Squeef's in the house

Unaccustomed as I am to blogging, me sister has asked me to guest blog.
Am feeling very important and yet have nothing to say - it could be due to the fact that many brain cells have been killed over the festive period - and many more to be killed tonight at our New Years Eve/Happy Birthday Dotsy party. The craic we'll have. In fact if only meself and me sister show up we'd still have the craic.

The wrong trousers

I remember being small - small enough to walk through legs like they were buildings - and following the wrong pair of trousers. Brown trousers that grew up out of dark brown shoes like my da's. I followed them down the supermarket aisle through skyscraping adults in the big city of my little world. And then I looked up, and I remember the roaring sound of panic that set my heart stammering.

He must have found me, da, although that bit didn't stick around for long in my store of remembrances. Just the moment of realisation that sounded sirens in my chest. Sometimes I think I've been following the wrong pair of trousers all my life.

Deck the halls with newborn babies, falalalala...

As if my life these days weren’t plagued enough by pregnancies, procreation and a profusion of Other People’s Offspring, my work party this year is taking place in – wait for it – a maternity hospital. Why yes, you did read that correctly, an end-of-year, down-and-dirty office party in a maternity hospital. Naturally. Because clearly, the cacophony of screaming babies is the perfect backdrop to Christmas debauchery. And no doubt the agonised screams of birthing mothers will function as just the sort of social lubricant required to bring people together in the traditional, lecherous fashion of such gatherings. On the upside, at least there will be beds or gurneys on hand for the post-prandial snooze. Ooh, and doctors rushing around in their scrubs with stethoscopes swinging across their swarthy, life-saving doctor chests and complicated charts clutched in their healing doctor hands. Ah, doctors. Suddenly it seems like the perfect party setting after all.

global warming

I think we spent too much time in the wrong climate. The cold didn't suit him. His skin favoured the sun, and the damp just made him damper. His spirits seemed to sag under the heavy weather. My moods got crisper in the cold, his drooped, dishevelled in the rain. Perhaps if we'd spent more time in the sun, the balance would have shifted. He would have bronzed and burnished, his hair bleached and teeth sparkled, while I shrivelled, shiny and red under the glare. But we were damp rainy poor back then, and could never afford to pay for sunshine. I think of soggy shoelaces and heater stooping, and I see now that he wasn't smiling, as my cold, cold hand slipped into his.

Ms Parker's wisdom

"Though she's a fool who seeks to capture
The twenty-first fine, careless rapture,
I must go on, till ends my rope,
Who from my birth was cursed with hope."

time passes

Something bad just happened to somebody I was once very, very close to - so close we almost lived for a moment inside the skins of each other - and now am less close to, as is sometimes the way of these things. But as I sit here typing light years and dark spaces away from him, I am close enough to know how confused and hurt he is by this new bad thing, and to feel a sadness in me too that shows a little bit of him still lives inside my skin. And always will.

culture shock

Aoife was perched between Keith Mathews' da and his mate, Dave, a quiet, lean kind of fellow with a big toothy mouth on him, the two lads facing grimly into dirty pints in an easy silence as she giggled in between. Then along comes another friend of a friend - "Jayz, how's she cuttin" - who sits down beside me, and starts a conversation about, as far as I could make out, horses. Or maybe toddlers who run on grass a lot. Two-year-olds, one way or another. Dave and himself, shooting off at each other to beat the band with accents you'd need a machete to cut through. All the while, your man beside me is absently petting a dog that's appeared from nowhere under the table. As it's early on a Wednesday evening, the bar is obviously jammers, and people are mulching into eachother on the seats, giving it the"sorry can I just get by you there?" as they trample all over you. And a young one who's trying her best to sidle into the bench beside Keith Mathews' da notices the snout peeping out from under the table, and says to your man beside me: "Is that your dog?" And up pipes this lad on the other side of her, with: "Ah no, that bitch left him some time back." And there's lots of grunting and nodding and big winky pints floating above the ring stains on the rickety tables, and it hit me with the force of a mighty wallop: I'm not in Buenos Aires any more.

When idol eyes . . .

La la la! I had a big ponderous post in the pipeline about love and other demons when last night I heard that a Kildare man had won Australian idol. I got so excited, I rang Australia to see if we could get him on the radio show I was working for. Instead, they put me on the radio, although I had shockin' little to say for myself really, apart from a bit of blathering about Kildare and Ireland and how we're all only delighted be the hokey. But Damien Leith, Australia's new idol - now there's a man who done us proud, wha? All bashful and doe-eyed, he then whips out this gut-thumping voice that just fills you up when you hear it. Much better posting material than my morbid Sunday night musings. To listen to Damien Leith kick the living daylights out of Crying by Roy Orbison, click here . Sweet mother of divine inspiration, not a dry eye in the house.

scandalavia

Right now what's foremost in my thoughts is the desire to be Scandinavian, if only for their appealing use of English. They speak it with a cavalier fluency that makes me swallow my tongue in envy, and then they go on to tinker with it just a little to make it speak a little clearer, to startle you from your first-language slumber and remind you of the pretty things it can do when it's coloured outside the lines. Look at these delightful Danes putting me to shame with their eloquent revolutionisms. And the Norwegian legion (See what I did there? Yeah, I know, that's what I mean) Hobbes and Lars. I want to be Scandinavian and fjordish, and write in syncopated beats. I want to think in that slivery way they do, with thoughts that seem to come from somewhere other than their own bodies. And to bear a name like Lars. Extremely.

serenade

Once upon a many moons ago, a young boy threw stones at my young girl's window and woke me up to singing in my front garden. It was Valentine's day, and he'd written me a song. He stood on Castletown Drive with his guitar in one hand and his heart in the other, as I curled up against the glass in my nightie. Mrs Brady next door was no doubt cursing his wavering falsetto as she tossed in her bed. But if only she'd had a digital camera, if only digital cameras had existed back then, she could have made herself a tidy sum by now and cleaned up on YouTube. Because my late night crooner and wooer of young girls has since wooed the world with his heartfelt tunes, and has just produced this - a whole new bunch of songs to listen to in my nightie.

The Cake Sale

Look what Brian did. No, he did not make buns. That's something even I can do. Brian can make albums. So he made one and the proceeds are going to Oxfam. Buy it. Buy it buy it buy it. Paul has a song on it, Nick plays guitar and Josh Marry-Me Ritter sings. What more do you need?

Home is . . . where exactly?

New blog for a new country. The new country being Ireland, which is really the old country, but now boasts a whole different set of jigs and reals (sic) due to the rapid changes while I was off dozing on my foreign siesta. As I have become attuned to a whole differnet pace of things in Argentina, it may take me a while to catch up but in the meantime, the old Buenos Aires experience is closing so my bejilliions of fans can now find me here. Youse must be only thrilled.