Tag Archives: friendship

The accidental tourist

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Two requests are guaranteed from visitors to our humble hovel:

1. Their insistence on doing the dishes

2. A look around the ‘local area’

Both are issued with the same level of overbearing enthusiasm, and greeted by the same underwhelming level of exhilaration. Interrupting the chat every five seconds with “where does this go?” while holding a plate aloft makes me forget what I was giving out about; and fearful our manky cutlery tray will be exposed and I’ll have to explain the presence of dead sweetcorn beneath the tin-opener. Or something more sinister.

Mention of the ‘local area’ is the surest way to unleash misplaced pride in the native I’d blame for the debris in the drawer. Nothing detonates my fella’s latent historian tendencies like a vague reference to the town’s Neolithic site. By which I mean “that hill thing”. Site of many a battle between various big cheeses from Irish mythology. No wonder they turned on each other. There’s fuck all else to do.

Once in a while, a Northern virgin crosses our threshold, wide-eyed with impossible eagerness to hit the biggest battlefield of them all: Belfast. On Friday evening our guest cheerfully bounded in handing a box of chocolates to the youngest resident to share with the group. I was none the better after the fitful sleep that followed an abandoned, cremated, dinner brought on by the unprecedented meltdown brought on by the unfettered access to sweets she’d no notion of sharing. The next visitor to pull this stunt will be frogmarched to that hill thing in the rain after washing every dish in the house. So, it was with a willingness to escape the residual trauma I carried out a quick spot-check of the car to ensure there was nothing growing in it before inviting my companion in for a spin to the city.

These days, my visits to Belfast are dictated by necessity, if you count Ikea a necessity. The malnourished streets of my studenthood have long been replaced by a city busy showing off its retail mid-riff and toned cultural abs. It had been an age since my friend and I had time to catch up. Years, in fact. So we eschewed suggestions of bus tours and taxi trips in favour of pounding the streets on foot, which turned into a hop on hop off tour of our feelings. In stoical, hands-firmly-in-its pockets Belfast, where smiling is a sign of weakness.

I blame the side-by-side exchanges of the car journey where thoughts are unrestricted by the absence of another’s eyeball catching their companion’s, leaving feelings unguarded and free flowing. As the façade of City Hospital crossed our eye-line, I had already owned up to my ostensible impatience with the place being the loudest expression of my affection for it. My passenger surveyed the urban sprawl and reflected on her reliance on city-life for comfort and anonymity; as well as her fear at the prospect of giving it up at 40 to satisfy her urgent need to acquire a mortgage after half a lifetime’s nomadic existence.  She concluded it was a consequence of her brush with death earlier in the year. Surgery. Chemotherapy. Roots.

By the time we reached the car-park, we were reconciling the mistakes made in our twenties with our resistance to taking responsibility for engineering opportunities for happiness throughout most of our 30s. The twenty minute delay in securing a parking space was not our responsibility, but time well-spent squaring up to ourselves and trading a dose of me toos.

Standing at the pedestrian lights opposite The Crown Bar, we were too distracted by talk of our respective parents to notice the crowd. How is it that the older we get, the more we become increasingly obsessed with our parents’ relationship with one another? And all their failings – though more visible now – become more forgivable. Sometimes.

We shrugged our way across into the pub to investigate the beautiful interior, pausing briefly at an empty snug to speculate on the damage we could’ve done in it once upon a time. A time now passed that ushered us onwards along the road to some quiet form of self-acceptance, and the Christmas Market at City Hall we couldn’t be bothered queuing for.  To George’s Market instead, with the iconic Harland and Wolff cranes peeping in between the soulless corporate monolithic structures now dominating the eastern dockside. Appropriate background to our thoughts on the criteria we adopt to judge our successes in work. We traced the overlaps in the confidence-diminishing effect of short-term working in disparate sectors that aren’t so different after all.  Roles with a defined life-cycle we complete with mixed success that haunt us as we recycle our respective bullshit to the next interview panel in a bid to win another.

Carols rang out behind us as we deliberated over lunch menus. The plethora of multicultural food stalls another healthy reminder of the City’s willingness to move on from the proverbial chips or salad. Against high calorie harmonies, my friend spoke of her regret at not having a family of her own, and her determination to convert her singlehood into something satisfying.  There’s a certain freedom derived from being in the company of rare honesty from another so I found myself answering her questions on motherhood that I had only barely attempted to ask myself. I spoke with what sounded like a lucidity I had been afraid of. Of months spent obsessively reading thoughts from only children, the halting desire to pre-empt what that experience will be like for our one before reaching the understanding that it is not mine to direct or second guess, or really my right or business to know.  It will be her experience alone to interpret; to undoubtedly change her mind about as her life unfolds.

Bellies full, we dusted ourselves off and snooped through the handmade trinkets, holding up earrings and necklaces to speculate on what they would best be worn with before being carried through the commercial heartland by throngs of festive shoppers. We took a right angled turn down a capillary lined with pubs and the type of restaurants we were studented far from.  I shook my hair in the mirror in the lift in the MAC to revive the curls that collapse with overgrowth; my friend took advantage of the unflattering light to top-up her lipstick. We emerged in the third floor to rotate the exhibits, and smile at the two children skipping through the spaces between their parents.  My friend spoke enthusiastically of her plans to start up a blog on contemporary Irish art, and implored me to write “something”. I confessed to the trips I’ve been taking here with a keyboard. I promised to send her “something”.  “Something you’re proud of”, she demanded. I couldn’t explain that the only possible source of pride was hidden in the notion of starting it at all.

I was sure my youthful ambition was down one of these streets

Sitting motionless on a bench in the dark, we watched the interactions of a random group of occupants of a high rise building in a video installation. The camera zoomed in to capture the grainy expressionless face of an office worker before it slid across to catch another brushing her hair at her desk before she put on her coat to leave. Neither of us had ever done this in our lifetime. Brushed our hair in the office, that is. Do women still do this?, we wondered aloud. The camera panned away to reveal the ant-like industriousness of humans from a distance as they went about their business. The voyeurism oddly hypnotic. “I love that there are no clues about where this is filmed”, observed my friend. The mix of ethnicities, the banal office set-up, the urban structure of the building. “It could be anywhere”.

It could even be Belfast. We took our leave, and I vowed not to leave it so long till next time.

Immense anticipation

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We all have them. Those friends who never knew you before your neuroses took root. Or when your skin was pillow plump. The ones who won’t ever understand your hometown or teenhood references or give a flying fuck anyway. Remember trying to be cool by accepting a smoke from Mickey Harte at the indie disco only to sledgehammer the Bogart and Bacall quality of the moment by leaving the filter end dangling for him to light? They don’t remember either. And they don’t care. You didn’t meet until well after the chief rites of passage were complete. Usually in your 30s when you’re on your way to somewhere you fear might share the same spelling with the place you intended to be by then.

Occasionally, you’ll have a relapse and beseech them to believe you when you say you weren’t always this fat/neurotic/cynical/fader/news junkie/judgemental etc. But for the most part there’s freedom to be had in not having to not be those anymore anyway. Besides, you were always a bit judgemental, you just mistook your own opinion as fact. I still do, but it has blended with all the other socially acceptable forms of behaviour along with sneering at parents who don’t wallop their children for having a mickey fit in Tesco, and sneering at parents who do wallop their children for having a mickey fit in Tesco.

Once in a while a woman comes along, and you can tell by her excessive use of “Ah lads” that your chances of hatching a friendship have been reduced by a worrying 72 per cent. Studies conducted by The Institute of Emigration from The Mother Land point to the inherent risks associated with two distinct groups of Irish people colliding abroad. Namely:

  1. Those who proceed with their lives as an immigrant pretty much as they did before
  2. Those who start off with a touch of the mild Flatleys with an odd begorrah here and there, before being one “Ah lads” away from tickling an imaginary pig under their arm and spontaneously jiving at every crossroads

I needn’t have worried. A case of mistaken identity. We went from circling each other with suspicion in a work meeting to an epic self-disclosure off quicker than you could say “top o’ the morning to ya”.  I saw her mid-30s-and-single crisis (Munch’s scream) and raised her the feeling of being adrift. She matched my broken heart and went one higher with the prospect of remaining childless.  She introduced me to good beer; I insisted she stayed for another.  And so it was and ever shall be despite our later jiving at life’s crossroads swinging us in different directions. A friendship to give any of my Mickey Harte era mates a run for their money. But I swear – I did used to be thinner, and slightly less cynical. Maybe.

Last time I saw her she was once again boarding the emigrant train; this time by brute force than by choice. Half a lifetime spent overseas, then a courageous move home to a cold shoulder from the state forcing her to turn back again.

It’ll have been four years since we’ve seen each other when we meet this weekend.  In that time she saw my growing semblance of impermanent contentment and raised me a philosophical acceptance with just the right faint hint of bitterness. She saw my ropey pregnancy and raised me a health scare.  She saw our hope as word of the breast cancer diagnosis reached us and raised us an indefatigable optimism.  I’m only saying indefatigable because it’s like something she would say. Along with ‘immense’. And converting an everyday action into an ‘intervention’.  Like lunch, or a pint. And of course they would all be truly ‘epic’.

She writes that her hair is beginning to grow back. She has gone back to her hometown, to the sanctuary of her family for her period of treatment and recovery. She wanders the streets of her teenhood now in her (immense) collection of colourful headscarves. I don’t recognise them, and will never know them intimately. But I’ve known her long enough to only think of her as the flame-haired artist converting the mundane into something magical, the woman who can hold her own in any company, crossing her Ts with a dirty laugh and dotting her i’s with engaging questions of others. I expect we’ll circle each other momentarily before going from opening hug to the here and now in the space of a Flatley tap.

Waiting for vici

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From: Your Sister

To: Your friends

Date: 20:18, 5th June 2014

Subject: Update on A’s Treatment

Four weeks out of surgery and going well.

The residual effects of chemotherapy aiding recovery.

Pathology results show both tumours remarkably reduced.

Spirits are high.

Next update most likely post radiotherapy.

____________________________________________________

To: Anyone reading

From: Me

Date: 21:44, 5th June 2014

Subject: Breast Cancer

What a cunt. Can I say the offensive C word on here?

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.