Trish Byrne's an Auld Dog

Trish Byrne, 36, writes abstracts for a living and novels for fun, rescues dogs and cats (and her friends when necessary) and sometimes prefers the age of sail to that of the combustion engine (bio and pic by Q.)

People who talk about the demise of rural pub life in Ireland talk about the smoking ban and, now, random breath testing. But what they don't talk about is the other factor, that for years men went to the pub in the evening, sat there all night, and then waited for their wives (or, indeed, their mammies) to come and fetch them. Since women, even in the Irish countryside, have social lives of their own now, that's not going to happen for them.

I've lived on a housing estate for a large portion of my life, and they are strange places. Everyone has plenty of space, but it's all individualised, and the potential collective bargaining power of the estate never seems to be realised. Why don't we get together and get a communal Tesco delivery, for instance, and reduce our delivery costs? Or a communal pizza delivery at 7.30 on a Thursday night? Or have our own estate-wide broadband network? It's not how estates function, is why not.

Not having any children, the three things that have taken over my life since I became an adult are back pain, dogs, and writing. Back pain in a bad way. When you've got it, that's it, you're incapacitated until it's passed. If you drop a pen or a glove on the ground, forget it, it's gone.

Dogs, well, they're like permanent toddlers, and they thrive on routine. If you don't have a life with at least some routine in it, I recommend you don't get a dog.

And writing, well, I've always done it. I used to think I wanted to be published, but now I think I just enjoy it. Making up stories is fun. Writing a certain number of words in a day is fun. Just getting to the end of the page is fun. Filling up a notebook with your handwriting is satisfying, even if you never read it back. It seems like a strange hobby to people, but I don't really understand why. People run marathons and don't win them. They play in bands that will never have a record contract, they paint pictures or take pictures that aren't for sale, so what's strange about writing novels for fun?

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Auld Dog is an intermittent column on this blog, which offers the collected wisdom of an individual for the rest of us to ponder. If you want to be an Auld Dog, send 600 - 700 pearls of wisdom, with a bio and a photo to Queenie, or I'll write it, at auld.dog@gmail.com