Despite using the word extraordinary too much, Queenie is pleased

Something extraordinary happened to me today.

I only use the word extraordinary because on reflection I used it a little too much in the experience I am talking about.

A woman I know and deeply respect agreed to my request, nay demand, that she interview me for a podcast series she's doing for the Mount (MSVU - Halifax) about political communication.

She had mentioned the series during a phone call about something else.

I hopped on it immediately, which is unlike me. Usually I wait to be asked.

But now I am 39 probably indefinitely, and the askings aren't getting any thicker (unlike the effing mosquitoes in our yard), so along with my youth I am losing my shame about these things.

Anyway, she agreed and I sent her some ideas, and then she came along the other day with her laptop and her headphones and after we had had a long conversation about current political events, I had to arrange myself and speak into the middle distance about my time with the Rainbow Coalition (Irish government 1995 - 97), and I was having a bad day and all the prep I had planned hadn't got done, so I explained that I was going to have to wing it.

Some day I will do something that I don't pull out of my ass at the very last second.

Some day.

Anyway, it was extraordinary. Instead of silence, the words just poured out of me.... except for the bits where I was supposed to point out my learnings. I struggled with them. I used the word extraordinary too much and I lost my train of though trying to describe the internecine bullshit of the post-ceasefire handshake ballet....

But she urged me on with her eyes.

First learning is, I am a media whore like everyone else. I didn't want to stop talking. In fact, if I hadn't had to go pick up Little 'Un from his art class I would be still talking.

She sent me the podcast tonight. I listened to it twice.

It was extraordinary.

It was coherent. The nuances of some of the issues are conspicuous by their absence, but I was speaking to an audience who knows nothing of coalition. Unlike us Irish.

Second learning, I cannot believe how much I remember of those days. They must be seared on my brain.

Third learning, I got a strange feeling about myself when I listened back.

Normally when I talk about that time I am careful to point out how junior I was, how irrelevant I was. This time, there wasn't time to explain all that, so I chose my words carefully to try to get the message across and I did to a certain extent, but I also heard myself describe situations where I think now I probably did help out in the sticking together of the various bits of that communications experience.

It strikes me as extraordinary that it took a woman teacher from that great woman's university to record the unrecorded work of a woman who didn't even realise she was doing something useful back in 1996.

And so it joins the canon of the quiet work that women do everywhere that is never celebrated.

The second part of my recent media whoredom is my imminent guest appearance on another Halifax blog tomorrow. I had to write a letter to my home town... Dublin.

It's a little mawkish. But I love the piece.

I'm dying to see what the reaction is.

I hope I am busy in work tomorrow or else I will spend all day fretting over comments/ lack of comments.

MEDIA WHORE!!!

I'm thinking though... maybe now I am nearly forty I can finally find the confidence to like my voice. I don't mean my actual voice. I like my voice, even though it is a little lispy on air, which it isn't in my head.

Is it lispy?

I mean my opinions.

stop laughing, people from Ireland...

and people from Nova Scotia...

No, that's not right. Yous are all laughing too much.

I mean my reflections on my experiences. Which are legion, and pretty interesting in a boring kind of way.

I think I heard something in that podcast.

I think I wrote something in that piece.

I think I might have something useful to say.

Finally.