letters, I might like her a little more for who she was and me, now, for who I am.

My next boyfriend lived up the road. It didn't last so long, though still it lasted longer than it should have. I didn't keep so much as a card from him, and I'm not sure he ever wrote me one worth keeping. Nor did I write him any letters. I've written love letters since, though. The first time I said "I love you", I wrote it down. On some sleeve notes for a mix tape. I know. I dunno if he kept them, the notes and the tape, but I hope so. I'd abandoned the tortured banality of my teens by that time, and opted instead for handwritten, heartfelt, signed-and-dated simplicity. I'd like to think that piece of my heart's still hidden in a sock drawer somewhere.

Not all of my correspondence is so hopelessly heartfelt and romantic, of course. There's a million mundane notes about picking up milk and putting out bins. Of Larkin's letters to his love, Dennis O'Driscoll writes that "work-related philippics are frequent". I had to look up what "philippic" meant, but my own correspondence yields similar tirades. “How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up” said Larkin. "Pussycat is on the verge of a nervous collapse and would rather be hit by a truck than have to come to work any more" said me, in my text to Andrew at 3.45pm yesterday.

"Send your 16-year-old self a tweet" twittered Shane Hegarty in the same supplement of the weekend's paper. The world probably doesn’t need another piece gasping at how awesome The Twitter is, I think, but here we go again, and I read his article anyway because I like Shane Hegarty and though part of me wants to caution him as one might a child who's sat too close to the telly, another part of me is willing him to convince me of Twitter's merits. He doesn't succeed, not this time anyway. Instead, he gets me thinking of these letters I write to myself, published by my own vanity press, to be read by you and reread by me too, my personal public correspondence.

Three Crooked Hearts, Swirls All Around

Sitting in wet Wednesday evening traffic on Clanbrassil Street, I switch the wipers to intermittent and put the handbrake on. The car feels like it's drawing breath. It's not just the car. I like Clanbrassil Street's slow snake of traffic after the clutch-heavy climb up Christchurch hill. I know I'm almost home. The raindrops gathering on the windscreen soak up the red of the traffic and tail lights ahead, the blinking orange of the indicators, the gleaming white headlamps of the oncoming cars. Just as their glitter and twinkle eclipses the road ahead, the wiper slowly smears the colour across the screen, a slow, squeaky sweep up and back, before the rain falls softly once more and dapples the dirty dark day with a little more light. I have to work to be optimistic, sometimes, when I'm feeling stuck and stealing five minutes where and when I can. But in wet Wednesday evening traffic on Clanbrassil Street, with a thousand lights shining through the drizzle, I'll smile.