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.