Matthew 6:34

I went to a funeral last week, to remember the father of a friend I had not seen in a long time. I hadn't seen him in so long that it seems funny to refer to him as a friend here, but it would seem funnier still to refer to him as a former friend. I am reminded of one of my favourite James Taylor songs, Places in my Past. Looking for a clip to illustrate my post with, all I could find was one of an earnest man in a baseball cap named Dodie1024 singing it sweetly as a dedication to all of his long lost friends. I don't know, I just seem to sing these songs and say I'm sorry for the friends I used to know. It's oddly moving. Or just a bit sad. I can't decide which.

I don't recall any falling out with this friend I used to know. We went to college and lost touch. He took up hockey and cricket. I took up smoking. I heard he got married. I don't know if he's heard anything of my life since school. I'm too embarrassed by my teenage self to reintroduce myself to him as an adult.

I got word of his father's death on the morning of the funeral itself. I'd rather have gone to his removal the night before - a shorter service and a single file up the aisle to shake hands and offer sympathies. It's easier, when you've lost touch, to stand in an orderly queue and wait your turn. I felt it might be arrogant somehow to approach him outside. "Isn't the point to let him know you're here?" asked the Jaffa Cake, who'd been dragged along for moral support (and as physical proof of my success in the form of a beautiful beardy man). I thought about it and decided that no, it wasn't.

I spent the hour of the funeral trying not to cry for the father of this friend I used to know, trying not to think about some day losing my own parents and instead thinking about all the time I'd spent in that church as a child. There are photos of me on the church lawn with my parents and grandparents, dressed in a white watermarked taffeta dress my mother had made for my communion day. "It's ballet length" I'd boasted to my classmates, thinking I'd be decked out in a tutu. I look serious, and freckled. I sang the psalm that day, Sé an Tiarna m'Aoire. I misunderstood the words and sang sé an Tiarna Muire, as an ode to the Virgin Mary. The choir sang it after communion at the funeral and I felt the same panic rising in my throat as I felt standing in the pulpit that day, reaching for the high note in cuireann sé ina luí mé. To calm myself, I concentrated on the ornate plasterwork behind the altar. I'd done it as a child too, imagining it to be made of icing.

Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. The priest concluded the rite by quoting Matthew. No talk of going on to a better place, of sitting at the right hand of the Father. And in my best Mrs. Doyle voice, I thought "how right you are, Father, how right you are."

John

I think I was about 6 years old when my parents got involved in BreakAway, a respite programme for children with mental disabilities run by St. John of God's in Islandbridge. My parents explained to my brother and I that a little boy would be coming to us for his holidays, and they told us about some of the special children they had met. The school chose a match for us and in time we got an occasional foster brother, John. He was between my brother and I in age, a difference of no more than a few months. He was the second eldest of nine at home, raised by his mother in a council house in Ballyfermot. We didn't always go into the house when we were picking him up; the local kids chased the car down the street to tell Chrissie that we were coming.

John smelled damp to me, and he always seemed to have snots crusting on his nostrils. He had Down Syndrome. I didn't know what that meant. I knew that he was special and that he loved to be held and hugged, but I was frightened of him and I found him disgusting. Dirty. He always wanted a part in our games but we were close, and I resented his intrusion. Two years earlier, we'd cornered my mother and accused her of loving our new baby sister more than she loved us. I never for a minute thought that she loved John more than us - he was such hard work. But he commanded her attention. He'd run away, he'd shout and swear. "Fuck! Baldy bollix!" he'd roar at the neighbour. He took a piss in our paddling pool.

One morning, when he came in to call us because he'd wet the bed, I threw a shoe at him. I got down from my top bunk, picked up a sandal and threw it at him. Then I threw its match. My brother joined me, and we pelted John with the shoes that had been lined up neatly along the skirting board. He cowered in the doorway, calling for my mam, naked from the waist down, his urine-soaked pyjama bottoms lying on the landing carpet.

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.

Mo Cheol Sibh

I saw a lot of music last weekend, some good, some bad and some downright orange (Duffy, but that was a total accident - I was on my way to the "toilets" and happened to be passing the main stage. I stuck my fingers in my ears, and not just for comic effect). Some of it, however, hit me right in the tear ducts. And because this blog is about me and not about music, here are my highlights.

Sigur Ros played a beautiful set on Friday. As Hoppipolla washed over the crowd the world felt for a moment like it had been set to rights, and in a small way it had. I sent a well-timed message to an estranged friend; it chipped at the ice and raised a smiley. Not quite a smile, but that's something for me to work towards.

"We're going to play a nice mellow set, to make up for all the stressful music that's being played around here" announced the bould Sinéad at the start of her set, instantly losing her friends and alienating people. Like most of the assembled crowd, I will forgive Sinéad most anything, even Sean-Nós Nua. Thankfully it didn't come to that. Her short, sweet set tested the audience's patience, but she finished with Nothing Compares 2U. The song will always remind me of my childhood in Palmerstown, my brother and I as 9 and 10 year olds bouncing on the bed, screaming it at the top of our lungs, spiking our hair with soap, playing guitar on our tennis rackets, wearing white vests and pretending we were rock stars. She sang it softly, Steve Cooney accompanying her on the guitar. I got goosebumps. I heard a snuffle come from the guy on my left as she finished, and clocked him wiping snotbubbles on his sleeve. "That was the nicest thing I've ever heard" he sniffed. It was, too. My beau sent me a YouChoob clip of it this evening, but I won't link. It cheapens these small, beautiful moments, makes them look loud, discordant, fuzzy. My memory of it will be of his arms around me, her soft voice lilting, lifting the crowd, and the poor cunt beside me blubbering into his pint.

My Bloody Valentine's set opened with the overexcited middle-aged gent beside me screaming Fuck Bono! We love you, Kevin! Show us your tits! at the top of his lungs, and ended with an almost orgasmic sense of relief when they finally broke from their Holocaust of torturous feedback. Their music washed over me on Sunday night and it tasted like home. I occasionally pump my teenage years in Kilkenny for stories, hugging my adventures to me for nostalgia's sake. In truth though I think of them little enough - it's eleven years and two days since I left them behind me. There is not yet enough space between the sixteen year old me and the person I have become for us to feel entirely at ease with one another, she brings out the worst in me and I become awkward and teenage again in her company. Close friends from those days have fallen by my wayside and even now my guilt at their sinking has not quite subsided. Those four years I spent there seemed like a lifetime ago, seemed like something that happened to someone else. But the swell of their guitars on Sunday night brought all that welling up. I felt again as I did then, when I was becoming the person I recognise myself as now. I like her much better these days than I did then and it has taken me a long time and a lot of hard work to get this comfortable in my skin. I wonder if, eleven years and two days from now, I will still be so easy to undo?

I hope so.

Beart Gan Leigheas...

...Foighne Is Fearr Dó.

Pisces

Are you expecting major transformations to happen overnight? It's time to face the fact that it's going to take longer than you thought. Whether you are looking for changes in yourself or in someone else, you have to be more patient and realistic about how quickly things can happen. Let things unfold the way they will, and the results will be better.

What bollocks. Patience is most certainly not one of my virtues and I generally feel like punching anyone who reminds me of the fact on the nose (but to do so would both hurt my knuckles and prove their point). Vegan ascetic Aurelius Clemens Prudentius laid down a list of seven Heavenly Virtues to oppose Pope Gregory The Great's seven deadlies and I am moderately pleased to see that I excel at Liberality and Kindness and am at least at improver's level when it comes to Diligence and Humility, though I'll admit I have some way to go towards Chastity and Temperance.

But Patience...

*sigh*

I have tried to cultivate it, to grow some, as it were. But gardening holds no appeal for me; it takes too fucking long. I did once sow a very successful vegetable patch, but managed it only because I wasn't living there at the time (it was in my parents' garden) so I forgot about it from one month's end to the next. Had I been home to gawk at it every evening I'd likely have kicked my infant pumpkins in impatient annoyance. There are few hobbies that I find so incomprehensibly frustrating - I find it bizarre that folk take such pleasure and comfort in something where you have so little control over the end result .

As a child I would press flowers from our garden, anxious to turn them into beautiful, paper-thin works of art. I was so very anxious to turn them into beautiful, paper-thin works of art that I would check them on a daily basis, which meant that I ended up with a mangled and sticky mess breeding mold in the pages of my books instead. As an adult I have found one or two which were spared my attentions, forgotten under a pile of encyclopedias. They are exquisite, and a vivid illustration of the adage that good things come to those who wait.

I fucking hate waiting to see how things will pan out.

Childhood Trauma #73

Davey's helpful comment yesterday that "learning is for sissies" got me thinking generally about sissydom and what a complete and utter sissy I was as a kid. I'm still a bit of a sissy these days, but now I think it suits me. Back then it didn't, but I was such a fucking sissy that I hadn't a clue what to do about it. Then I read Felix's #5 this morning and the true extent of my sissyness as a kid washed over me again in a wave.

There is incident from 1988 that haunts me yet, a public humiliation from my time in rang a haon with Múinteoir Ciara where the memory of the burning in my cheeks is still so vivid that I have to lay a hand to my face to check that I'm not blushing again. It was the year of our first Holy Communion, that rite of passage that signified, well, I'm not too sure on the whole Catholic side of things but it was significant for me in that I bought a set of swings for the garden with my communion money. Before we could get stuck into a bit of Holy Jesus, however, there was the ritual of the First Confession.

The process was explained to us in detail, the priest introduced, we were reassured that our confessions would be heard on the altar rather than in the confessional boxes lest the claustrophobic amongst us have a shit attack on the big day. We then had a quickfire Q&A as a prelude to the practice confession we were going to make to our teacher. Which is when it all went horribly wrong. My friend Martha put her hand up, the picture of genuine, worried sincerity, and asked what would happen if you hadn't got anything to tell the priest, because, she reasoned, "Rosie doesn't have any sins!"

Cue silence while the 32 eight year olds and their teacher ponder this hitherto unforeseen snag caused by the innocence of the class Goody-Poxy-Two-Shoes. That's right, I thought miserably, as the lot of them stared at me and my already red cheeks turned puce. I don't. I'm 8. I could make one up, but that would be a lie, and a sin on the altar.

I went home that day mortified at having been singled out from the crowd because of my virtue. I gave my brother a thump, muttered a bad word under my breath at my mam and thought about dipping her purse for tenpence (a step too far - but thinking about it was a good start). I resolved once and for all to rid myself of the nickname the class clown had bestowed upon me - "The Walking Talking Statue".

I've been moderately successful.

Yowl!

A rambling vignette, inspired in equal parts by last night's nightmares and Davey's post on censorship.

I've been woken the last two nights by horrible nightmares; blurry ones with lots of screaming and scary monsters. Nothing new there, but then last night I was out on the balcony enjoying a cigarette when I heard the very same sounds coming from the apartment block's underground car park. The hairs rose up on the back of my neck. Perhaps the last week and a half's cocktail of over-the-counter cold remedies was finally taking its toll and causing hallucinations? I stuck my head tentatively over the parapet to see if I could identify the source of the wailing (deciding that real-life scary monsters would be slightly preferable to ones that exist just in my head).

I saw a streak of ginger tear across the tarmac. Mystery solved. It was the fucking Bin Cats. These mangy moggies live in the basement, warming themselves on car bonnets and eating from the communal rubbish dumpsters. I make the Swede take the bins out in the apartment because on more than one occasion I've swung a bag up over the lip of the dumpster* only to have the shite frightened out of my by a caterwauling and clawing furball leaping out at me because I've accidentally smacked it in the nut with a week's worth of empty wine bottles. To be fair though, they keep the rats down and bother no-one but the lily-livered such as myself. Except for this week. For the Bin Cats appear to be in heat.

I remember the first time I heard cats indulging in some tender lovemaking. I was about 9, maybe 10 and staying overnight with my aunt in Dundalk. I was in a strange house, in a strange bed, with an overactive imagination. I wasn't quite asleep but I was getting there when I heard this sudden keening, answered by a mocking yowl and it sounded like it was coming from the house next door. I convinced myself that my aunt's neighbour was a witch and was torturing a baby, mewling back at it every time it cried. The neighbour (whom I'd met earlier that day) was a perfectly nice lady who displayed no outward signs of being an evil witch but for reasons best known only to child psychologists I decided that she must be sticking pins in a baby.

I did nothing about it at the time bar worry, I remember looking crookedly at my aunt the following morning and wondering if she was in cahoots with the neighbour, deciding that as she must have heard it too and had made no mention of it then she probably was. In which case I wasn't going to be the one to bring it up; they might end up boiling me for soup.

It was years later before I saw the neighbour's cat at home getting his rocks off with some cute wee pussy and heard those same yowls and screams. I'd forgotten about the night in Dundalk til then, banished it to the recess in my brain where I keep the things that haunt my adult nightmares. Last night's feline symphony and the previous night's disturbed sleep brought it rushing back again and I'm wondering now what prompted such dark and morbid thoughts in a bright and happy 10 year old.

One of the few songs in my repertoire as a kid was one that I remember hearing sung at home, Wiela Wailia. The Dubliners had done a version of it and though I haven't heard it sung in years, I remember the psychotic words and the jaunty air perfectly. The full lyrics can be found here but in summary; There was an old woman and she lived in the woods, she had a three month old baby and a penknife long and sharp and she stuck that penknife in the baby's heart.

It's the kind of catchy tune that sticks with a kid.

*Wrong word? I don't think we have "dumpsters" in Ireland but "big fuck-off bin" would have made an already overlong sentence even more cumbersome.

The Heimlich Manoeuvre

Santy came up trumps again this year; a ticket for next year's Electric Picnic. In fairness though, Santy had had a lot of unsubtle hints. We've grown out of list writing in our house at this stage (at 26, 25 and 22 respectively I suppose it's about time) but back in the day the lists always followed a three item formula: a toy, a pet of some description (not a fucking chance) and (because we were polite children and knew that sometimes Santy runs out of things) a surprise.

So imagine my surprise a few years ago when my sister went in to the other room to fetch my present and emerged with a hamster. The lady in the pet shop had been reluctant to sell him to my mother, worried that the child wouldn't appreciate the gift. "She's 21..." When they got him home they opened the boot of the car to find him swinging from the bars of his cage by his little pink feet. I was thrilled with him. He was like a little ball of cotton wool, brilliant white with bright pink eyes. And he was mad.

I named him Heimlich after the manoeuvre because when I fed him each day he'd stuff his cheeks with the entire contents of the food dish and then wait until I'd left the room to squirrel it away under his bedding, presumably in case I changed my mind and decided to take it back. He soon grew large and portly, so I trained him to do trapeze across the bars of his cage (for banana chips) and got him one of those exercise ball thingys which he used to chase the big dog around the kitchen. He'd sleep all day while I was at college, I'd wake him for playtime in the evenings. One day when I woke him I noticed he was a bit off, when I took him out to play he started walking around in circles, agitated and unable to turn to the right. I looked like an absolute tit sitting in the vet's, cradling a shoebox, tears in my eyes. The prognosis was grave; it was either a bad cold which had caused his brain to swell (!) or a tumour. The vet injected him with an antibiotic and a sedative and told me to bring him back the following day if there was no improvement. He recovered but it knocked him back, a few weeks later I went to wake him and found that he'd died in his sleep.

My brother and I gave him a funeral in the front garden, where the dogs would be less likely to dig him up and present him to me at the breakfast table some morning. We buried him under the daffodils, in an empty Tampax box. Snivelling, we waved at the neighbours who were seeing some visitors off. Two twentysomethings burying tampons in the flowerbeds... Just another Sunday afternoon in Naas.

Dad Rocks

I had dinner with my dad this evening, catching up. One of the things I miss most about living with my parents is that although I see them very often, I don't spend much time alone with him these days. He was working late in town and called to see if I'd meet him for something to eat before he headed off home on his bike (a traffic solution rather than a mid-life crisis and I believe him, if only because he dresses like a Garda in the visi-vest and geeky white helmet).

It was really good to spend the few hours talking like we did, but demanding too. When you spend little time alone, you tend to make it count and I found some of our conversations difficult. Ever anxious to know how I am and how I'm getting on, he wastes no time in asking me. Asking me about yesterday's visit to the doctor, my progress, the consequences and how I'm feeling about them. Talking to me about work, how I'm doing for myself there and where I see my job going. Enquiring after my mental health, whether I still have black days and how I manage them. Congratulating me on looking well, doing well, feeling well and expressing myself with honesty, diplomacy and grace.

For my part I'm just as inquisitive, and he answers me with the same warm candour. There's a lot I don't know about my dad and where he comes from. He tells me about it over dinners like these, or when we go walking, or on long car journeys. Some of it is very hard to hear; his childhood was very different to the one himself and mam have given me. I know I can be an awful whingebag sometimes (for my own amusement, often as not) but I also know that I have a lot to be grateful for.

You Know When You've Been Tangoed

Being naturally pasty of face, I've often looked wistfully at sallow-skinned lovelies and wished for a more Mediterranean complexion. Only twice have I succumbed to the lure of fake tan; most recently about 3 years ago when I was heading for a week to Barcelona. I had learned (through experience) how people there would stare openly at me for being almost translucently pale, so I reckoned a tan might help me to avoid unwanted leering on the metro. I decided to go pro -no streaky home application for me- and went to the beautician to get a spray tan. They don't warn you how humiliating it is, to have to stand wearing nothing but a paper thong while you're power hosed in cold sticky paint. Nor do they warn you that you can't wear underwear until it dries, so you'll need to go commando back to your respectable desk job, knickerless and with nipples that could cut glass visible through your blouse (my bras are -unfortunately- more for insulation than support). Above all, they don't warn you about the smell. I'd noticed it before, on people's clothes and in nightclubs, vaguely unpleasant but nothing I could clearly identify. Like old, wet socks.

They did warn me that it would darken over time and not to panic, to have a shower the following morning and it would be fine. I did, and it was. For a day. Subsequent showers saw the tan peeling off me in strips which meant that I attracted that unwanted attention on the metro anyway, but this time people were moving away and wondering if the peeling skin and the musty smell were symptoms of something catching. Still, at least it came off, albeit in patches. The first time I experimented with fake tan, I wasn't quite so fortunate.

In primary school, our Sports day was always a major event. Not because of any interest in sport but because you got to wear something other than your uniform. School uniforms are a great leveller; pretty girls look plain, plain girls look plain too, risible fashion decisions are avoided. So the opportunity to distinguish yourself on Sports Day was eagerly anticipated. Or fucking dreaded, if you were me, and paranoid about your pasty legs.

A friend of my mother's used to mind my brother and I for a bit after school, and the week before the Big Day I was in her bathroom, idly rifling through her cupboards looking for interesting things to pocket (I was at that klepto stage that all 10 year olds go through) when I found a bottle labelled "False Tan". That'll do! Up the jumper it went.

The following Thursday night I slathered it over my legs in the bathroom at home, paying particular attention to my knees. Off to bed I went, secure in the knowledge that I'd have sexy pins for the egg and spoon race the following day. Imagine my dismay upon waking up to see that my legs looked like they'd been smeared with treacle, and that my knees were a peculiar shade of scutter brown, as were the palms of my hands. Efforts to hide the damage (and the smell) from my mother failed, as shorts were mandatory and gloves were not. I'll talk to you about this when you get home. Fuck.

I spent the bus journey to school with my sleeves pulled over my mahogany palms and my mahogany palms covering my scutter coloured knees, panicking about how I'd hide them once I got to school and how my mam would punish me if I ever made it home. In the end the best I could come up with was to take a fall, literally, and graze the shit out of both hands and knees in the hope that the grass, gravel and blood would provide passable camouflage. The idea was genius. I staged a tumble off the bus and duly flayed myself, which got me out of having to do any sports, covered up my silky tan and scored me some sympathy with mam when I got home.

I call these tales to mind as a caution to myself. I saw a photo today of me standing beside a friend in the pub. She's standard Essex-girl orange, and I am see-through. I caught myself thinking hey, a little bronzer might do no harm...