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.