Meet the flockers

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Department of Speculation

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 ’90s 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 variety of 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”. cropped-margarita-personal-292

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 Ma’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 sheeple. 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.

Did you read Róisín yet?

Posted on September 20, 2015 by Department of Speculation

A common mate call among pairs of mothers and daughters echoed along our national phone network on any given weekend. An Ireland-shaped matrix of relationships that leads them to find in her columns those common touchstones on the pitfalls and playfulness of life. A recurring item on the agenda for the weekly weekend catch-up. Invariably, it reminds one of the other, or of themselves together. Distilling what they’ve been “saying all along” into ways they’ve never heard put, or possibly as compassionately or honestly, before.

As a bridge between generations, my Mother and I have been tip tapping back and forth over her columns to each other for years. Plucking out similar calamities and falls from social grace for a duet of laughter. And letting a few seconds of silence speak for themselves when it comes to more fatal falls of the heart and good intentions. As an interpreter of the hard stuff between generations of the same blood, Róisín’s been doing it pro bono for as long as I can remember.

Last week was no different.

“Did you read Róisín yet?”

It’s rare for both of us to be on the same page. The other is always just on the brink of sitting down to do so. And there’s her crossword and Sudoku addictions to attend to first.

Last week was no different.

“I’m just about to sit down. But I heard her on Marian. That took some guts”

“It did, yeah”

But last week was different. Instead of waiting till the next call for her to catch up, I felt an unpremeditated urge to keep going.

“Ma?”

“Yeah?”

The few seconds of silence steeled us both.

“What is it?”

“I had an abortion, too, Ma. I just never found the right time to tell you”

Her sigh of relief audible.

“Well, isn’t it lovely that it was Róisín who helped you to tell me?”

A woman who has been giving us both permission to talk as women for years . The significance was not lost on either of us.

Sole kid

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Department of Speculation

Life, like Tom Cruise, can be very weird. I robbed that line outright from Panti’s set at Body & Soul last weekend. A half hour retrospective sizzling with one-liners and insights as she pieced together the bizarre experience of finding herself a national treasure in recent months. Other highlights included generous helpings of falafel, general good cheer, unidentifiable music powerful enough to get the most stubborn of feet shuffling, and a previously unheard but cracking laid-out on Sunday festival lawn cover of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, which you can listen to here.

There comes a moment in every aging festival goer’s career when one can no longer put off the inevitable. When it’s time to pause, reflect on happy times, reconcile then with now, adopt some perspective, and finally trade in the sleeping-room-only tent for one with ample standing room. Preferably chosen with the aid of a little video on a website that shows off the interior while the prospective buyers lean in to marvel at its impressive orthopaedic friendly features. We could well have given birth to the average festival weekender by the overbearing youthfulness of them, but by Jesus we’re able to maintain a comfortable up-right position as we lament not investing in some reputable ear-plugs to drown the fockers out.

A middle-aged camper awaits oil after bending his back too often

Which is exactly what our camping neighbours were thinking when they registered our Nordie riff raff status and barely suppressed their furtive glances checking for evidence of our exact position in the lowly caste. “Oh, Honey, where did you put the Buckfast?” Ha, had you there (I thought to myself). By Sunday we were on fake smile terms as our one cheerfully played with little Deloitte, Touche, Morgan and Stanley. Such adorable children. They didn’t even make fun of her when she helpfully pointed out their football was broken. She enjoys the occasional rugby tackle but her experience of them to date is confined to rigorous tickling sessions with her Da on the living room floor.

Focking right

For all the unlikely bedfellows family friendly festivals peg together, children rise to the challenge without a bother, gabbling away in their native tongue of life in the moment; the elusive moment the pair of us strain to reach through the tent that doubles as a tardis on another return journey we’re not convinced is going to land safely.

Review: Plenty of standing room so no more muscle pulling while entering and leaving. Plus and an abundance of storage pockets. Even the lip balm can have its own storage.

Drifting from stage to food stall, and from bar to ice-cream van, we managed to get within reasonable distance of The Moment. Not quite front row, but close enough to make out its features. To see the self-consciousness of its inhabitants dissolving away, its out-stretched arm offering a non-discriminatory hand to whoever fancied crossing its threshold. The promise of no-strings-attached escapism however meaningless. And meaningless is just as meaningful as life-altering experiences man, that more experienced travellers manage to reach usually with something stronger than warm beer and generous helpings of falafel.

We managed to catch most of the Moment from sitting on the shoulders of a one-child army, victorious on her hunt for every available opportunity for fun. It transpires that living in the moment also means not having to worry about needing the balls or your own two-to-four feet folk to join in. Just hook up with the others already there.

Sífein makes another failed bid for freedom

Flights of fancy

“Wait a minute, where’s me jumpah?”

Souldiers of fortune

When love breaks down

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Department of Speculation

You raise your children. Bite your lips at the choices they make as they get on with growing up. Pick them up without judgement after they trip over their mistakes and land in a heap at your feet. Give them a financial leg up on their swagger into adulthood. Lend them your ears and your re-assuring nods that speak a thousand hugs. And when they’ve made it past the post of independence, you help them help themselves to raise their own children.

But when the love between their parents breaks down, you pick the children big and small up again, steady as the touchstone and the rare source of surety they have left . You turn the other cheek from the verbal slaps dispensed with venomous hurt and anger from their significant other. Continue to provide their children with a place of sanctuary from the maelstrom of torment from a marriage that’s never done collapsing.

And though unsteadier on your feet now, the years yielding to all the attendant ailments of growing old that usher you onward to the end of your decade; and while steely in your resolve to keep your home a haven; and willing though you are to look the other way as you take the bruisings in dignified silence, the gradual extraction of your love from their lives and the incremental mounting of barriers along communion and confirmation tables can only cause a hurt that can’t speak its name because you don’t know what the words are.

Do it all again, you would, all the while surrendering to the uncertainties of life. Even in the winter of your days.

The revolving door

Posted on January 7, 2015 by Department of Speculation

Today, I am burdened with the unenviable task of dismantling the decorations. The tree, the balloons, and the banners must all come down. Having a child’s birthday overlap with the last day of Christmas would motivate most people to rid the room of one lot before replacing them with another. Not us. For one day of the year, our house is such a staggeringly awful monument to kitsch, it qualifies us as contenders for a Channel 4 documentary. Better make that Channel 5, or, if the barrel is really being scraped… TV3.

Being middle-aged parents to a young child means we reminisce about the sketchy details of the labour and birth as though it happened fifty years ago and we were both really drunk at the time. Our indulgent game of This Time *insert relevant number here* Years Ago kicks off on the eve of her birthday. “This time three years ago, I was locked in the bathroom trying to shove a suppository up my arse that the midwife had fobbed me off with that morning”. Ah, nostalgia.

By noon on her birthday, we have already done a recap of Dad helping himself to a lengthy kip, the derision the birthing ball was greeted with, and the offer from the midwife to listen to Norah Jones when the pain was really revving up. The throat-cutting gesture I mimed in response tends to be more aggressive in the re-telling, which is only fair. Norah fucking Jones. The aural equivalent of knocking back half a Disprin with a glass of your own piss. I have vague recollections of the next bit. “This time three years ago, your Mum was doing her best Bernard Black impersonation to the Midwife called Rowena”. Or Roweeeeeeeeena, as I fondly knew her as.

My labour outtakes

“And not long after that, you arrived!” Before one of us quickly added… “And for a few seconds we thought you were a boy!”. At three years, she is already bored of her parents’ nauseating, heavily exclamation-marked story of her birth, so despairingly asks for another cookie. I stare into the middle-distance and think how mad it is that I’ll never get to go through childbirth again, before asking for the bill.

A series of appointments with her public awaited her back at Decorations R Us. Her farthest flung grandparents first since they’ve reached that age when they will only drive in day-light for fear of getting lost and not knowing who they’ll meet on the road. “You’ll never know who you’ll meet on the road”. There’s an oft repeated statement of fact. I began to wonder if it was my Father’s codified way of announcing “I’ve had enough of this child’s woeful attempts to play the harmonica. Let’s get the fuck outta here, Dear”. On second thoughts, he would never say Dear. I embrace the shift system as the new way to do birthday business.

A steady, yet manageable, stream of Aunties, Uncles, cousins, and the other set of Grandparents, dribble in and out till bedtime. Their generosity and thoughtfulness the perfect antidote to the New Year Comedown; the presence of her biggest fans a real reminder of our good fortune.

Forced to take just one breather in the kitchen, I was about to behead Olaf with the bread-knife when a neighbour sidled up to me with an update on her daughter’s brief encounter with a work colleague. If I recall rightly, I was in a similarly compromised position last year when she chose the moment to tell me of her own sexual conquests with a married man. “I hadn’t had sex in twenty years! I can tell you it’s quite something!”, she whisper-shouted before retreating to the living room to discuss the price of furniture in the local charity shop circuit with my Mother-In-Law. I wondered what’ll it be next year. Our girl will be four. Perish the thought of progress.

This time three years ago, I was alone in the midwife unit suite, cradling our newborn in the quiet before the silence was punctured by the swing of the door ushering in the first round of visitors. The tree stayed up for a further two weeks.

Many occasionally happy returns

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Department of Speculation

Hit by the whiff of a half-cooked feast as I bound through the back door on the eve of it.

Back from childhood border crossings with my Da to pick a last minute gift for my Ma in exotic High St. shops; in a city without a high street. Stopping off for chips doused in silence in a Strand Road cafe before navigating hostile torch-lit interrogations on the way back through.

“Drivers license please, Sir”

“Any goods to declare?”

Back from the yearly sore arse cultivated from sitting on bottles of Black Tower and Blue Nun. The height of sophistication for the discerning diner’s table. A table always cleared before dessert and the occasional arm-wrestling tournament. We lived in a developing county; the concentration distracted us from the central heating my Dad ~~was~~ is fond of rationing.

Back after swearing blind I’d never go back. From the Dublin bus after the first semester on the brink of dropping out. Dropping down for a drink to the pub to re-unite with old classmates to commandeer our corner of it. Spotting yer man out of the corner of my eye; the later lighting-up together as good as being beckoned towards your coat.

Back in the small hours and being woken up not long after by Bart Simpson ordering me to “Get up and get outta bed”; my Mother pissing herself laughing at the effect her present of a talking alarm clock was having. Inadvertently getting her back by accidentally leaving the sacred sprouts I’d been sent out for behind in the pub.

The Bart Simpson Alarm Clock. Hilarious.

Back all grown up but reverting to our bickering ways in the year 19…20..oh take your pick. Back to slammed doors and exploited windows of opportunity our parents threatened to put us out for even if we were in our incremental decades. Maintaining a ceasefire for the duration of Top of the Pops before scrambling for the remote to prevent Mrs. Windsor from addressing the room.

Back-to-back films and phone-calls from far away relatives my parents hoped each other would answer. Reading back over wish lists of goals composed for the year ahead with cross-legged concentration alongside my best mate in my bedroom. Listing the qualities of our respective future partners through wild guesses of the other. Paring those down to a bare-boned sex preference by the age of 30.

Back to the website booking page after being struck by a gnawing feeling as I smiled my way down Waterloo en route to the airport. The airport I had mistakenly booked to fly into instead of out from. Back eventually with relief to a livelier looking tree replacing the vague question mark the old single set of lights used to aptly resemble.

Putting back cards my parents gave one another on the mantelpiece after reading. Hand-writing getting smaller, much like their frames. Closing over another card written to a Wife, unable to reconcile herself to her new title.

Back for fewer days with each passing year. Escaping the resurrection of barren shelves and that unbearably empty nest feeling pervading the house on the day the decorations come down. Avoiding total recall of all those quiet tears she struggled to hide after waving her boys back to college with a foiled turkey leg brandished from each bag. Reminding her to hang in till January 6th and the night we’ll have. On Women’s Christmas. Little Christmas. Nollaig na mban. When she and I would traditionally leave the remaining fir to fend for themselves and trot out for dinner in smug satisfaction.

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Prompted by the Christmas Memories linky posted by the lovely Naomi at Science Wows Blog. I’m sure she’d welcome your contribution! Click here..

What to give the man who has everything?

Posted on May 25, 2014 by Department of Speculation

What do you give the man who has it all?

The wife and kids

The lovely home

The successful job

The healthy parents

The many friends

The 10k personal best

The everything he’s lived for

The youth on his side

The second house a mile from his first

The halfway from heartache

The rental agreement

The kids two nights a week

The emotional disorder

The stranger for a wife

The impending separation

The unlonged for silence

The science of new appliances

The both sides of the bed

The 10 month personal worst

The healthy parents

The many friends

The sanctuary of work

The strength on his side

The everything to live for

The new world order

The halfway to a new beginning

Very little, I suppose.

Just an assurance that you’ll keep pace

With him till he gets there

Where we’ll all be waiting.

Month’s Mind

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Department of Speculation

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.

Meet The Flockers

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Department of Speculation

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.