Yes, it's all really funny till someone gets hurt

Smart ass anti-baby comedy sketches inc.

So we were talking about it this evening, in that part of the evening when we stand in the kitchen after work drinking tea and telling each other what really just friggin' sucked about the day.


What really sucked about my day (and it was a sucky day) was that my friends got turned down for adoption after YEARS of filling out stupid forms and undergoing stupid tests.


None of us could believe it.

Himself couldn't believe it.  And he doesn't even know them.

When you think of all the babies in the world that are hurtin' and starvin' and lonely and scared and your friends want to raise one, and there's some asshole somewhere says they can't.... that sucks, man.


YUP.


Me, I had spent an hour or so last night looking at footage of George Carlin and Bill Hicks on YouTube, including their 'why would you bring a child into the world' sketches (see the link under the picture), which always make me laugh because it's exactly how I feel about the whole children business.  But last night, while I was watching the video I happened to think of those same friends and how determined they were to have a child despite all the hurdles.  And I felt a little surge of happiness because finally it seemed they were on the back straight to their dream.

And then they get SHAFTED by some bureaucrat today.

This is a trip down the rabbit hole on so many levels.

On the first level, there is the macro argument.  There are millions of children in the world who need love and parenting.  There are people who want to parent.  It should be possible to match them up.

Except it seems to be nigh on impossible, such are the levels of perfection that prospective adopters must reach.  Not just in Ireland.  I have friends here in Canada jumping through  similar hoops. But at least you can be a bit eccentric and still have a chance.

In Ireland, you have to be perfect.  Heterosexual.  Married.  Conformist.  Boring.  


Normal.

But that is necessary, they say, in order for children to be safe.  We must make sure that the people in charge of them are not psychopathic or perverted or dangerous to the child in any way.


R.E.S.I.D.E.N.T.I.A.L. S.C.H.O.O.L.S.


....yes, old schtick... it's because of that that the rules are so strict now.

Hmm.  Tell that to the Nigerian children who are accused of witchcraft and abandoned by their communities, usually on the authority of the caring US and Canadian Pentacostal missionaries working in those villages.  I don't see the combined adoption personnel of the world working themselves up into a frenzy of tongues about that issue.

Yes I know hard cases make bad law.  I don't friggin care.

But let's pull the lens in a bit.

Ireland's Health Service Executive.  Responsible for adoption procedures and for looking after children in care.

Here's a snippet I found on the Internet:

The Health Service Executive now believes that approximately 200 children have died in state care in the last ten years.  The figures are emerging as part of a nationwide probe and are ten times greater than the previously admitted number of deaths - the HSE had said that 23 children had died in care.... A senior figure in the HSE told The Sunday Business Post that it still did not know the precise number of children that had died while in care, but it was feared that the true tally could be in the order of 200. - Sunday Business Post, May 2010

 

Actually, the final audited figure was less than 200.  But that's not the point.  

 

There are two points of immediate relevance:

 

1. Children died in the care of the HSE, which proves they are not perfect.

2. The HSE did not know (until a month ago) how many children had died in its care in the last decade, which proves they are incompetent.

 

But that imperfection and incompetence doesn't stop them acting as judge and jury on honest, hard-working people who just want to have a kid and be a family.  That doesn't stop them defining what it is to be a good parent.

Let's pull the lens in a bit more.

If you are lucky enough to have all the right bits in place and find a man who has all the right bits and bobs in place and functioning efficiently, you can lie back or sit up or whatever, and have a bit of fun and slap and tickle as they say and then, bob's your father's brother, if the day's right, baby magic happens.

If you are lucky enough to have that gift of life, you can be a sociopathic liar, a thieving whore, a child-beating egomaniac. It doesn't matter.  You can just pop one out whenever you want.  Or pair up with someone who can pop one out for you.

If you are not lucky and try to adopt, you will fail.

If you are lucky enough to have that gift of life, and you are a good person but you have struggles in life, say... a brief period of mental health instability ... you can stay home with baby and try to get better and get some limited support from the state. Then, if you fight real hard, you can get some help to go to school or get yourself back into the workforce.

If you are not lucky, forget about adopting.  You are not normal enough to be a parent.

If you are lucky enough to have that gift of life, and the father/ mother of said child runs away and leaves you and your child in the lurch financially, you can get the government to track him/ her down and make him/ her pay you for up to 22 years, at no cost to yourself.

If you are not lucky, and you did any of those things ever, you would not be allowed to adopt.

 

If you are lucky enough to have that gift of life, you can injure your child severely and more than once before anyone will even investigate.  And even then, it would be a long time before your child was taken away from you.

If you are not lucky, you are prejudged on your disposition and ability 'to keep a child safe'.

Speaking of prejudged, let's pull the lens in a bit more.

If you are childless, you are prejudged automatically.  Unconsciously.  That little grimace when they ask you about your children.

Poor woman.

Can't.

Selfish bitch.

Won't.

One or the other.

You can tell by the grimace.

 

Either way, you are not really whole.  

 

Not normal.

A cause for amusement or horror on the part of the ignorant of those who can just pop one out whenever.

Some of us can't and spend our lives mourning and trying.

Some of us won't and spend our lives just mourning.

Some of us won't and don't give a shit until the grimace happens.

None of it is fair.  You're prejudged if you try and you're prejudged if you don't try.

This week I was amused and a little angry that the now pregnant ongoing carbuncle on my otherwise deliriously happy existence felt yet again that my childlessness was a stick which which I could be beaten relentlessly.  

 

See, according to her, my childlessness is proof that I am a bad parent.  That I must be kept away from her children at all costs.  Lest I infect them with my selfishness.

 

The social worker's report on her 'incident' is sealed, so I can't prove that she is a bad parent. Nor am I interested in pursuing such malevolent thoughts.  Life being too precious and her children too fond of her and all that.

But after today, I am not amused and very angry because the thought has struck me that her outburst is really just the sociopath's verbalisation of what all those child-bearing people think of us barren wans.

Really think of us, deep down inside, near their brimming with life wombs.

I can think of no other explanation that makes sense.

In the meantime, she can pop one out whenever she wants, without a licence or a psych. report.

And my friends can't.

 

So how do we fix this?

Do we prejudge everyone?

Or do we take a benchmark of real parents and apply those standards to prospective ones?

I don't know.  Any argument on this will be battered with the child protection argument.

I just don't understand how an organization that doesn't even know how many kids died in its care can even begin to use that one.

Maybe we should start with the word compassion.  In all its imperfections.

Compassion for bad parents.

Compassion for non-parents.

Compassion for would-be parents.

Compassion for parents that are a little different to us in whatever way.

Compassion for non-parents that are wildly different in every way.

Compassion for fantastic parents having a bad day.

Compassion for children who need parents.

Bitter sweet Sundays

Somebody mentioned on Facebook today that Sundays are so bitter sweet.

True.

I love waking up on a Sunday knowing I don't have to go to work. But round about 4.30pm on a Sunday, I always get a really sad feeling.

I think most people do.

Sundays are such a strange day. They've changed so much over the years (well, if you're a lapsed Catholic living in a country where religion is not part of the DNA they have).

When I was young, Sundays meant you had to go to Mass. Then you had roast beef dinner and listened to the radio. Which meant listening to people drone on about Northern Ireland.

Then you went for a walk. Sometimes we went for a walk with the Queen Parents. Which involved a long walk in Portumna forest park, or somewhere like that (long for a kid, obviously) and then you went to the hotel for a mineral (pop) and a bag of crisps (chips).

Sundays we didn't go walking with the parents, we went to visit Paddy. That also involved a walk. A very very very long walk. And then sometimes a secret trip to the lemonade shop.

Also known as Kellys pub.

But that's a different story.

Then when we got a little older, I went to boarding school. Sundays meant you were getting a visit or not. If you were getting a visit, Sundays were FANTASTIC, until about 4.30pm, when you were sitting in the grimy hotel in Dungarven, having a mineral and a bag of crisps, and you remembered you had to go back to boarding school for another four weeks of misery before you saw your parents again.

I think that's why I get so sad on Sundays.

The brother went to boarding school for six years, and on Sundays he got to come home, bolt his roast beef down, and see his friends, before making a loaf of sandwiches and buying a bag of Pot Noodles and heading back to prison for another week. Four-thirty was round about the time of day he would start on the Queen Mum, wondering whether he could just stay home this time, and not go back to school.

I don't know who was more upset...

As for me, I got to go to secondary school at home, and Mass had been scheduled for Saturdays as well now, so Sunday was a big long teenage lie-in, followed by roast beef of course, then sitting in the playroom watching MTV USA, hosted by FAB Vinnie. Three hours of music videos and desultory conversation with Eileen or whoever else was around.

Then back to school on Monday.

When I went to college, weekends were often spent at home. Get the bus down on a Friday night. Spend Saturday doing laundry or catching up with people. Out Saturday night.

Sundays were when you had to get the bus back to Dublin. If you hadn't cadged a lift with Willie Burns on Saturday night in the pub. Or you couldn't persuade mum to drive you to the train in Tullamore.

Long, wet, boring trips through the midlands (before the motorway was built) in a smokey bus. Then trying to get a bus home to wherever you lived. Culchies roaming the streets of the capital with bags full of lasagne dinners and bags of spuds. Trying to fit into a pub stuffed with bags of clean folded laundry sent with love from Cork and Galway and Portlaoise and Donegal.

If I stayed in Dublin for the weekend, Sundays were a long, boring day of trying to stay warm in whatever hovel I was living in; writing an essay or just trying to find enough money to buy a packet of cigarettes to have something to do.

It was only when I started working that Sundays became a little more interesting. Long brunches in Odessa or somewhere trendy, with all kinds of people popping in and out and enough money to buy the paper and read it with a latte or a pint.

Now we have every second Sunday. This is a second Sunday, which means Kitty and Little 'Un were here for two days of chaos and noise and loud telly and cooking and feeding and whatever activities are on the menu. Then around 4.30pm the doors slam for the last time and the car heads off back to Truro and the dog lies abject at the gate hoping against hope that they're not gone and I pace around the house for an hour trying to find things to do to make the bitter sweet feeling go away.

But it appears on the other Sundays too.

5.33pm. Suddenly, completely dark. Shannon won't come in from the gate. I will go find some nice raw meat to bribe her with.

Even puppies find Sundays bitter sweet...

At least we don't live somewhere where you have to sit quietly and read the bible all day.

The weekend before Christmas is really the Christmas

Big snowfall tonight.

Maybe two thirds the way up the ruler.

Standard ruler... 30 cm jobbie. Like in school.

OK. Mathematics starting.

Mathematics in the sense of one of Mr. Hensey's classes (fifth year honours) ... I am hanging out with my friends talking about the weekend, but I am also supposed to be doing maths.

The driveway is 100 metres long and four metres wide.

A little wider at either end.

The snow shovel is 45 cm wide.

I think.

Why am I writing a math post? This is not good.

Side to side. From lawn to woodland.

Over and back.

Over and back.

Pick up the spill.

Then over and back.

By my calculations (which are usually wrong and need John Brown to fix), that's 222 shovel swipes across the driveway.

Over and back.

And then scooping up spill.

Say, another 150.

That's 372 shovel swipes.

I'm pretty sure it was more than that.

Put the shovel into the snow with the blade aligned to the edge of what's left, and push along the line to the far side. Turn on your heel, and clean up the spill on the way back.

Then put the shovel back down against the clean line of the snow.

Scraaaape.

In early November snows it's mostly rain with some ice in it, so when you shovel it's like pushing water up a hill.

Heavy and wet and no fun at all.

After January, it's all ice pellets and misery. The shovel stops up on the ice and pushes into your sternum and it's hard and miserable to move it.

After I finished doing it seven times last year I found out all the men on my road used to watch me shovel ice off the driveway, and wonder at how Himself got himself such a hardcore woman...

But there's a couple of weeks in December when it's light and fluffy and perfect if it snows.

And shovelling is a meditation.

That was tonight.

I think about a lot of stuff when I shovel the driveway in December.

I feel so lucky that I get to do it. I need to think about a lot of stuff.

Today I was thinking about Ireland, because I was very lucky this Sunday; people from Ireland were all home suffering from pre-Christmas hangovers, so they were vulnerable and I got to talk to a few of them for quite the chat.

Well, I have to admit that during the section of the driveway from the road to the garbage box (about 20 side to sides), I thought about how difficult it is to build and maintain a mature and loving relationship with stepchildren who are the powerless pawns in a ridiculous battle of control freakery being waged by their mother against their father and me.

But I think about that a lot and if I write about it she uses it in court proceedings, so we'll just move on, shall we.

From the garbage box to the rhododendron bush, which is not very far, the rhododendron bush being near the garbage box for a reason, I thought about Ireland.

The lights on Grafton St.

Winking against the wet paving.

The weekend that was.

What a weekend that must have been. Everyone finally had time to go out and chew down on a few things.

I'm sorry I missed that weekend.

I would like to fly home for that weekend and then leave before Christmas. Would that be so awful?

How well everyone is doing!

Everyone I love has survived.

The recession. The revelations. The floods. The everything.

For my New Year's wish, I would like everyone I know in Ireland to be in charge of Ireland now.

It's the fact that you're not that's making your teeth ache boys and girls.

The demography is on your side, guys...

I was halfway up the section from the rhodo bush to the back of the car (the long, difficult, middle section), when I had to put the shovel down and go get the dog.

Neighbours again, not approving of the dog being allowed to wander about in what is ostensibly a wilderness backyard area...

She's half wolf for fuck's sake... what do you think she's going to do in the snow.

I got feedback on the blog tonight and was told the dog bits were boring, which I knew, but dog bits = life right now, so maybe up the ante in the life is a priority for soon.

After Christmas, as Himself would say.

Anyways, got the dog, got back in the rhythm, over and back, over and back, pick up the spills, over and back, when I noticed it was blowing snow, like it said in the warning.

Your late thirties and early forties are all about 'blowing snow' aren't they.

You shovel and shovel and shovel.

And then you get up the next morning and all the snow is drifted up against the car again.

There you go, metaphor for next year.

I'm going to post this without a resolution because I am drunk and blind (dog ate my glasses)..

I will amend if something comes to me.

Oh yeah.... make Christmas about the kids for once eh?!

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.

Universal engager with the private

What a lovely occasion: Alice Munro celebrated in Trinity College Dublin (my alma mater of course... and the Queen Dad's.... and Gypsy's now too) for winning a prize awarded to her by a panel chaired by Jane Smiley, who was interviewed by Colm Toibin about that choice.

If I wasn't so delighted about the choice, I'd have Da Envee...

You can read about it here:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0626/1224249575138.html

Nevermind what I felt about Nevermind

One of the problems with writing a personal blog is that you generally aren't near a computer when you are having slightly better than shallow thoughts. And I do my thinking in the car, or when I can't sleep, which makes even scribbling things down on a piece of paper difficult.

So, even when I have managed to figure something out, by the time I get round to blogging about it, I've usually forgotten what it was.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I don't know if this post is going anywhere.

But it's the journey, boys and girls...

We were in the car on Sunday, driving through the radio wasteland that is the Annapolis Valley, so I put on Nevermind and we listened to it for the first time in a long time.

I think Nevermind is the only album I own whose opening track brings me right back to the moment I heard it for the first time.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is November 1991. I am in my room in the GMB in Trinity. A friend up from Galway is raving about his newest tape. Accent Monkey is here and other people are coming and going as usual and we play it and it is fantastic so we play it six more times and then the girl upstairs (the one who has the enormously loud orgasms with someone called T-aaa-dddhhh--gggg-hhhh!!!!! twice a week) bangs on the floor so we stop.

Then the movie Singles came out a few months later. Set in Seattle, home of Nirvana, it made the twenty-something struggle to fit into the world of work and bills and adulthood hopelessly romantic, and we all thought we'd like to be Seattle grunge slacker green creatives who live in way cool co-op apartments and drink Starbucks coffee.

Well, I did.

While trying to find an adequate definition of the word 'slacker', I found this post from what could be described as a very early blog. It's called Barefoot Jim's Flat. Like Barefoot Jim, I've never considered the word slacker as describing someone who is 'workshy', unlike him I've always seen it as being in some way 'responsibility shy'.

It's hard to believe all that angst and hope and trepidation was swirling around my head nearly eighteen years ago.

It's also hard to believe I ever aspired to drinking Starbucks coffee, but there you go...

It's even harder to believe I'm still getting away with being a slacker. Even though it's not a word I can say outside my head anymore, and I had to move to Atlantic Canada (Capital of the Slacker Universe) to haul my ass back onto the slacker waggon train...

...because slacker's a dirty word these days...

Why, I don't know.

Look at the end result of all the running around and huffing and puffing and wheeling and dealing we did between 1996 - 2008.

What did we achieve that we could not have achieved in a more sustainable way and at a slightly slower pace?

I hope I never get taken in like that again.

I want to grow old and be a slacker Walmart greeter.

Cllr. John Foley, Edenderry - take a bow

This is priceless. You have to watch it to the end.

Cllr. Foley is the bearded gentleman towards the back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3elLmrCmOqo

With thanks to Baz for the heads up!!

Breakfast Roll Man abandons the Soldiers of Destiny... the muesli parties are on the rise

I despair of my countrymen.... frigging despair...

This is splashed across all the papers this morning:

"An opinion poll conducted by Millward Brown IMS for today’s Irish Independent shows Fine Gael on 30 per cent (up three points since the last election), Fianna Fáil 25 per cent (down 17 points), Labour on 22 per cent (up 12 points)...."

"According to the poll, Fianna Fail would lose anything up to 30 Dail seats if an election was called today. The findings are stark: just over one-in-five voters think their leader is doing a good job; one-in-10 are satisfied with the Government.

The plight of the 'Breakfast Roll Man' -- the group of newly prosperous Celtic Tiger cubs credited with sealing the last election for Fianna Fail -- appears to have mirrored the party's recent misfortunes. The most marked drop in support has been among young professionals in the 25-34 and 35-49 age categories, who are abandoning the party in their droves."

The corruption, the cronyism, and the pathetic inability to look after the sick, the vulnerable and the less well to do in our society was okay while you had a job and could borrow on your property portfolio's value, was it?

But now you're not doing so well, it's time to get rid of Fianna Fail.

RATS..... LEAVING THE SHIP.... SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED... GRUMBLE GRUMBLE GRUMBLE....

The Cruiser departs

I see the Cruiser is departed this world at the ripe old age of 91. He had a good long life anyway.

His books always made me feel incredibly stupid, so I shall continue that tradition by not saying anything intelligent now either.

Everything changes and everything stays the same

This from Miriam Lord's Irish Times' daily political sketch today:

Once there (in Irish Parliament building), they (Fine Gael front bench) will have come across a press release from Sinn Féin's Arthur Morgan, who is his party's spokesman on their latest relationship with the banks.

Sinn Féin has always enjoyed a unique relationship with banks.

"Morgan to set out minimum terms and conditions acceptable to Sinn Féin for deal with Irish banks," said the press release.

The financial institutions must have been agog. In their hour of need, were they going to get some of their money back?

hahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahaahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

That's cheered me up no end.

That and the fact that Manolo Blahnik has opened a shop in Dublin.

And the fact that we in North America are soon to be joined by Mr. Charlie Bird for a spell.

What's that, Charlie?? I can't hear you!!

La plus ca change, la plus ca c'est la meme chose..... as they say in Paris Fashion Week.

Ahaa!! My suspicions were founded!!

From today's Irish Times:

THE LEAVING Cert exam has been significantly "dumbed down" and there is evidence of widespread grade inflation, according to a new study of exam grades.

The study, to be published shortly, is the first to track Leaving Cert grades across 24 subjects over almost two decades.

Its key finding is that the number of students gaining A and B grades in many higher-level subjects has nearly doubled since 1991. But the study finds little evidence to support higher academic standards. "In the most recent European-wide OECD/PISA study, there has been no detectable improvement in mathematics, reading and science in Irish 15-year-olds between 2000 and 2006, and so such an explanation of the increased Leaving Certificate results does not hold up."

...

The study concludes: "That there has been massive grade increase in the Leaving Certificate Examination over the period considered is beyond dispute and even a cursory inspection of the data confirms this . . . There is little evidence of higher academic standards. The increase is simply grade inflation - higher grades being awarded more easily."

The survey shows an astonishing increase in the percentage of students gaining Grade A and B (70-100 per cent) in Leaving Cert higher-level papers since 1991.

...

The study also finds that far fewer students are failing Leaving Cert papers. The new study says the grade inflation is all the more remarkable because the number of students opting for higher level has dramatically increased. It notes how "the lowering of standards in the higher-level subjects has driven this increase".

Queenie has suspected for a long time that the Leaving Cert (Irish exam that is similar to the IB) is for pussies these days. Not like when she were a girl, and there was just the one place in college, and you had to lock yourself in your bedroom and study for six hours a night for ten years to get the place.

IF YOU WERE LUCKY and your questions came up.

Having had several arguments with various people about it, Queenie has come round to the point of view that what's good for the child of the eighties is probably not so good for the child of the nineties.

But it's still effing unfair.

Us survivors of the horror that was the LC in the eighties deserve some respect.

We didn't know there was a lucrative future in VJing ahead of us if we failed.

I get no respect in my house.

I am considered weird because I know so much.

And that's just the stuff I mention.

The wonders of technology

So, I'm browsing my site meter by referrals, and I come across a google search for a friend of mine, Nadia, who is a teacher in Co. Galway, Ireland.

And what do I find only her teacher ratings!!

Found her the most interesting teacher of the lot. Great communicate with us unlike most. I had her for only one year. to this day and a few years have by since. i still remember her lovely perfume.x

Body Shop White Musk if I remember correctly. Although it might have changed. To this day, if I smell it in a shop or a bus, I whip round, expecting to see her.

11/15/06 lovely person even tho she appears scary in the halls.sucha a nice teacher to have especially for the leaving! bcause of her i really like german and am doing it now in college!

I don't think she appears scary. I think she actually is scary. But you're right, she is a lovely person.

3/29/06 can teach a class and listen to what each student has to say aswell as getting everyone to enjoy class

Wow! When I knew her, back in the day, all she did was talk in class! She must have grown up since.

Hilarious. Spot on. But nothing I didn't already know.
What I don't know is, who got from there to here.
Mysterious....

OKAY!! Am leaving now. Honestly.

Have I given people too much despair?

I don't know what to make of Nuala O Faoilean's interview about her terminal illness, which took place on Marian Finucane's show last week. (go to 6 mins 50 seconds to start it).

It ends with Nuala's whispered question, 'have I given people too much despair?'

I suppose it depends on the person, Nuala.

I found it deeply comforting and positive to be able to listen to two of the most influential Irish women of my lifetime discussing how it feels for one of them to face her own death. This pair have been a major part of the running commentary that takes place in Ireland, and have expressed views on pretty much everything that I have thought about in the last thirty five years or so. Death is one such topic, one that I seem to bump into a lot more these days, as you do when you age, so it is fitting that they tackled it.

There was beauty (which is the antidote to despair) in it as Nuala, despite her insecurities about it, is a deep thinker and she delivers her thoughts in a knitted wooly hat type of intellectual way that has always resonated with me as a similar kind of citified agnostic country catholic.

And there were flashes of the old Nuala, the Nuala that wrote for the Irish Times when I was a teenager and took no prisoners and taught me how to do it: the wry acceptance of how unimportant a mere woman at the edge of a small country on a small planet in a vast universe really is, followed up with a 'to hell with it, I'm going to voice my opinion anyway' speech.

Being faced with Nuala's desperate longing for a reprieve, her desolation at knowing life is finite, and her decision to share her despair with us was difficult. Why? To make it easier? To record it as a journalist? To get sympathy and attention?

It was hard to know what she wanted from us as listener.

Marian didn't wobble once which is probably testament to her work with the hospice movement, but she ended the interview very abruptly, I thought. Maybe she was going to cry.

She was very concerned about people with cancer and their families getting upset by conversations about death from cancer when there's great hope around nowadays.

Which I thought was a bit of a red herring. After all, she was interviewing a woman who was pulling back the veil of silence across the issue of death by cancer while dying of cancer.

Dying.

Not praying for some of the great hope there is nowadays.

But Marian is nothing if not reflective of the Irish love of a good red herring. That's why she's so successful. And why we don't talk about death by cancer generally.

Other people I know who listened to it have talked about the part of the interview that was most poignant for them. It's interesting. Some people were upset about Nuala leaving her room behind. Others were upset because she said she was glad she didn't have children. Another was upset by the way she didn't want to rear the fourteen year old girl she mentioned at the beginning of the interview. And everyone noticed the smoking thing of course.

There's a reason why we hear certain things of course.

I was interested in her current attitude to her earlier, oft-proclaimed view that passion was what counted.

Passion can go take a running jump at itself right now, apparently.

Marian asked her about love.

Well I always used to get love and passion mixed up, Nuala said, with one of her little laughs.

I always suspected that was the case. I never agreed with you about passion, Nuala. But I could never prove you wrong in my head, because I couldn't figure out what passion really was.

I think passion is an emotion you can feel about anything or anyone and yeah, it's great, but nowadays its meaning has been corrupted so much that we mistake it for other things.

I am passionate about photography.

They have a passionate relationship.

He is passionate about football.

etc.

I'm just noticing how stupid the word passionate looks by the way.

The above are all examples of what most people would consider the various forms of passion that exist.

And of course, when you grow up an Irish Catholic, the first encounter you have with the word is The Passion of Christ.

Here passion is a condition rather than an emotion, full of pain, suffering, misery, desolation, with the promise of elation at the end of it. Or elevation.

A heady mix.

And then you grow up and cast off the shackles of Catholicism and say thank Christ that's over, now I can have some fun and go out into the world.

And the world tells you that passion is actually, really about those things, just not necessarily on behalf of mankind, or indeed anyone else. Passion should be focused on the self: it can involve sacrifice (for yourself and your loved ones) to achieve greatness in your field, or a heady mixture of suffering and elation in a difficult (but emotionally and of course physically satisfying relationship), or even the loneliness (and moral sanctimoniousness) of a crusade.

To my mind, the world is difficult enough without having to try to have an obsessive, sacrificial relationship with it.

I told passion to go take a running jump at itself years ago.

Wry objectivity is a much easier approach. Or even self-piteous subjectivity, when it's that time of the month.

However, I've since found that passion sneaks back in. And when you let passion sneak into your soul, rather than grabbing at what you think it might be, it unveils itself.

A glance at the profile of the person you love makes you catch your breath yet again.

Why?

What makes that face do that to you?

Memorising all the lines radiating from their eyes, and wondering what caused them; the tinge of stubble on their jaw, the shine in their hair, and the swerve of their nose. The way the hairs lie across the shadow of the muscles of their arm.

Because you'd forgotten for a second how beloved their face is.

In case some day they don't come home.

To see how long you can do it before they sense that you are.

And then they catch your look. And it makes them feel great.

Why?

What makes that look do that to them?

That's passion. Right there.

The rest of it, all the moaning and groaning (as the Queen Mother would say) and focus and sacrifice and elation/ despair polarities is just obsession which is so prized in this world that is being run into the ground by obsessive people, it has been rebranded as passion.

I am wondering if Nuala did not mix up passion and obsession.

The way most of us catholic country girls have done at one time or another.

We are who we are.

Desolation doesn't change us.

It just makes us truer to our unique selves.

As Nuala would say.

When she wondered aloud how it was possible that she would be gone and all she knows gone with her I wanted to shake her, tumours and all.

You are a woman who taught two generations of Irish women how to think in their own way.

Thank you, Nuala.

Summer in Dublin

This summer, from July 4th-20th, George's Dock in the Dublin Docklands will be transformed into a "tropical seaside oasis", dotted with palm trees and beach cabanas, and will play host to activities such as yoga, tai chi, chess, volley ball and sandcastle building.

Bring your own beach towel, or relax on a sun-lounger and watch the world go by. Just hope that the weather plays ball or "tropical seaside oasis" could be words the organisers may regret using. - Irish Times

WTF? Are we thinking we're Paris now?

The wrong end of the schtick

So some poor pretty Irish girl who wanted to be a celebrity so much she became one of those famous for being famous people took too much cocaine and died.

Along with the other two people who took too much cocaine at a twenty first party in Waterford a few weeks back, and died this week.

And apparently some actor called Tom Murphy earlier this year (I hope it's not the Tom Murphy I know), who died of an overdose.

Not to mention all the non-famous for dying of cocaine overdosing people who will die this year.

Shouldn't we be talking about who sold them the frickin' cocaine, instead of wondering what it all means for the dying embers of the tiger?

Mr. Newspaperman?

A poem for Jim

This is a poem posted in honour of the memory of one of my favourite people, who has gone Home after a long illness, to be with his wife and friend.

Jim Loftus

Husband to dearly missed Eileen, father to beloved Nabla and Roisin, father-in-law to Allan (and Shane), grandfather to Dara and the babies, godfather to many, including my brother Baz (of which I was always insanely jealous)...

History teacher to me and hundreds more, including the wonderful students in Nigeria he never forgot and often told us dreadful Irish students about (little birds with their mouths open, they wanted to learn so much)...

Good friend to the Queen Parents and dozens more...

Intellectual, wit, anarchist in his own way, owner of the greatest book collection I saw before I went to Trinity College library, crossword fanatic...

Trivial Pursuit cheat (not that he ever needed to)...

Mentor to me always, mostly with a grin at my naivety/ stupidity/ whatever, always with a kind word, a witty comeback and sound advice...

The subterfuge we both descended to in order to get in a round for each other, subterfuge I never won...

Wearer of red socks, pipe-smoker, dog-lover (Juko, Scamp, Flop, Fiddler)...

Clareman, no, Kilfenora man...

A man with stars in his eyes, the soul of a poet and the pointedness of a swordsman.

Goodbye Sir James. Sir.

My life is emptier for your absence.
My soul is better for your influence on it.

I'm sorry I crashed your car when I was three.
It wasn't Nabla's fault.
Honest.

It was mine.

Say hello to Eileen and Mr. O'Neill for me.
Tell Eileen I miss her dreadfully still.
Tell Mr. O'Neill I still can't call him Jimmy. And I still can't sing Pythagoras.

I'm sorry I didn't know the last time I saw you was the last time. But we had a nice chat in the kitchen that night didn't we.

A poem for the end of the century
By Czeslaw Milosz

When everything was fine
And the notion of sin had vanished
And the earth was ready
In universal peace
To consume and rejoice
Without creeds and utopias,

I, for unknown reasons,
Surrounded by the books
Of prophets and theologians,
Of philosophers, poets,
Searched for an answer,
Scowling, grimacing,
Waking up at night, muttering at dawn.

What oppressed me so much
Was a bit shameful.
Talking of it aloud
Would show neither tact nor prudence.
It might even seem an outrage
Against the health of mankind.

Alas, my memory
Does not want to leave me
And in it, live beings
Each with its own pain,
Each with its own dying,
Its own trepidation.

Why then innocence
On paradisal beaches,
An impeccable sky
Over the church of hygiene?
Is it because that
Was long ago?

To a saintly man
--So goes an Arab tale--
God said somewhat maliciously:
"Had I revealed to people
How great a sinner you are,
They could not praise you."

"And I," answered the pious one,
"Had I unveiled to them
How merciful you are,
They would not care for you."

To whom should I turn
With that affair so dark
Of pain and also guilt
In the structure of the world,
If either here below
Or over there on high
No power can abolish
The cause and the effect?

Don't think, don't remember
The death on the cross,
Though everyday He dies,
The only one, all-loving,
Who without any need
Consented and allowed
To exist all that is,
Including nails of torture.

Totally enigmatic.
Impossibly intricate.
Better to stop speech here.
This language is not for people.
Blessed be jubilation.
Vintages and harvests.
Even if not everyone
Is granted serenity

We take our comfort where we can get it.

What a friggin' disappointment.

The Queen Mother valiantly tried to give me a flavour of the match by text as I didn't get out of work in time to get the Setanta package on the interweb. She was actually way ahead of the Guardian minute-by-minute reporter; who was too busy watching the match to actually tell any of us what was going on.

Which proves yet again that my brother is his mother's son in a lot of ways. My brother always remembers he should be typing when it's exciting. Which is why his minute-by-minutes are better than his colleagues. It was too much to hope that he would be doing the commentary. No doubt he was somewhere far more interesting than in front of a creaking laptop for the match.

(For all you Canadian readers, I am talking about the Ireland - France rugby world cup pool game that took place last night and was the perfect end to a perfect week chez Queenie).

You leave a country for two years, and the rugby team collapses. I have heard all kinds of rumours which I am not going to repeat here because according to certain players who couldn't kick a ball straight if it killed him last night that they are not true.

Well, he may not have been kicked out of his own house, but he should be now! That's all I am going to say.

Kicked out of the country more like. Unlike his manager I disagree that his performance should be judged on how much possession he gets. Where I come from, his performance should be judged on what he does with the possession he gets.

Call me stupid, if you like, but you shape the clay you are given.

Anyways, I didn't see his performance so I can't really talk about it.

What I can say is that some of the rumours I have heard are about a Munster - Leinster split in the team.

A what?

Is this friggin' true?

Is this all we are capable of as a nation?

We endure a thirty year conflict that pits neighbour against neighbour at its lowest points, emerge from it stunned and grateful, get a few jobs, make a little money, and now a crowd of overpaid middle class boarding school boys are having a Munster - Leinster split? Over rugby?

I friggin' give up.

I had a crappy week. But I think everyone else did too, so it must have been some astrological trine or something annoying everyone this week.

The third last shitty thing that happened to me this week (the last being the knowledge that we were going down 25 - 3 to France which I received in a text message from the QM) was that I found out that I should know by the way I am treated in work how valued I am.

That's good to know. I'm glad they cleared that up.

After I heard O'Sullivan's post-match interview I realised what they meant. It's all about what kind of possession you get, you see (in staff terms). Nothing at all about what you do with said possession.

Well, we saw how well that worked for the Irish rugby team yesterday.

Himself and I went to Sugar Spice, the Jamaican diner to comfort ourselves with jerk chicken and then we got some dvds to while away the evening.

Seraphim Falls.

I never heard of this movie before. Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan chase each other across the Wild West in a John Toll-filmed (Braveheart, Legend of the Falls) landscape that just jumps off the screen at you (snowy Oregon mountains and New Mexico).

It cheered me right up. Restored my faith in Irish men on a world stage.

Liam Neeson was wearing a pair of slinky suede trousers that showed off the longest pair of male legs in Hollywood. He had a gun as long as his legs, and a grudge to match.

Pierce Brosnan was doing his James Bond schtick: but this time it was in the forest with no toys and no women.

He is actually a good actor. You can see why he was such a good Bond. It was the possessions that did for him towards the end of his reign in that franchise. His attempts to light a fire to dry off after getting shot in the arm and falling into a winter river are fantastic.

Then we watched Taxi Driver (not Taxi!) because Himself has never seen it.

That's right. Himself had never seen it.

I'd forgotten how good it is.

Sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

Sometimes so does a woman.

Watch this space.

What's going to happen this evening?

The Queen Dad is in Paris today; one of the many thousands of Irish people who must be wondering what the hell they are doing in the city of light on a night when it is possible that our rugby dream is going to be washed down the toilet.

I am wandering around in a state of complete bewilderment, no doubt engendered by my prolonged absence from the Irish rugby scene.

Stringer dropped for some bloke I've never heard of? WTF?!

All my memories of our recent successes in rugby are tinged with little baldy Peter wrestling the ball away from scrums twenty times his size and passing it to our Ronan, who then kicks it to suave Brian/ suave (other tall guy I can't remember because it's 6am) who then puts it over the touch line.

I think I remember Peter getting dropped once before and the results being an unmitigated disaster. Or maybe he was injured. I don't have a brain that can remember these things well.

And the Queen Dad is in Paris so I can't ask him.

Anyways, I am in confused shock. No doubt Stringer has had a string of bad games that I know nothing about. Because Eddie Sullivan wouldn't make a stupid decision would he?

And what's all this about the guys having 'personal problems'?

The last time I was in Paris, France annihilated Ireland in the Five Nations and the Queen Mum and I had to put up with it in a tiny room in the Hotel des Arts in Montmartre.

I hope that the Queen Dad gets a moment in the sun. At least he is on a pharma-junket, so the hotel room should have enough room to swing a cat in celebration if necessary.

Anyone who feels like sending me text updates this evening will be my friend for life. I shall be hanging onto the internet like a mad woman, trying to get the game on Setanta. Which is nigh on impossible.

Stupid internet pay per view.

Speaking of the unspeakable, on his recent visit here, the Queen Dad gave me Cormac MacCarthy's The Road to read. I asked him what it was like. He kind of shivered (strange for him) and said: 'it's a bit intense. It's a bit frightening. It's a strange strange book'.

I read it.

I couldn't be in a room on my own when I was reading it.

This book blows the bleak, post-apocalyptic vision of Margaret Atwood and her ilk right out of the ooze. It is delivered in McCarthy's simple prose, which as usual contains huge ideas in small sentences (how does he do that).

Then I read Charlie Brooker the other day:

This week Charlie finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy ("which might as well come with a razor-sharp spine, so you can slash your wrists once you've finished it"). He continued playing Bioshock on the Xbox360 ("but I can only play it if someone's in the room with me, because it's too scary to tackle alone"); and he failed to quit smoking for the 18 millionth time.

I'm glad it's not me.

If this book does not get you sorting out your compostibles from your paper waste, then nothing will.

A man and his son wander around a post-apocalyptic north american continent, heading for the (Pacific I think) ocean. The world has been on fire. The remains of the built and natural world still smoulder. Ash settles on everything. The sun is blotted out. Hordes of cannibal wildmen roam the land searching for food and weapons.

I kept reading bits of it out to Himself in a panic. 'Would we survive, babe?' I kept asking. 'Sure', he said.

Then I got to the bit that told me what happened to the man's wife.

I'd head north, meself. Fuck the ocean. They couldn't see it anyway.

Anyways, up the lads, I'm wearing my rugby shirt to work today and they had better not let me down.

Can I spend the night with...?

No you can't.

Multiply that by one hundred.

That was last night.

Yes, the teenager is back. For a few days anyway.

And she is out with her friends, as teenagers are. But she wants to spend the night.

There are two problems with this.

One, she never actually spends the night where she says she's going to. So we cannot calculate odds and say, yes, that place is fine. Because we don't know where she'll end up.

Two, there has been a spate of teenage violence in Halifax in the last two weeks. A sixteen year old stabbed four security guards at a teenage disco last weekend and nearly killed one of them. Three sixteen year old girls attacked an elderly lady with iron table legs (for no apparent reason) at 9.30pm on the Commons and were set upon by the crusties who hang out there who held them until the cops came.

Plus all the usual swarmings etc.

Now, I'm pretty sure Kitty wouldn't stab anyone, or attack someone's granny with a table leg, but she has been known to throw rocks at her own house (there must be some Irish in her somewhere), so no, she can't spend the night.

Then she got home at eleven pm on a Thursday and started with the 'It's so crap having an eleven pm curfew. Nobody else has an eleven pm curfew' rant.

By eighty eight times.

I listed all the other sixteen year olds who have one.

They are all losers, apparently.

I have to laugh. It's all exactly the same as the conversations I had with my mother. Except this time the Queen Mother was sitting listening to me having this conversation with a sixteen year old. There's even an annoying little brother butting in.

Karma.

This week has been one of massive shifts and changes and it's all a bit unsettling.

I am currently spying on the new neighbours. Mike and Kate and Connor and Mika and the dogs left on Wednesday for Ottawa and the new neighbours are a couple with a baby who are teachers and triathletes at the weekend. They have just arrived on their matching bicycles sans baby and are now walking around the house checking every inch of the exterior very carefully.

I'm sure they'll be lovely.

Himself is despondent. Not without cause.

Craig and Lyse whom we love and who were the best neighbours ever left a month ago and were replaced by a nurse who is on disability which means she sleeps all day and moves furniture around all night and has the LOUDEST LONGEST SEX in the world.

Every night.

When she and 'Peter your Lover' (that's how he signs the notes he leaves on her door) are having loud energetic sex and we are in the garden we have to be sure not to look up at her windows because she often likes to have sex against the window.

It was poor Himself who copped that one night when he was putting the garbage out.

It's actually quite annoying.

At least we know it's not her back is causing her disability.

What's most annoying though is that Peter the Lover usually arrives around seven, so she has long, loud showers in the hour preceding that, which is when Himself arrives home from work covered in diesel actually needing a shower and as our pipes are connected, there's never any water for him.

He got so pissed off yesterday he turned the hot water on and left it to run while she was abluting.

I have never ever seen him do something vindictive. But all his male buddies are abandoning him, see, so poor Himself is upset.

We need a house in its own gardens with no neighbours, and a dog for Himself to play with. That's what we need.

The baby has arrived in a battered old station wagon (the baby is not driving it obviously).

Well, a battered old station wagon is usually a good sign.

And the D key has fallen off my laptop. No D, no K, and two of the cursor keys are now gone.

I possibly may need a new keyboard.

I hate the end of the summer. The Queen Parents leave tonight and then it's Labour Day weekend and then it's back to nose on grindstone for another four months.

The good news is that we will be in Ireland from 22nd December - 5th January.

Well, good news for some anyways.

Vikings apologise.... finally

From the Guardian:

More than 1,200 years ago hordes of bloodthirsty Viking raiders descended on Ireland, pillaging monasteries and massacring the inhabitants. Yesterday, one of their more mild-mannered descendants stepped ashore to apologise.

The Danish culture minister, Brian Mikkelson, who was in Dublin to participate in celebrations marking the arrival of a replica Norse longboat, apologised for the invasion and destruction inflicted. "In Denmark we are certainly proud of this ship, but we are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings," Mr Mikkelson declared in his welcoming speech delivered on the dockside at the river Liffey. "But the warmth and friendliness with which you greet us today and the Viking ship show us that, luckily, it has all been forgiven."

Of course, when I demanded an apology from the National Museum in Copenhagen, circa 1998 -99 I think, for neglecting to mention the rape and pillage their people had inflicted on mine during the Viking raids, they just laughed at me and said that history was written by the winners.

The section of the museum that dealt with that time was a total whitewash. Along the lines of 'during this period in history, the Danes farmed and built ships to travel to other lands'. Got me right riled up at the time.

Glad to see they've seen sense at last.

Wonder whether they will change the museum exhibit now?