Monthly Archives: May 2014

Month’s Mind

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Losing your faith on a pilgrimage to The Holy Land. That still cracks me up. There you are in the photograph, all 46 mother-of-four years of you, flanked by camel humps in those ridiculous square shades that devour your face, high up presiding over your travelling companions like The Queen of Pop-socks herself.

No spa breaks back then, just a girly week in Jerusalem with a pick ‘n’ mix of the habited and the devotional. And you. No furious ten-page follow-up message-board dissection. No outburst of empathy from strangers at the touch of a keypad, just an indelible question mark left next to your thoughts on the point of it all. And there it stays, mostly, until one of their kind gets a rise out of you obliging you to roar obscenities at the wireless and demand they “get a life”.

And still you occasionally slip into their place of worship on a Saturday night to bow your head and try to square all the question marks with the inevitabilities that befall your family, passed away and present, members of which you email occasionally when you can be bothered despite your virtuoso typist past. Google is an order you give your grandchildren.

I tell you I started this blog thing last month, as a hobby mainly, a way to relax since there’s not a hope of me losing the will to live entirely by going running, or cooking, or cleaning. I half expect you to ask if I’m coming out of writing retirement after twenty years but you’re already lost in your Sudoku. We thought you had it bad with the crossword. Remember when you flew to visit me and leaned over in the taxi with the paper wondering what I thought 5 across could be? Some addictions don’t require Wi-Fi.

Tomorrow, after we clear up, and your son-in-law cajoles your granddaughter up to bed, I’ll slouch on to the sofa reaching for the laptop. You’ll come in looking for your umbrella (“just in case”), and each of us will slide into our respective back pews to join the herd for a while, collect our thoughts, and zone out in the only way we know how.

Top 5 things that freak me out on planet blog

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1. Parenting blogs. Specifically, my tendency to take a leisurely stroll around them for a casual snoop only to re-emerge completely freaked out. Like many a habit I should avoid, it’s totally unavoidable. I fear it will culminate in a 50 paragraph purge in here, then we’ll all be sorry. I’m working on balancing one earnest thought-provoking post with every four laugh-alongs. That way I’ll prevent myself from calling it quits and shopping myself to social services. I’m one ‘motherhood’ article away from adding them to my contact list on speed-dial.

2. That I can’t change the name of this blog. It took me five days to settle on a theme. This was the fifth choice. Or was it the seventh?Anxiety over the latter could well re-surface to shove it into this top five as a stand alone head-stagger. I’ll settle down with the title eventually; it’s just that on some days, like today, I’d like to rename it Darby O’Dildo and the Little Penises. Shrugs.

3. Endless photos of food I can’t eat. My food fetish works in a way that there is never sufficient time to leave the meal unattended on the plate to look at it through a lens.

4. Widgets. I don’t have to know any more than how to pronounce the word. I have full confidence in their ability to mess me up, so I stay away from them.

5. That by some cosmic joke, Gary from IT is reading this and laughing his bollocks off. Gary, how did you find me when I can’t access this place in work? And while I have you, is it true that yer man was sacked for indulging his on-line porn habit?

Those last few words should do wonders for addressing another minor anxiety on here – the stats (hyperventilates).

Password Protected

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Hi ho. It’s back to full-time work, I go. This time to one of those large organisations with its own IT Department. Gotta love those IT guys. Every day is a no-uniform day, another opportunity to remain nonplussed with head down while all about them are losing theirs. And go by the name of Gary. Usually.

Gary set me up on the system on my first day before sauntering back to his mothership with an over-the-shoulder warning I’ll need to change my password regularly. It took a nanosecond to lash in the first: my Daughter’s name and birth year. There was a time I would’ve approached the task by having a generous stare into space before being jolted back into real time with precisely the right song title for there and then, only for it to be rejected for not containing the requisite mix of numbers and letters. Napoleon36. A historic figure and a few random numbers to you, an Ani DiFranco song and the year of my Mother’s birth to me. [“Everyone is a fucking Napoleon”. Except you, Ma, you’re just naturally short.]

Passwords represent rare opportunities to smuggle a teeny wee piece of your heart and soul into a soulless workplace. The hidden bit of you for when a framed photo or potted plant won’t do. When the frame is empty and you couldn’t give a fuck about plants. The password protects those cordoned off files and feelings you can’t share with anyone.  Except on the rare occasion a Gary needs it, and they’ve probably heard them all.  I wish I could remember all of mine and print them off like the keyboard-track of my life.

I’d forgotten the scale of my Ani DiFranco habit back in my 20s. Her middle finger was perpetually aloft to the latest man who’d broken her heart, and to The Man who breaks millions to make millions. Notsosoft – the first, and sole remaining, password from an early email account. A relic of me as the idealist, brimming with enough angst to take Him and his sort on. Like many of us thundering up the highway towards World Change, I was seduced by a boy down a back alley where we both overstayed our welcome. Subsequent passwords from that love affair: firedoor00, untouchable02 (as in Untouchable Face), and thereyougo04 [..”swinging down the boulevard..”]

Damestreet08 didn’t expire till ’09. Scene of my first kiss with my now husband up against a fancy streetlight outside the Brian Boru Pub on the corner before you cut down to Burdock’s. We parted an hour after it started from where I floated back to the car-park. It was locked so I had to cough up eighty quid to get my car out. I’d have cheerfully paid double that. Fakeempire09 and Slowslow10 came later followed by the date and place of our wedding. Now I bring our little one in to work every day. All kitted out in lower and upper case accessorised by a one and a two. Till home time, when she comes running towards me with her lopsided ponytail and Minnie Mouse t-shirt giving me a few ideas for the next password.

There’s a change in constellation. Something’s been re-arranged. Even Ani is lighter of step..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUM_i666O8A

Got a password story to share?

The Piece, Process

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I’ve spent the last few days leafing and listening through the commentary on Gerry Adams’s arrest this week. As so frequently happens when it comes to capturing the nuances of life in Ulcer, it took an English broadsheet, not an Irish broadsheet, nor the National Broadcaster, to give voice to a Northern Ireland-born writer to nail the many hearts of the matter.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/northern-ireland-gerry-adams-arrest-troubles-haunted-ghosts-past

A considered piece of writing; shame about the accompanying image.

 

Meet The Flockers

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On my 21st birthday, my best mate presented me with a bulky card containing an obvious little something. Since it was so long ago  *pipe lip-smacks*, I don’t recall my exact response but no doubt I mentally punched the air at the prospect of being able to get my round in down the pub. This was the early Nineties remember, so German beer and disposable income had yet to make an appearance. “Open it later”, she muttered, or something to that effect.

I still have the two hand-written pages that slid out that evening. ’21 Good Things About You’ is a credit to the list-making community everywhere (you know who we are) with its respectable double-spaced bullet-pointed lay-out, the different coloured pens indicating due care and consideration for the task underpinned by the occasional moment of inspiration when any pen had to do. The free-hand drawn border frames the mirror up to myself. Naturally, I lingered over the ones that sounded most complimentary (“You know a lot about one-hit wonders”) and curled my lip at a few I feel might’ve been used better. For instance, the one about my friends could’ve been dropped in favour of a nod to my parallel parking. I guess with the best parallel park-ups, no-one is ever there to witness them when you pull them off, so I’ll let that one go.

One of those original eye-rollers has grown on me over the years. “You come from a long line of Donegal people”. Original response: Glad we cleared that up. Later response: Yeah? And what did they do when they ran into a spot of bother? Legged it as far as they could. Current response: That, I do.

According to the latest Census figures, Donegal has more sheep than people. You probably already suspected this if you ever watched RTÉ’s result analysis on election night. In 2010, it had 618,447 of them. The photo at the top of this page shows a few of us back in the 70s. That’s me there in front as a nipper beside my Ma plotting my escape route. I managed to run away some months later but they caught me in the newsagents at the bottom of our street before I could make a proper getaway. That’s my Dad behind her. Behind every Donegal mother is a Donegal father relentlessly on the hunt for a cuppa tea, most likely with one already in paw. There’s my Mother’s two sisters further behind her on the right. They’re both dead now. Every old woman I see wearing white cotton socks with high heels reminds me of one; Marks and Spencer’s biscuit collections reminds me of the other. These women had their standards. Behind them again is an array of uncles. All silent men who worked with their hands and shared a passion for car engines and Elvis.

If you squint, you’ll see my aforementioned mate at the very back with her folks. They moved in next door when she was three so I suppose you could say she’s one of my clan, too. All individuals with their own unique stamp, but part of the flock. From a long line of Donegal flocks.

P.S. I have no idea who that guy on the left is.