i'm the dog that ate your birthday cake

So it's Christmas night and it's late and I can't sleep. "You won't sleep!" she told me at around 7 this evening, as I chased my third coffee of the day with my 2nd coke of the day. I generally operate under a no caffeine after 4 pm rule, but fuck it it's Christmas and I'm the one who'll be driving back from Naas, where we've spent the day with her family. We take it in turns to spend Christmas with our families, since we married. I've never minded. I need the coffee because I didn't sleep well the night before either. It was the throat infection keeping me awake, the one that everyone has right now. That, and the needing counselling. I know I need counselling because I found myself really looking forward to appointments with my physiotherapist and hairdresser the other week. I don't spill my guts with them or anything, but I know that I can simply say "I'm tired because I'm not sleeping well because I'm stressed," and they'll make sympathetic noises and tell me stories that'll make me laugh. Do counsellors do that? I've never been to one, except twice. The pre-marriage counsellor was great. "Do you counsel married people?" I ask at the end of the session, presumably feeling it was inevitable I'd make a balls of things at some stage. Then there was the, I dunno, grief counsellor we went to together to talk about not being able to have a baby. We justified that 80 euro through Kleenex alone, Jesus. I was incapable of speaking for about two hours beforehand, because I knew what she'd ask, and how much I didn't want her to ask it. And we sobbed, and I suppose it was cathartic. 

Running is cathartic, too, but the marathon's over for now, and it turns out it doesn't fix everything. What was maybe meant to be this act of redemption or renewal felt like working in Supervalu of a Saturday morning with a massive hangover when I was 19. Grim and fucking unrelenting, like. An unfathomably long and stupid thing to be doing. My friend Y said she never saw such despair as she saw in my eyes when I stopped for a hug in Terenure, hoping she and her husband might invite me back to theirs for tea and Countdown and another nap on their couch. Y finds the day to day ughness of it all as disagreeable as I do. "NO IS TO CAN! NO IS TO WANT!" we groan at each other in silly accents most mornings, in a tribute to the way our students speak, though they never really speak like that because we are good at our jobs. Y gets needy South Americans coming to her, asking how to know if the Irish guy they're seeing is now their boyfriend or not. I get Arabic students asking what this letter they got from Irish Water means. I get provoked. I get discouraged. I get turned on. I get angry. I get soppy. I get inspired. I get thinner. I get shin splints. I get sloppy. I get tired.

there will come a time gigantic waves will crush the junk that i have saved

I want, of course, to tell you about the marathon I'll be doing in less than two weeks now - my first one. But I've no angle to tell it from, no hook or line of attack. I will run it and it will be 42.2 kilometres long, because that is how long all marathons are and I am a Modern European who understands the imperial measurement system but feels it is time to let it go. I am not running in memory of anyone or towards a cure for Ebola. Running usually makes me feel better, or calmer, but I am not one of those idiots who claim that runners would never need therapy or anti-depressants. I have no stunning goal in mind, just a time that I will feel satisfied with, whilst leaving me with room for improvement because, right now at least, I would very much like there to be another marathon, and probably many more. A lot of runners seem to only do one of them, most likely honouring a promise they made to themselves after 35 kilometres, to get their cement legs and groaning lungs through it. To keep the tears back. There've been tears already for me in this process, a couple of weeks of hurt and confusion rising like choking vomit after a long warm up race so poorly executed that I nearly told the cub scouts handing out water and encouragement at the final station to go fuck themselves. I expect less of that on the day, and high fives will be stored like glycogen. What I want, more than anything, is to feel like I'll do it all again before too long. So that's the narrative thrust, should we need one here, I guess: no redemption, memorial or scorching glory, just a competent start at the age of 33.

Red wine and sleeping pills help me get back to your arms

So Rosie and I are, like, total athletes now, right? The thing about being a total athlete is that you'll get injured once in a while, and there are constant strains and niggles in your body. I hurt my lower back pretty badly the other week, leaving me barely able to walk for a couple of days, and fairly uncomfortable for a few more. I dined royally on a feast of Nurofen Plus, regular ibuprofen from an American jar of 500 pills, Belfast paracetamol, and Difene and anti-inflammatory gels of varying strengths - provided by family members who'd been prescribed them for prior ailments. Not too shabby without seeking a single word of medical expertise. My back got better and I didn't need any time off work. My stomach turned to acid, my mouth to manky ulcers and my mood to mouldy. 

We realised, Rosie and I, that our knack for finding cheap and strong painkillers meant that we're both taking tablets on a daily basis for what are often really just dehydration or tension headaches, and tired muscles. We're quite good at recognising when something might just be beginning to be a problem, Rosie and I. It may leave us desperately short of good stories to tell, one day. But things have been tough lately, and if we emerge with only a brief phase of mild dependence on painkillers then we're doing alright.

We didn't flush all the pills, we're far too cheap for that. We just moved them out of our immediate eyelines, and agreed to keep a note of what we've been taking. Rosie made the necessary arrangements and told me where they were.

I wanted something this evening, after five miles in the park aggravated my back slightly. Rosie was in Sligo overnight for work, because she has a grown-up job that makes her go places. I might have asked if she thought I should take anything, because she is my sounding board for everything, even things she couldn't possibly know the answer to. I might just  have joked about falling off the wagon after five days clean. I found the ibuprofen in a box on a high kitchen shelf, and with it a pen and a sheet of paper for each of us, ruled into columns for what we took and the date. "Rosie!" said hers, "What have you taken?"

"Andrew!" said mine, for we share a fondness for the carefully deployed exclamation mark, "I hope you feel better soon!" I did. And I missed her - my wife who finds the right note of humour in the stresses of this life, who makes things exactly as much of a deal as they need to be.

he's gave it away cheap there

The World Cup just started. You may have noticed. I stuck on Brazil v. Croatia, because that's what you do, isn't it? There were goals - a couple of them decent, lots of men worrying about what percentage of their country's population will want to fuck them/buy their boots/drink their soft drinks after the match had finished, refereeing controversy, and people who managed to separate themselves from the utter euphoria of it all just long enough to rattle off a few selfies. Football, like.

I've watched a lot of football for a long time now and I kinda find it harder and harder to give a shit about the World Cup. I peered over the top of my laptop at the second half, more engrossed in anything else. Most people don't give a shit about the World Cup, really. That's why we come up with more and more elaborate fantasy leagues, predictions games and pools. Few quid resting on things will keep you watching. Gerry the janitor says Japan are the ones to put money on, as the Japs don't do anything by halves. I'm tipping the Germans myself, in a more pragmatic (racist) extension of his logic.

Christ, those keepers. Did you see those keepers? Wouldn't make it into any Premier League team, would they? My dead granny would've stopped that. England - Italy on Saturday. Multo CarlingSambucas there, lads. Only way. Won't like the heat, though, won't like the heat.

Qatar 2022. Fucking desert there, it is. Air-conditioned stadiums. Expanding markets. Great potential. Few brown envelopes. Sour grapes, and that. Jumpers for goalposts. Couple of thousand dead Nepalese, give or take. I don't know, Bill. Doesn't track back, Bill. Massive ego, Bill. Renard's jacks, Bill. Dollar bill, Bill. Can't write the South Americans off. Love it.

We had a good journey back from Bristol airport the other week. Champions' League Final was on at the bar, but I as distracted by the presence of Johnny Vegas. I'd telly you the story but I can't do his accent here. Ask me about it some time. Or don't. I've kinda built it up a bit now.Taxi driver back in Dublin had plenty to say about One Direction, and the traffic that came with them. Didn't say he minded. I asked him if he knew what the final score of the match had been. He said it was a draw. I said it can't have been a draw, it's the final. He said he'd heard that alright, that that was the last time they were doing the Champions' League, that this was the final match. He wasn't being funny. I liked him. One Direction cost us an extra tenner in the fare. Pricks.

if i could tell you i would let you know

It's about half one on a bank Holiday Saturday afternoon, and Rosie is off in the mountains somewhere, cycling up big bastarding ones to get ready for the Wicklow 100 next weekend. I'm lying around, still in my PJs, resting my legs after running a combined 17 kilometres or thereabouts over the last couple of days. I'll do at least 14k later on, once everyone's fucked off from Bloom and given me back the park. I'm training for the marathon in October, and Rosie's going to do all the build-up races too, up to the half-marathon in September.

Whilst there was something of a need on my part to balance out the fervour for craft beers and fine whiskies that has grown in me over the past couple of years, there are other reasons for our new found fondness for keeping fit.

[Andrew realises with alarm that he is about to go down some tedious road of linking he and his wife's exercising habits to their ongoing difficulties in conceiving a child. This is amateur self-analysis at it's worst, it is narrativising of the worst kind. There is simply no need for it. He is filled with self-loathing, and goes out.]

I went to the Lilliput Press while I was out. I'd never been in there before, despite it being two minutes from my house, and small, independent publishers of envelope-pushing writing being very much the kind of thing I would expect myself to be into. I bought a couple of books from the friendly folk in there, dodged invitations to book launches, and thought for a good while about picking up the new collection of essays by Hubert Butler. I'd never heard of him before, but something made me think I might like him. Perhaps it's that several of his essays are about Irish Protestant identity. I'd like to write about my Irish Protestant identity sometimes. But only sometimes. I had to take a colleague aside recently and tell him to cut out the Proddy jokes. It's not that it wasn't funny, it's that it didn't remain funny on a daily basis over two years. That's the one thing I can definitely articulate about being an Irish Protestant: no-one can look at you as any kind of a victim when you are perceived (usually correctly) as being from a position of privilege. It's also, like being an Irish Catholic in America, or a Jew anywhere, far more than a religious identity. Your status as lapsed, agnostic or atheist don't really come into it.

It makes me feel a little squeamish talking about this stuff. I don't know why. I read bits of Hubert Butler's essays on being a Protestant and other things, but I didn't buy it. Perhaps I should have. The Irish Times says I should have. He does that pleasing thing, that Con Houlihan did too, of ending his pieces in the curtest of manners. I can do that.

cookie i think you're tame

See, you look at things like the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman and these young lads who've died from neknomination and you almost feel bad, almost embarrassed for your own restraint, for your fucking pussy moderation, this drinking to almost always only mild inebriation or less, this once-had-an-eight-cigarette-a-day-habit kind of bullshit that isn't even worth talking about in one way or another because it's just nothing and it would be more interesting if you'd never done anything at all, just sat there all righteous while the rest of them smoked soft drugs and said I don't see the point I don't see the point at all will you pass the Club Orange thanks

You are, of course, beloved by your

wife and

your house

and your 

cats and your

parents

And your 

sisterandbrotherand

friends and

yet you will drink to excess on a Friday because it is a Friday and you like it and you have the money and you sit on your couch on a Sunday with your rooibos tea and you say it's an idiot tax it's a Darwin Award it's their own fucking fault it wouldn't happen to me it's a shame it's a shame he was so talented it's all those films we'll never get it's a shame they were old enough to know better their mams and dads and all their friends and i remember him from when he was in Scent of a Woman he had money and talent and kids and he didn't need to do that and it can only be great being them and didntioncegivemyfifteenyearoldbrotherabottleofabsolutvodkathathedrankinonegofromapintglassoncetoimpresshismatewhowasstayingoveronlyforhisvomittowakehimwhilehewaschokingonitsoitsfineitdoesnthappentomeorhim

we are hummingbirds who've lost the plot and we will not move

"What are you doing out there?" asks Biscuit, his face pressed to the glass door, eyes wide and tail a-wag. "I never know what you're doing."
"I am smoking, Biscuit."
"You don't smoke any more. You run. You read books and cuddle me. You drink rooibos tea and you stockpile whiskey that you barely even touch now.You're a total athlete, Daddy."
"We had a difficult day, your mum and I."
"You shouldn't call her my mum, she doesn't like it. She says she can't be my mum because I'm a cat."
"I know, but it amuses me. We were in the clinic earlier, talking to the doctor about how to make something that's allowed call us mum and dad in front of real people without it being socially awkward. Apparently Daddy has super sperm, that's what the doctor said. She actually used those words. I thought Mummy had asked her to, while I was out of the room, because I'd been so underwhelmed the last time when they just told me my sperm was 'fine.' But no, I've cracking motility and all that. Daddy needs affirmation, sometimes."
"I like it when you call yourself my daddy."
"I know you do, you silly fat fuck. Apparently I produced lots of semen, too. Way more than normal, she said. Imagine if I hadn't missed the cup with the first go and spunked half of it on the floor? Front page of Metro, I reckon."
"You're a top-class wanker, Daddy. But I don't really know what semen is. You had me snipped."
"No harm, pal, no harm. The doctor said I'm off the hook, what with the super sperm and all. That's what she said. I don't think doctors know how relationships work, Biscuit. Your mum will take medicine that will fuck her head up a bit, and have nasty scans, then take other medicine that will fuck her head up in different ways. And I'll try not to be an inconsiderate prick while she's doing it. That's my job."
"She'd rather be a mam than a mum. She says only you Protestants have mums."
"I know, gobshite, that's part of the joke."
"Can I keep being an inconsiderate prick? Will you come in now and rub my belly?"
"Yeah, giz a sec."

now what happens you are heavy metal

"You actually look dead, Andrew."

Throbbing with tiredness, and a sthkaw haw of a throat not answerable to boiled sweets. Socially hamstrung; coffee with someone else's yelps that are not in a meward direction so is fine is fine no is good teacher is fine; is preposition why I can. An unexpected suit and tie for POWER AND RESPECT IN SOCIETY and a headful of Clarissa Dalloway; not to mention semi-colons and artefacts and; moreover nevertheless, delightfully worndown stinking trainers for the cat to bury his face in; a shower before eight o'clock. An unflushed piss; this this this, there is this - what is this?

Dress shoes on, to every cow its copy. Miles and miles on the watch and boots most resolutely not on the bottom of the Liffey and I am throbbingly

not

dead

gone to the beach

Greystones is covered in cyclists but he finds somewhere to ditch the car for a few minutes, drags the bike out, pins his wife's number on her back and kisses her goodbye and good luck. He wriggles his way back out, through a warren of affluence, parks in the village, goes for a wander.
He knows this place a little, sees the flat where he used to attend sordid little parties where everyone had The Best Time and posted their Magic Memories on Bebo after, replete with rictus grins and misplaced hands.
He's on the beach now, gritty underfoot. He's not 40 seconds in before he pisses, shivering at waist depth. He dunks himself under, trying not to gasp too loudly as he comes back up so as not to startle the old man throwing a tennis ball into the sea for his dogs. He gets out quickly - the freakishly good weather hasn't warmed up the sea. He checks his phone and retrieves his wedding ring from his shoe. It is 8.08 am, and now there is no-one else on the beach, only him in his trunks, a dozen crows and a crisp packet.
He reads a passage of deep, queasy unpleasantness in his book. Are we all the same? Flies feast on strands of seaweed and the hair on his legs. There are photos somewhere of him here before, fat and tanned and faking something.
Good citizens and their dogs are starting to fill the beach now, though the waves and the sea remain the only sounds. Another swimmer appears and lasts about as long as he did in the sea, though she doesn't look the sort to only be going for a sneaky slash. He wonders where his wife's at now. The gorgeous gorse on Bray Head. A text from his mum. A man from the Tidy Towns committee picking up detritus. More dogs. More crows. Flies on his feet.

Radge against the machine

I feel it would be remiss of me to let the decision of a blogging contemporary and like-minded soul to give up the ghost pass without remark. I've been at this for about five years now, and Radge was there when I began, putting his thoughts out there in the same kind of way I wanted to and chiming in with encouraging words on my own efforts as I went along. Personal blogging has always been an easy target for accusations of narcissism, though it rarely contains anything more revealing than a Twitter feed, a personal essay or newspaper column, and doesn't suppose that its audience are interested in multiple blurry shots of every drunken night out they have. Radge, as with so many of the others he mentions, was always trying to articulate life as it happened, equal parts appalled by and in thrall to all the things he encountered. Writing projects, without the usual incubation period. There was a brief period, probably early 2009, when at least one of these people, often Radge, could be counted on to have something great for me to read every day. Moseys around Dublin, thefts of PM Dawn, flights of fantasy,Serious Thoughts on Serious Things. It was exciting.
I survey my own 312 posts over the last few years and only feel pleased with vague snippets of a few of them, only feel that little bits of them capture what it's like to be me or someone like me in Dublin in the 21st century. But that's enough, quite honestly. If Radge can do the same with his 803 pieces then it was all time well spent.

I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know

January saw me haunting the streets of Stoneybatter at every available quiet or light moment, searching for our missing cat, Butters. The plumber had let him out, and he obviously bolted, then didn't know how to get home. I grew familiar with every every single street - invariably named after an obscure Scandinavian king or one of the more agricultural parts of  County Wicklow. The streets grew grubbier and darker every evening that I didn't find him, and with them my mood. The streets smelt of other cats' piss. I thought the brushes on the inside of every letterbox we posted heartfelt callusifyoufindourcat flyers through were going to eat the flesh from my hands. A young guard on a bicycle who stopped me late one night as I was checking under cars on Niall Street looked disappointed when I told him there were only Dreamies in the little bag I was clutching. He looked taken aback by my face, helpless and teary with the wind. My wife, who loves me very much, beat the streets with me more often than not, tried to tell me when it was time to knock it off for the night and bought me a lightbox to combat the dark and grubby beast that is my SAD. I took the head off her for telling me my dinner was ready one night, and hated myself more than I ever had before.

I am back in college now, part-time, adding another silly arts degree to my 'skillset' - so I sat in front of the lightbox with a history textbook or Great Expectations, letting the harsh light hit my retinas and waiting to feel better. And, stupidly, I did. I do. What a sorry mental condition to just be pining for the sun! Who wants to lose their edge, their excuse to be a prick and be bad at their job, to a high watt bulb and regular walks in the park?

Natural light slowly returned to the world just as Butters was found. Not by me - a great blow to the hero fantasy I had conjured up on cold evenings - but by a nice man called Des eight doors down. He was skinnier and had rotting teeth, but he's grand, the little fucker. Butters, that is. I have little reason to pour scorn upon the dental hygiene of Des. We gave him a bottle of Faustino V by way of a thank you. Des, that is.

So the returned cat and the improved mood leave me with just the streets to contend with. Because a place takes on everything that has ever happened there, and every bad fucking feeling you felt on it. It does. Thankfully, most of us only feel the ones that happened to us. But I've reclaimed the sofas of bereavement, school locker areas, and the lane in Wicklow where someone punched my jaw so hard that the pain made me vomit. Scraped off the residue of resentment. I will put the strut back into my Stoneybatter shuffle and the  aching streets will be glad of it.

Do you have a minute?

Are you having a good Christmas? Have you consumed? Do you spend an inordinate amount of time giving out about things beyond your control, TV shows you are supposed to like, social media trends and the decline in quality of mince pies? Do you have a pension plan? Do you feel really satisfied with life every once in a while and then worry that you're being smug and then worry that the act of worrying about being smug is in itself really smug, or else a mask for many other concerns because you aren't all that satisfied at all, are you? Do you participate in that ah here leave it out hilarity even though you know it's not really very funny? Have you ever eaten four pieces of shortbread in alarmingly quick succession? Did it hurt? Do other things hurt? Is it OK to go shopping on the 26th of December? Is it OK to loudly proclaim your despair with the world over people going shopping on the 26th of December? Is it? Have you read a book recently and was it good? Do you not have time for reading? Do you watch more than four hours of reality TV a week? Do you believe that America will ever sort its shit out with guns? Do you gripe about auto-correct? Do you jangle your keys? Would you buy a gun if you lived in America? Do you get vexed? Do you regret a lot of the things you did in your early twenties and some of the things you did last week? Do you think that foetuses have a soul and can you explain what that might be? Do you ridicule the religious? Are you, the evangelical church up the road wishes to know, the victim of an ancestral curse? Do you ever pray? If you do sometimes pray do you mentally sign off with "almost certainly not, I know, but just in case,LOL!!"? Did you read the small print? Have you claimed your tax back? Do you do something to break a sweat every day? Can you touch your toes? Are you aware that this entire concept comes from Padgett Powell's 'The Interrogative Mood', but that this particular dude hasn't read it because writing a whole book like this and getting it published and expecting people to pay for it would be taking the piss, right? Am I wrecking your head? Has anyone ever accused you of being a hipster? Can you go now? Is it getting better? Did you get what you wanted? Do you feel at home? Did you have a good year?

Priorities

I came home on Tuesday and started a new post. I wanted to to tell you about a nice encounter I'd just had on the bus, and by way of that, fill people in on what's been going on with me and ruminate on one or two things. As I do. But it wasn't coming out as I wanted it to so I left it for another day.

I won't be writing that post now.

I went to bed that night and did my usual ill-advised check on Twitter. News was just coming in about Savita and the first outpourings of anger were spewing thick and fast.

Savita.

I don't know much about her. I know she was 31, the same age as me. The same age as my wife. I know that she had a beautiful smile, was intelligent, that she taught children to dance and clearly had a sense of fun. I know that she was pregnant. I know that pregnancy can be a dangerous thing, but that modern medicine is continually making it less so.

I know that she spent quite some time in a lot of pain. That she knew her baby was going to die. That she died, and she didn't have to.

Women have been 'other' in this country for time immemorial. Our national religion and guiding light, Roman Catholicism, revolves around notions of women having sex being disgusting. There once, most likely, was a woman called Mary who lived in Bethlehem. She had a child called Jesus. She did this because she had sex. This revolts certain men, so they said that she didn't. A few hundred years later they decided that her mammy didn't either, and put it into writing. And so it began. All the words on the entire Internet could not describe the horrors perpetrated on the women in this country in the name of Jesus, and his pure mammy and nana.

They rumble on here, largely because setting up our own rituals for births and deaths and weddings is difficult, and because it hurts our parents' and our grandparents' feelings when we don't abide by traditions, like everyone else.

On Wednesday morning a student of mine, a Polish priest and a genuinely nice man, pointed to a picture of Enda Kenny in his copy of Metro and said "Is he a good leader? I hear he is Catholic and then I hear he is going to pass law for abortion." I gritted my teeth. Metro were a day behind on the Savita story, so I filled him in. He felt that he foetus should have been aborted, and would have been in Poland. I talked to students from Libya, Kuwait, Italy, Spain and Japan - all highly conservative countries in their own ways. All were sure that Savita would not have been let die in those circumstances.

This goes beyond the divide of pro-choice and anti-choice, this is about recognising women as human beings. As I walked up to the Dáil with Rosie and Colm on Wednesday evening we saw Willie O'Dea and Jimmy Deenihan slithering their respective ways out of there. They were welcome to stay for the protest. Tears were far more likely to break out than violence, but they knew what they were. Cowards who voted against doing anything about our law. It's well for them how they take the backslaps and the hoisting onto shoulders every few years, the triumphalism and the showboating, the expenses and the salary, the pints of Guinness from local businessmen when they go down the local. The prayer to shivering prayer until they have dried the marrow from the bone.

We let them go home. We hope they slept well. We knew, like Emer, that we're all complicit in this. We were glad they were plenty of men there, as it will take men as well as women to stop this from happening again. We sat on the ground and we thought about Savita and we felt sad and we felt sorry.

"Leah was tender-eyed"

With her pissy, mewling offspring all moved on, we sent our cat to be spayed in late June of 1995. 'Smiler', was the name she came to us with - presumably intended to be deeply ironic, as she wore the mien of a feline who dwelt too often on the sorrows of this world. I learnt a lot from her.

The vet sent her back with the news that she was already pregnant, and we greeted my mother jeeringly and triumphantly at the door with the news, for it was she who had wanted Smiler fixed - aware that our childish desire for kittens didn't extend much into the household hygiene end of things. We would later learn that she had just returned from a meeting where she had been fired. It would be much, much later that I would learn what that felt like.

Three kittens were born in a contained bloody mess in our hot press early one morning. My mother brought them out to the garden with a bucket of water before we got up, eager to avoid the months of urine-drenched kitchen that lay, inevitably, ahead. She hadn't the heart to do it. Or had too much, rather.
One was black and white, like his mother, and we named him Snoopy in a teenaged attempt at subversiveness. The other two were a brindled mix of black and brown and ginger hues, like a tomcat who skulked at the end of our lane. We called them Jacob and Esau, like the biblical brothers. When the vet told us they were female they became the lesser-known biblical sisters Rachel and Leah. I liked this, because I fancied a girl in school called Rachel, but it was Rachel we sent away for adoption, and Leah and her fattening brother Snoopy we kept.

Leah grew a cancerous lump on her leg when she was one, which we had removed. It came back, and we were told that having the leg amputated was the only option. So we did. Her appetite for hunting, previously voracious, was now curbed but she managed life just fine, operating under the sobriquet 'Hopalong' and far more affectionate than ever before.She grew squawky and grizzled as time wore on, and gradually became a toothless little gremlin of a thing, ugly-pretty in the same way that gnarled old men are.

It's early August 2012 and I'm back at the family home, visiting with my wife. Leah is squawking in a different key, and doesn't sound great. My mum explains that the vet has said he'll put her down, whenever they think she's ready. "But I don't think she's ready to go just yet," she says, as we watch her slow-motion lope around the garden. I doubt I was ever told where exactly she was nearly drowned, but in my mind's eye it was more or less precisely where she was at that point, seventeen years on and moving as tentatively as a kitten.

They decided she was ready on Saturday, and buried her by the roses, with Raffa the giddy spaniel in attendance. My dad called and broke it to me with his customary gentleness while I was out in the shops. I sighed and thought I was fine and then didn't feel fine, so took the bus back to my own home to scoop out litterboxes and write something about her.

who is showing whom their bloody rag now?

Every time I check your blog, to see if you've written a new post, I'm reminded of you being sad, and don't like that. I know it's not something you control, but you should never be sad, because you are a best fellow and I love you. 

Hello.
It's hard not to be stirred into action by a comment like the one above, even when it's from your younger brother, who visits the blog from time to time on his lunch break. I used to feel far more of a compulsion to put stuff down here, if only to feed the narcissistic impulse to share my epiphanies with whomever cared to listen. But what happened when I got depressed was that whatever worms of creativity lurked in my brain seemed to crawl off and die. That started with humour. Anyone who considers themself to be "a bit of a joker" should probably be publicly horsewhipped, but I suppose I do try and make people laugh on a daily basis, whether they want it or not. But that went out the window for a while, as did attempting to write anything at all. Because when you are low you feel like everything you've ever done is shit, and that when people say nice things to you then that is just them being nice. People were nice about my last post, and I appreciate that, but you kinda have to be nice when someone writes about being depressed. Really, though, if you wanted to read something unbelievably articulate about depression you'd go here. One can only assume that Allie just thinks everyone's just being nice, too.

Since my last post I've ended up doing what I never thought I would, by joining Twitter. You can felch me here, if that's your thing. I've also signed up as a contributor with the excellent new online magazine ramp.ie. You can read my first post for them here, and I recommend you have a good snoop around while you're there, as it's filled with great, diverse stuff. You can also sext them on Facebook, felch them on Twitter, roger them on your Skybox, and all those other things that the kids are into these days.

Now that I've cleared my throat I'll be back soon, probably with a post about violence. Yay!

I will be with you when you lose your brave

The M4, a dank Friday evening.
"I knew you'd been out of sorts for a bit, but I didn't know it was this bad."
"I know you didn't, I didn't want you to."

He looked everywhere except her face, and felt relieved that she was driving. He hadn't wanted to tell her in case she thought it was her fault. It wasn't.

"This is different, I've been low before but there was always something rational at the root of it and I don't think there is this time. I really don't. I feel useless all the time and so, so fucking stupid."

They talked about it, calmly. They talked about him maybe going to see someone about it, calmly. They parked  outside the hotel and sat in the car for a while longer, the unwelcome nagging of tears in both their eyes. She rubbed his hand and they went in. They went out for dinner and he said very little and she didn't mind.

There was a wedding the next day. Not theirs, theirs was ages ago. The bride was beautiful and the music was nice and the kids were cute and the priest was crass. The usual, all good. He played nice at the table and ate too much and waned after a fashion and retreated upstairs to watch Match of the Day and drink scotch on his own. An hour or so later she texted to say that she missed him. Not that he was being antisocial and inconsiderate, just that she missed him. He told her that he was finding socialising hard at the moment and she told him that she'd mind him.

 So he went back down. They smoked and they talked to nice strangers and they danced, even though he never dances. Nor does she, really, but she took him out there in front of real people and she made him dance to Gay Bar and Florence and The Grating Voice and laughed when he cried "I can't believe what happened to Tony!" like he always does when that Journey song comes on. She smiled patiently when he tried to sing Creep  at 4 a.m. with some bloke he'd just met who had a guitar in the residents' bar.

He felt better for a bit, and then awful again and then better. Beyond the mountains there are mountains, he thought to himself. And she knew that people don't make mountains.

äppärät yeah!

Chancing My Arm is now available to all my readers in snazzy mobile device form! Everyone else has had their blog available in this format for fucking ages, you say! I know! But I'm still excited! I'm even writing this post on a mobile device! I'm so modern I'm next week! Back soon with a post about depression! If I can be ringed!

of course i've had it in the ear before

This is a post I handwrote in late October 2009, a few weeks after I'd been (temporarily, but indefinitely) laid off from my teaching job. I'm not sure why I never got around to typing it up, but a visit to my grandfather on Friday night reminded me to do so.


My grandfather calls me at about 10.30 in the morning. I'm relieved that he doesn't seem to realise he's just woken me. He asks if I'll meet him for lunch later, and I happily acquiesce. I'm delighted to have any excuse to leave the house at the moment: three weeks into unemployment and I hate that it now doesn't matter whether I get out of bed or not. Lunch with a man of wit and dignity is as good a reason to do so as I've heard. It's over a year and a half now since my grandmother died and he's wearing it well - better than I could possibly have imagined.

We meet on the steps of the Dining Hall in Trinity College. I'm late, sodden and flustered. He's punctual and characteristically pristine, as though the rain wouldn't be so insolent as to try. The man is effervescent, and frequently taken for my father. He looks me up and down in bemusement and greets me warmly. He fumbles with his key to the members-only door for alumni and staff and we head in. I was in there only once before, for coffee and a chat with a senior lecturer. He wasn't grooming me, it was for a chat about my dissertation. I spent five of the last eight years in Trinity and I don't really know anyone here. Despite it being over twenty years since he retired from working here my grandfather seems to know everyone, and they're all pleased to see him. "George!" says one chap enthusiastically and expectantly. My grandfather looks somewhat blank.

 "It's Henry Winter. You don't remember me, do you?"
"Of course I do, Henry - a fine, handsome young fellow like yourself!"

Henry is about 45 and not particularly handsome at all, but beams with the compliment. We bid polite hellos and goodbyes and move on briskly. "I've no idea who that fellow is, or what he's about," confides my grandfather in tones of disappointment and relief.

It turns out that the magic door leads us to the same eating area as all the proles and students use. But they're barricaded out of the place for a little longer and we get superior eating options. I end up with a three course meal in front of me, owing to his generous encouragement and my reluctance to admit that I only horsed my breakfast into me half an hour ago.

During the meal I spot a blogger* whom I recognise from pictures beside his journalistic work. I like what he does and, being on his blogroll as I am, I imagine he'd be only fucking thrilled to meet me. So I contemplate going over and saying hello, but decide that it's bad form to interrupt a chap over his lunch. and besides, I'd feel compelled to explain to my grandfather why I'd gotten up from the table to introduce myself to some bloke who had no idea who I was or what I was about, and I don't feel like explaining what blogging is to an 84 year-old.

A few minutes later he makes a casual reference to some bishop or something in cork landing themselves in a bit of trouble by whinging about someone on Twitter and having that whinge read by the person in question.
"Sorry, did you just say Twitter?"
"Yes, Twitter. It's like blogging but with more back and forth, as I understand it."
"Uh, yeah...I suppose it is."

Later, over coffee, he asks out of nowhere whether I do any writing to occupy myself while I'm unemployed. I end up telling him about this blog, about the piece i wrote for Homepages, about the couple of piss-takey pidgin Gaeilge columns I've written for the Irish language magazine Rosie contributes to, about my painful, stunted attempts at short story writing.
"I'd never make a career out of it, though" I say, lest he or, worse, I start getting big ideas.
"No, but it's good you're keeping active."
So the conversation moves on to what i might make a career out of, given how hard it seems to be to land a teaching job right now. He's fascinated to hear how much I enjoyed my time in South Korea a couple of years back, and I regale him with a few anecdotes from there. I don't think it's anything I hadn't told him in the immediate aftermath of my trip, but I'm enjoying telling it again.
"And would they know you in the Korean embassy here?"
"Well, I think was only there briefly a couple of times to sort out my working visa before I went, so..."
"I think it would be a good idea for you to go in there and ask to speak to someone significant and explain that you're someone who has spent time in their country and has very positive things to say about their country and that you could be useful to them."
I ponder the fact that the only use the Koreans would have for me is as a spokesman for soju.
"Mmm, sure, I might do that sometime."

I love his career ideas for me. Previous ones have included sourcing Polish food for all the expats here (he was shocked to here that the supermarkets have been all over that for some considerable time now), and opening a language school with Rosie where I teach English and she teaches Irish. They beat the hell out of "put your name on the teaching substitution register and maybe get a job in Tesco in the meantime", which is probably exactly what I should be doing.

He calls an abrupt halt to our time together, as is his tendency. He presses an envelope with a very generous cheque inside into my hand as a belated birthday present, and hurries off towards Dawson Street. I feel a certain twinge when I realise that this 84 year-old has more pressing engagements to attend to than I have, and wonder if I'll manage to get my shit together before he starts losing his.



*In my original draft I had named the blogger and intended on providing a link, but in the subsequent couple of years I have encountered him once or twice and discovered that he's a bit of a prick, so anonymity would serve him better now.

Beasts of no nation?

When I was eleven or twelve some knacker walked up to me on the street, said something in Cant that I didn't understand, and punched me in the stomach. It was ideal, really: it didn't hurt very much but it allowed me not to feel bad about referring to Travellers as 'knackers', and to lustily join in with every badmouthing of them that I was every privy to. I learned quickly that, despite everyone and their dog understanding the term to be pejorative, it was nearly always completely socially accepted. Usage in front of teachers and other adults would, at worst, be met with a mild frown - the same one you might get if you said 'crap'.

I don't know how many times it took being punched by settled people for me to write that one childish tap in the gut off as part of life, rather than symbolic of the values of an entire ethnicity. I don't know exactly when I grew out of using the term 'knackers' (I suspect it was shamefully recently), but I did.

Last Saturday I read a piece in the Irish Times about the rugby players Denis Leamy and Rory Best. A puff piece, in fact, that had little to do with sport and a lot to do with the fact that the aforementioned are now 'Bushmill Brothers' (there's a remarkably similar piece in The Examiner - it seems that the edict from the marketing people was to use words like 'brothers' and 'bond' prominently, and mention the brand name at least once. Tacky. One can only hope Messrs. Thornley and Lewis got a nice case of whiskey or five for their trouble). But what was jarring was not the thinly-veiled-infomercial nature of the piece, but the part where Rory Best is asked about his BFF's playing style and says he is "a complete knacker on the pitch, as you can imagine."

Does Rory Best mean that Denis Leamy is in the habit of finding old horses on the pitch and turning them into dog food and glue? He would undoubtedly claim that he's using the word in the other sense - that of a person behaving anti-socially or thuggishly. Some say that it's an entirely separate meaning, with no reference to Travellers at all. Bock does (or did, I'll allow for the fact that that post is three years old). But most of the times I've heard people use the phrase "some knacker..." in the middle of an anecdote they will inevitably have to clarify whether they are referring to a scumbag-knacker or, you know, a knacker-knacker. The etymology of any term is a complicated thing, but there seems little doubt that its origins are connected to Travellers. The term is still heavily connected to them, in my experience.

Rory Best has always seemed like a decent enough skin, but he might want to think again about publicly using a term that is highly offensive to an entire culture, even if a lot of people use it freely. They used 'nigger' freely, too, once. If he must use it in the context of Bushmills Brotherly Bonding Banter, then perhaps the Irish Times might think a little more carefully about publishing it, and potentially perpetuating its use among the thousands who will have read that article. Twenty percent would deny citizenship to them, remember, lest we claim that Ireland doesn't have a problem with Travellers. Perhaps they'll redact it later, as they do.

Bad Santa (Part 2)

A few years ago I wrote this post, all about one of my experiences of pretending to be Santa Claus for other people's amusement, I mentioned at the start of it that there were going to be four parts to it but, like so many of my good blogging intentions, they never happened. That post just flaps in the wind there now, still frequently visited by naughty people trying to stream the movie 'Bad Santa'. But I've just read it again, and was surprised to find that it's actually pretty funny, and that there were elements to the story I'd entirely forgotten. So here, more than three years later, is my stab at a second part:

PornoSanta

During my third year of college I lived in a part of Finglas that the landlord pretended was Glasnevin and compensated for the lack of a social life that I simply couldn't afford by doing a bit of volunteering at a homework club in a refugee centre, where shared the title of 'volunteer co-ordinator' with a far more enterprising and imaginative person than I who went by the name of Sinéad. It was our job to help teenaged asylum-seekers who'd come to Ireland without their parents do their homework, and ensure that there were enough volunteers to meet the demand for it. It was a huge amount of fun and I felt bad whenever anyone commended me on the work, as I it was far too enjoyable to be considered in any way worthy.

Sinéad, being an enterprising and imaginative person, was out and about one day single-handedly organising the Christmas party for the centre while I was suffering through all the added workload that being one year ahead of her in college brought by gawping at pretty girls in the library.
She called me:
"Andrew, would you dress up as Santa for the party and give out a few presents?"
"Ummm...are they not a bit old for Santa?"
"C'mon, it'll be fun and they'll love it."
"Do we have a suit?"
"I'm just about to buy one."
"Do we have the budget for that?" (First and only time I've ever uttered those words.)
"Yeah, it's grand, it's only three euro."

The three euro part should have been the warning, in all honesty.

This costume lacked the musty antique shop elegance of my previous Santa garb by being more of a small,  thin two-piece red suit, rather than a glorious crimson robe that could house any trousers I wished, along with many a pillow for full jolly-fat-bastard effect. I just about forced one small cushion under the jacket, before making the decision to keep my jeans on under the flimsy drawstring trousers. Skinny fuckin' jeans they were, grey ones, for I was almost a skinny enough fucker for them back then.

The students, from all over Africa, were indeed thrilled by the sight of me and my big sack of presents, and laughed long and hard. Once again, I felt like a rockstar. A present or two distributed, the laughter became even more uproarious - screeches and hoots everywhere. I was starting to become bemused by just how funny these guys thought the whole thing was. It was only me in a red suit, speaking in a deeper voice than usual, after all.

"For god's sake pull up your pants, man!" exhorted a young man beside me, who has subsequently gone on to slightly make a name for himself as a slightly-known comedian. I looked down to see that the flimsy drawstring trousers had, shockingly, failed me and were now sitting pooled around my ankles while the protective layer of my skinny fuckin' jeans now resembled grubby fuckin' longjohns. I looked at my chest and the corner of a cushion was poking out of the the intersection at the breast of the jacket, like some sort of floral-patterned cotton Janet Jackson.

After I'd waddled back to the toilet cubicles and begun changing back, wishing I had something else to put over the now-shameful skinny jeans, I overheard one of the Nigerian kids having a blistering barney on the phone with his girlfriend from school, who wanted him to meet up with she and her friends, while he wanted to hang out at the party for a bit longer. I think it was only then that I began seeing the asylum seekers as citizens, rather than guests of the nation.