Tag Archives: life

So what do you think of the situation in Chechnya?

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24

I couldn’t give a fuck, Jones.

Admit it, we all have occasions where we’re compelled to gag our inner Daniel Cleaver by mimicking the other person’s disgust and flexing our impressive empathy muscles. This is best achieved through a slo-mo head-nod and a momentary gaze into the middle distance to figure out how to change the subject without getting busted. A delicate manoeuvre that takes years of practice.

Some recent examples…

Friend: That Iona Institute crowd are just mental. Aren’t they?

Me: Absolutely. Bonkers. Madder than two mad things stuck together with Vatican-endorsed adhesive.

[I mean this sincerely, but am unable to sustain the outrage without getting hungry, or have conversations about them through outbursts of 140 characters or less from a person sitting right next to me; especially when 60 of those characters tend to be hogged by exclamation marks]

*momentary gaze*

Fancy sharing a slice of lemon meringue?

Friend: G’wan then

[So weak]

*************************************************************

Dad: I see Topaz has a sale on petrol. You’d be better getting it this side of the border. It’s far cheaper. How much is it in the North these days?

Me: Ermm

*momentary gaze*

[My Da is gearing up for a full-on rant on the price of fuel. These are occasionally subtitles for ‘I love you’ in Father-of-a-certain-generation Irish. So is ‘how’s the job going?’, and ‘how’s the car going?’. Chances are though, he will quickly veer off into the realm of the “scandalous” way the energy companies have been slow in reducing the cost of domestic oil. We’ve been here before. Speckles of red mist are already forming on the horizon. I do sympathise. But having been raised in a house where this obsessional interest in ‘the price of oil’ was considered a conversational piece and something reflected on during that five second window the priest gives mass-goers for their own special intentions, central heating was relegated to the basics in my hierarchy of needs early on. Consequently, I can’t get worked up about it to quite the same psychotic extent.]

Hmm. Not sure. My car is diesel and sure that’s always cheaper anyway.

Dad: I’m going for a walk.

[A cruel move of me, I know]

*******************************************************

Colleague: You…like…you’ve never ever even tasted tea? Like, ever?

Me: Never

*momentary gaze*

[For some inexplicable reason, there is a cohort of Irish people who deem this an unpatriotic act and recoil in horror at the casual way I cause the architects of the Easter Rising to twirl in their graves. Was this what they fought for? Our freedom to show outrageous indifference to the national tipple? That’s me in the dodgy photo-fit flashed on the screen on Crime Call last night by the ever radiant Gráinne. I am the one. Kill me.]

I have tickled a pig under my arm though, and had a wank with a shillelagh.

Colleague: Seriously?

*******************************************************

Friend: You’re from an Irish-speaking county, do you not think it’s absolutely ridiculous how few gael scoil places there are?

Me: Absolutely!

*momentary gaze*

[No offence, Peig, but I couldn’t give a shite. But this is not the time to challenge the middle-class aspirations of my nearest and dearest. I’d probably risk leaving myself open to charges of hypocrisy down the line when I start protesting about Electric Picnic taking place before the new school year starts. Sigh. Besides, I got hit by shrapnel from a stray ‘absolutely’ at an open evening at a pre-school the other week. Nasty.]

Have you watched Catastrophe yet? Hilarious

********************************************************

Mum: Would you look at that amadan *points to Enda Kenny* He’s a liar…

Me: *momentary gaze*

[Uh oh.]

*leaves room*

Mum: …would you look at the state of him. Like someone who wandered out of the ploughing championships…

Me: *gets into car*

Mum:…and they give out about Fianna Fail, but sure they’re just as bad…

Me: *drives away*

Mum:..I can’t STAND him….

Me: *arrives home*

Mum:..sitting there in the Dail for the last umpteen years and what did he ever do?…

Me: *turns off bed-side light*

Mum:..keeping the farmers sweet and nevermind the rest of us…

outrage

Sheryl was outraged to discover she had only 3 characters left

Personal specification

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12

I’m gearing up to recycle my own bullshit for the umpteenth time. What’s new, says you, the occasional reader of my posts that come in various shades of the same old shite. With two months in my current job remaining, I am back revising the CV and hovering over the two-hangered section of my wardrobe that is supposed to radiate confidence. Diligence. Conscientiousness. Success. All I’m getting is desperation, and someone dangerously close to one pair of trousers away from a M&S twin-set and a life-time allergy to heels.

That’s the problem with the bogus feeling of immortality in your twenties. Freedom is just another word for not conforming, until not conforming becomes an inescapable by-phrase for harbouring an overdraft, a love/hate relationship with your potential, and a willingness to at least Google ‘pension plans’. Usually from around the age of 36 onward. In my field anyway.

The nature of my work puts a stranglehold on any notions of security and direction. So, with any luck, I’ll be back before a panel of managerial all-sorts soon working that enthusiasm. Working it good. Working it so good that sometimes I don’t notice I’ve brought the wrong USB key and the panel is looking on non-plussed at my family photos as I gabble on at the speed of bluffing it (“We regret to inform you..). Or I go completely blank and just walk out (“Please accept this cheque as a token of thanks for attending and a contribution towards your travel expenses”). Or I turn up two hours late apologising profusely after the plane was unable to land due to fog and go off on one like Spud from Trainspotting (“We are pleased to inform you you have been successful”). One just never knows what will wing it.

spud

“Well, I can parallel park and lip sync to ‘So Lonely’ by The Police with perfect precision”

The stakes are higher; the pool of potential competition wider; and my ability to suffer fools who claim not to suffer fools is waning rapidly.

The definition of defeat: When the idea of becoming a civil servant/teacher/nun doesn’t seem that bad an idea after all.

Of course I’m only half-joking.

When thought bubbles attack

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10

There we were, casually wheeling the trolley by the baked goods display when, suddenly (in keeping with cliches), my coveting was interrupted by..

“Mummy, I need to do pee pee”

“Your Father put you up to this, didn’t he? You are in on this keep-Mum-away-from-the-carbs-at-all-cost ploy together”

“Pee peeeeeee”

“Sure. Let me just find somewhere to park this”

The pregnancy test shelf. Perfect. Oh no, wait, not a good idea if we’re going straight from there to the toilet. The dog-food aisle. We don’t even have a dog, but I’m half-way through negotiations to wrangle a gold-fish as a compromise deal and potential gate-way pet to bigger beasts. “But…but..[pleadingly]..she’s an only child”. Heavy duty lash batting etc.. I see a pattern emerging. Men. *eyerolls* (Don’t worry. I’ll be complaining about women who belittle men by doing this in my next post. Probably).

Two toilets; one in abysmal shape. How the fuck do people manage to do that?, I wonder in my sideways head. It is a truth universally unacknowledged, that on finding all available toilets in a public premises are filthy, there is a panicked fear that the next person in will suspect you’re the culprit. Few moments between strangers are more tense than that when one is washing their hands while looking ahead in the mirror only to catch the other sticking their head rapidly back out of the cubicle from which they just emerged. “It won’t flush” doesn’t cover all bases. And, if you’re already under the hand-drier, it’s just not worth shouting over it. It’ll sound like “I’ve got thrush” and will inevitably lead to a pile-up of tumbleweeds.

The sweet relief of parting those scenes. Grossly underestimated. Along with managing to pack the shopping before the healthier goods from the customer behind slides over the conveyor belt and narrowly avoids a collision with yours. Is it any wonder anxiety levels are on the rise.

The other cubicle is grand. In we go.

Ten minutes later…(she chose the occasion to request a run-through of her genealogical chart. Relaxes the bowels.)

Out we come.

“Careful. Mind the lady”

The lady smiles. Early..mid-twenties, tops. Bit much calling her a lady.

thought bubble

Ignore this advice

“Maybe you don’t like being called a lady. It’s one of those potentially dodgy words, isn’t it? Like girl. Girl..woman..lady. It’s hard to know. Lady. Suggests you should be posh or have a blue rinse.”

“It’s grand! But I hate being called ‘Mrs’. You know, when someone says “Can I help you there, Mrs?”

“It’s hazardous alright”

I better let her get on with the task she came in for. She remarks on the ban diet garda’s cuteness.

“Say goodbye to the er..bye now”. She disappears into the clean cubicle.

We finish washing our hands as another female comes in. She’s headed for the other one. Oh no. Will I?

“I really wouldn’t go in there if I were you”.

We’re out the door when I panic slightly about that sounding too close to.. “I’d give it a minute”.

UPDATE: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=735311

School around the corner

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3

What a difference a week makes; book-ended as it was by songs that evoke emotions so heavy they don’t bear hearing more than once in a year. O Holy Night cracks its whip on the heart, startling it to bolt upright and take off around the track of emotion. Past memories, some magical, others painful; disturbing the earth surrounding dormant feelings as it gallops onward through the bend of hopeful anticipation before hitting the straight. Then chasing Now along the final furlong to cross the line in a perfect photo-finish. A week later Auld Lang Syne will not be able resist pulling at the stray thread dangling from the soul; it won’t be satisfied until it unravels it completely before abandoning it in an untidy heap for its owner to disentangle and roll back up.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved the Eve of Christmas and loathed that of New Year with equal measure. Nothing new or unique in that, says you. This doesn’t go unnoticed. All the New Year greetings are filed long before the credits roll on the spent one. Few, it seems, are alone in longing to keep the head down and let it wash over them. Possibly in a similar haze of miniature snack denial that sees the desperate diner through a sustained period with their considered size. Honey, you shrunk the hot dogs. It’s OK, Dear, there’s another 45 of them in the oven. The relief in the room is palpable.

Under pressure to respond, I get most of my replies texted by 10pm. It used to be that no-one could be arsed going out on New Year’s Eve anymore. In recent years, I mistook the flurry of early evening messages for a preventative measure against an echo of Millennium hysteria that caused ordinarily laid-back folk to fear telecommunication failure at midnight. Now I know it’s a cure against other people phoning them to detonate the ring tone equivalent of Auld Lang Syne, and the risk of letting the wrong person in.

Unlike Christmas Eve, with its camaraderie, the promise of impending bonhomie and threat of reciprocated love among one’s own tribe, NYE sits in judgement in the confessional box of life, waiting for you to enter alone to square up to yourself. Bless me New Year’s Eve, for I have sinned. It has been one year since my last confession and here are my sins…

Like the death-knell signalling the near-end of school holidays, you know the party is coming to an end. The determination to ring the best out of the remaining days is your two fingered salute to the army of Mondays advancing.

I phone the one friend I can speak to on a night like this. Throwing scorn on the notion of resolution, we resolve to go gentler on ourselves and to meet soon. I ask her what she’s doing. She is loath to write a list but is in the middle of compiling two: one with the things from the past year she wishes to let go; the other with wishes for the coming year. Both will go up in flames in her tiny hearth in the hope that the former will be extinguished, and the latter just put out there. To the universe. She read about it somewhere. I hope the right list attaches itself to the stars, I say. She forgives my outburst of cheese and we say our goodbyes.

An hour later, safely ensconced in our mini-snack stupor, we risk crossing the threshold of midnight with a quick flick to Jools striking up the band. Ten..nine..eight..

Like the classic seasonal ending to a dodgy soap where the credits roll over the scene, my mind’s eye involuntarily pans those chief characters of my life in tonight’s episode. I see my mate with her knees tucked under her chin watching the flames go up; my parents dragging their grandchildren to their feet; my brother waiting to pick up a fare; my State-side friend with a few hours to go; another kicking back in the sun by way of good riddance; and even the odd blogger whose faces I wouldn’t recognise but who I’ve become immensely fond of nonetheless. The powerful round-ups of their year reverberate.

Then the morning comes. Just like that the storm is over. Souls are re-wound with hopeful determination into slightly different shapes than before. And a new year of fleeting speckled pieces of happiness beckons. We’ll do alright.

Answers for myself this time last year

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5

fortune

This old thing? A fiver in Penneys. Now, down to business…

1. Yes. Everyone is alive and well.

2. Yes. You will get a job. In March. A year’s contract. You’re not enamoured by it, but it’ll do till you move.

3. No. You don’t move. Sorry. You still have plenty of those intense late-night discussions about it. You both vow to make 2015 the now or never moment. Future happiness depends on it. You both learn it the hard way.

4. She is thriving. You still can never quite believe she is yours, and frequently wonder aloud if you’ll still be following her around in her 20’s telling her how much you love her.

5. A million miles an hour.

6. A cross between Herman Monster and Dora the Explorer. She wouldn’t sit still.

7. He is the same calm self. Healthier, and running like Forrest Gump through the town every other day. He’s in a new job with more variety. It’s back in the city so he’s less isolated.

8. No.

9. Yes.

10. No. It doesn’t happen for you both. C’mon…you know the odds are low. But you do make peace with it.

11. You are both fine. He will prove his love many times as you encounter a few rogue horizons before finally hitting the seabed you’ve been hovering above. You’re rising with a wave of hope on the cusp of January 2015. Can’t you feel it? Make it last.

12. They are well. The situation with your brother took its toll on them but they have come out the other side intact.

13. He is steadier on his feet. He meets someone who is also on the rebound. It’s over by Christmas but he has learned a new definition of affection, and everyone is relieved the children seem happier and settled. There is talk of them getting back together but a seat remains empty at the Christmas dinner table.

14. No. The fridge-light remained your enemy but you’re back in respect with your body and relying on looking after it to ensure number 4 is realised. See number 11.

15. Treatment is successful. You meet in September and it will feel like only yesterday. Reconstructive surgery is scheduled for Spring 2015. She will articulate her trauma and reconciliation with a new future in a way that leaves you stunned and full of admiration in equal measure.

16. Yes. You begin to write again. On a blog. You agonise over what to call it and regret it shortly after. You blog about this and that. Waffle mostly. Family life. The North. Whatever annoys or moves you. Sometimes both simultaneously. Many more hours are given over to reading the blogs of others. Some know you’re writing it, but only a few are given the link.

17. Yes! You’ve managed to keep it going after 9 months. Take a bow.

18. Do you really have to ask? Of course you’re a ridiculous procrastinator. The number of books on your bedside locker has doubled. Consistent with the number of those gathering dust.

19. No Electric Picnic this year I’m afraid. And before you get excited at the prospect of the following year – a family member has only gone and announced their wedding plans for the same weekend. You console yourself with some fist chewing. On the plus side you get a ticket to Body & Soul for 2015. It comes like a golden ticket tucked inside of a bar of Green & Black’s on Christmas morning.

20. You only manage a handful. John Grant. John Murry. Neil Young. Joan As Policewoman. John Fullbright.

21. No contest. John Grant doing a cover of Abba’s Angel Eye’s at The Olympia with yer man from Villagers. You pray to God Sinead excuses herself from that one. Then listen to it 14 times in a row when it’s uploaded on youtube.

Musical moment of the year

22. Yes. He comes out. You both hear about it via text driving to Dundalk on a Saturday afternoon. You cry a little with relief and curse that he has to do it at all. Everyone loves him as before. His Dad momentarily wonders if he could’ve done something different before his daughters tell him to cop on.

23. Hardly. What do you think? *arches brow*

24. A wee baby boy!

25. It sadly ended in miscarriage.

26. Not enough. You miss your friends more than ever.

27. Just one. A kindred soul in work you click with immediately. She is hastily pushed out of her agency contract but you stay in touch.

28. A little.

29. Does a new second-hand car count?

30. No. Not even London. A staycation by the sea. Get your passport renewed – it’s due to expire next April. You’ll finally be able to replace the photo of you grossly hung over. You’ll probably look exactly the same when you add on the ten intervening years.

31. Three penalty points. For texting on the straight from Belfast. Numpty.

32. Well, you agree to be a witness at the wedding of a couple you’ve never met before in January. The other witness is a fellow poster on the same forum who turns out to be just as funny and sound as she was while entertaining you on the message board. You both agree it’s surreal. But a laugh. Oh and you eventually abandon the message-board. You haven’t time what with the blogging and the box-sets and making lists of things to do that rarely get done.

33. Mild suspicion of your uncharacteristic optimism.

34. Paralysis. Rogue horizons. Therapeutic outlets. Determination. In that order.

34. Hmmm. Be Brave & Believe by Declan O’Rourke, or Glacier by John Grant.

35. For the love of Christ. I can’t see that far ahead. Now bugger off.

Mind the gap

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7

Hmmm. Can’t say I’m happy about that half centimetre gap in the curtain. I’m experiencing changing room anxiety, convinced folk on the other side of the curtain can cop a load of me through the strip the width of a cigarette. Except I’m in a hospital cubicle about to disrobe for a procedure in the day unit. Other than this, it has everything going for it. The absence of a three-way mirror and interrogation lighting; in their place a bed for a little lie-down when shopping gets too much.

I suppose to truly disrobe, I should be wearing a silk dressing gown, standing forlornly next to a stand-alone bath in a stately pile, give or take a century. I half-tried that at a spa break I was roped into a while back. At one of those lesser spotted fancy houses hidden in the midlands that manages to escape the spread of recession infection. Only it was a cotton gown that had seen one too many boiling washes, and significantly slimmer beings between its side pockets. Think a hospital gown worn back to front. Like the one I hastily get into now before sliding under the sheet designed by Hospital Property.

Lying still, Ray D’arcy competes with chatter at the nurses station across the way. I worry I’ve left my clothes untidily on the chair so I quickly leap out, shove them in the locker, and lie down again. Knickers securely inside my socks inside my boots. Trailing my eye along the neat pleats of the disposable blue curtain, I curse the total recall I have of each admission during my ropey pregnancy when I can barely remember details of the first six months of our baby’s life. My annoyance is interrupted by a clipboard with a nurse at the end of it.

There’s something about lying down in the most innocuous of circumstances that unleashes one’s inner bumbling witness in the dock of the imaginary court of public appeal. It’s the therapeutic setting. Dodge one straight forward question and risk detonating that out-of-body experience of uncharacteristic unwarranted over-sharing. Like an emotional Russian Doll shedding layers until your voice is tiny and your sentences eventually trail off mid-sense because you know you’ve started something you can’t stop so you try to cover it up with inane facial expressions by the end.

It’s a relief that eyebrow treatments take the little time they do, because being horizontally hemmed in with whale music and gaps in chat is dangerous territory. SpaGownGate culminated with being resuscitated from an emotional hemorrhage by a post-it note from the massage therapist containing the name of a revolutionary G.I. Diet Book. It was too smooth a move for her not to have had previous experience of a post-post-post partum woman breaking down over letting herself continue to be bullied by the biscuit tin. At least I didn’t cry like I did in Kilkenny years previously. I’d only gone in for a facial but misinterpreted “how are you looking after your skin these days?” as “why have you let yourself go to shit?” That wasn’t the first time the therapist had heard a break-up story. That smile had heard things before. She continued to apply it like a truth serum.

So I’m concentrating on keeping it brief here with Florence Nightingale. We quickly discover we’re from the same place and laugh conspiratorially at our superior differences to the locals we live among now. I’ll blame this bonding later; after I sail through questions on my family’s medical history, medications taken, even childbirth. I’m on the home straight. “Oh wait. Is there a chance you could be pregnant?” “No, no. Definitely not”. “Would you like to take a wee test just to be sure?”

My eyes dart over to the chair where my bag hangs. I hope I closed it shut. Ah no, I’m grand, I re-assure her. Well, I know for sure I’m not pregnant. And then just to make sure I’m sure, I tell her all about the four used tests in my bag I’ve been meaning to get rid of since the weekend. And how ridiculous anyway. Pregnant at forty two? And sure look at the state of me. Insert lots of inane laughter and the inevitable shoulder-shrug here. Thankfully it is soon my turn to be whisked away to have a camera shoved up my arse.

Seven Seven

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8

I’d been pottering around earlier scratching my head over the significance of today’s date. It kept staring back at me throughout the morning.  Checking my phone, flicking through my diary, composing a letter. There’s something about today. It took till lunchtime to twig it.

I was in a similarly listless state that morning, landing in late to a Mexican heave of relief across speechless faces of colleagues. What? Surely being late isn’t a crisis that merits such a reaction.

The news was haemorrhaging across the city. Russell Square. Tavistock Square. Edgeware Road. They meant little to me before. Now they’re universally known place-names synonymous with death and destruction.

The eeriness trickled southwards over the bridge as the day wore on. Peckham. Camberwell. Brixton. All reverent wake houses with business not as usual, heads shaking in disbelief.

A few posts back I mourned my own wee corner of London. Friday evenings down The Hermit’s Cave where we convened for weekly secular mass. Here are another few aspects of London living I still miss by way of my salute to the great city.

  1. Getting an education. On the lives and outlooks of people from all around the globe. A city that’s a compendium of  the world; capable of knocking the edges off all generalisations and prejudices towards folk you only think you know. Sharing a city with umpteen other nationalities serving as a reminder that we’re nothing particularly special. Most Muslims I met were moderate, gracious, and braced themselves tighter as the backlash began. Paddy Irish Bomber finally displaced as the receptacle for native suspicion.
  2. The status of madness. Not at yourself? Away with it? The nerves at you? Got a problem with that? Cause in London they don’t. They positively embrace it. And they don’t shy away from it. Madness is a form of madness as legitimate as all others. They don’t have euphemisms for it, but they do have festivals in the name of it.  The feast of St. Madness used to fall on an August Saturday in Camberwell. Officially known as Bonkersfest. Reclaim the craziness.
  3. The iconography. Battersea Power Station. Free to on-looking neighbours. Anywhere from a tenner upwards to those who choose to fly in and out of Gatwick just to get up close to it on the train route. It’s still too soon to talk about the day they replaced the Number 12 Double Decker with a bendy bus. Where did that dread-locked Jamaican conductor go? Re-deployment. The curse on those charming characters.
  4. 24 hour independent cinema and comedy clubs (more or less) with, wait for it…..air-conditioning. And there’s more… some without popcorn. Exclamation mark, exclamation mark.
  5. The Buzz. Mouthy street vendors. Fifty four thousand different kinds of food. The equivalent number in attitude. Three million pairs of feet storming in different directions underground. Skateboarders on the South Bank. The audience in Peckham cheering Bridget Jones’s release from that sweaty Thai prison. Standing in the middle of the largest English city not understanding a word being said around me. Slipping into the little church off Leicester Square to get my head showered next to others praying to a God I don’t believe in. Being asked where Ireland is. Police sirens. Anonymity. Community. The posh end. The dodgy end. The up and coming end.

London. Facking brilliant. Init.

Own goal

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2

It’s that time of year again. The annual pilgrimage to the sold-out Springsteen shows. Relax. It’s just the sun giving me jip and having me mix up my religious rituals as the summers fade into one another. I mean graveyard mass, of course. Then there’s the monster raving Ulsterman cracking open the apoplexy, as is tradition. Or Joe Brolly, for short. Bruce and Joe. Imagine them trading birth places, if you will. Joey and Wee Brucie.

Not a porch door for any of Brucie’s average-looking women to slam. Maybe a broken lift to curse, or the person who was born in a hospital with swinging doors who left one wide open. Meanwhile, Joey’s giving it Red Sox knocking himself out commentating on the baseball league with Patty Spillane. Awesome.

There’s really not a whole lot that separates these two men from their traded places in terms of the people that inspire and drive them. It’s just that Jersey skylines go better with the universal theme of disenchantment and broken blue collar dreams than Tesco car-parks and doughnut tracks from twin-cams. Baseball is the unifying game that helps them forget about life for a while. Sort of like The GAA. Or the Grab All Association. Or the what’s-the-point and the anachronistic eye-rolls scornfully mocking the parochial game. Or its failure to compare with the beautiful game. Delete as you see appropriate.

It’s that time of year again. When the city/rural divisions rear their jerseys online, and the self-regarding antipathy breaks out on messageboards like a prickly heat rash. I’m no devotee, or apologist for The GAA. No sport has claimed to be the panacea for all societal ills, except maybe democracy. But it takes a certain blinkered snobbery to wilfully ignore the unifying power the GAA has in carrying communities through good and bad.

One of the more heartening developments in recent years has been the emergence of rugby as a more reachable sport for all the nation. Men and women getting stuck in on the great debate throughout the country (“O’Gara’s better looking” “No BO’D is”).

Plenty of sporting enthusiasts love both, some play both. Even so, it’s past time the minority of whingers paused the eyeroll and threw out the stale sweat smelling questions on the point of it all. Go listen to Badlands. It’s about living in Leitrim. Except it’s not, but it is. And Carlow. And Donegal. And Armagh. And Louth. And Tipperary. And even Dublin. Where the game breathes energy into connections between folk, and helps them forget about life for a while.

The dingo took my baby

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7

My car has broken down

I ran out of petrol

I’m locked in the house and can’t find a key for the windows

I’ve lost my car key

My child-minder is sick

I was visiting my parents who like to economise on basic needs and got frost bite

I got sun stroke

It’s a personal matter

It’s too embarrassing

Women’s problems

*crams dry cream cracker into mouth* Really sore throat

(4pm) I’ve just realised it’s Monday, I thought it was Sunday

Sorry I’m four hours late, I thought today was a bank holiday

I fell asleep on the bus and ended up in Cavan bus station overnight

I won last minute tickets for Glastonbury

Sorry I’m a bit late, traffic’s shit.