Game Set and Match to who?

A few years ago now I worked in a prestigious Sports Club as maternity cover. I would walk up from the train station and take the short cut through a lane that led to the side door, but if you went further on and turned to the left you could walk though the front door which I chose to do every day. As you walked through the front door you were met by the most beautiful chandelier and sweeping staircase where you could choose to go left or right when you go to the top. It never failed to lift my spirits knowing that for 10 months I was going to see this sight.

What didn’t lift my spirits was knowing that the person in charge was a bastard of the highest order who occasionally went out of his way to deliberately target me in the most foul manner but generally it was your common or garden variety of derision.

A funny (but not at the time funny) incident was when he came after me when I was in the serving area of the kitchen making toast for breakfast. After I picked up my toast and threw a couple of butter portions onto my plate he started shouting that I wasn’t allowed to make toast. I told him I brought my own bread and he shouted back and I’ll paraphrase here… the fucking butter isn’t yours.. what do you say to that eh? A multi million euro club managed by a man who was constantly on the verge of putting his back out carrying boxes of wine and champagne into the boot of his car was concerned about my consumption of two portions of Kerrygold butter.

We were entitled to a break in the morning and during that same conversation I told him that I needed to eat something during that break as I didn’t have breakfast in the morning as I was afraid if I got dizzy on the train, (which I occasionally did because of low blood pressure) I didn’t want to throw up so I didn’t eat until my mid morning break. He told me (and when I said told, I mean roared) that he didn’t give a fuck and that I was to eat before I came to work. I ignored his polite request and a few days later the cowardly bastard got his lackey to tell me I wasn’t allowed eat at my desk. Everyone else was allowed to eat at their desk for their morning break but I had to run the 4 minute mile getting up to the kitchen to continue to toast my bread, continue to use the butter that EVERY OTHER EMPLOYEE USED, and run up the back stairs to the break room at the top of the building, horse down my toast and come back to my desk in 15 minutes.

As my time there was coming to an end I started looking for new jobs and joining agencies which required face to face meetings. As a person on a fixed term contract I was entitled to some reasonable time off for this and one time I went into him (my direct line manager was out) to let him know I would be extending my lunch to go to such a meeting. I only got the words ‘Hi Pig (not his real name obviously) is it ok if…. ‘ and he waved the back of his hand at me as he had done on so many previous occasions to dismiss me, so I never got to finish my sentence. Off I trotted to my meeting which required two short bus journeys there and back and when he noticed I hadn’t returned one of my colleagues told me he stormed out of his office and shouted… Where the FUCK is she.. When it was pointed out to him that I tried to tell him I was going for a meeting, I told my colleague what had happened with the hand flicking dismissive movement, he stormed back into his office FUMING, either because he couldn’t give out to me or I told my colleague about his rudeness.

17 days before my contract was finished I was fired by Mr Pig (again, not his real name). I was summoned to his office about my request for overtime. This is the short version of events.. He shouted and wailed, waved my contract about and told me I was in breach of my contract. I told him I didn’t know what was in my contract as I never received it. PURPLE FACED at this stage (there were other words spoken besides the overtime) he told me he was sick of me and I was to leave. I asked him if I was being fired and he said yes, to clear my desk and go.

Oh… and I had discovered that money had gone missing…

I brought the club to the WRC and won. I couldn’t sue under unfair dismissals act as I wasn’t there long enough so I went under industrial relations act and won a small amount of money as I was in gainful employment 13 days after I was fired and I won the maximum amount allowed at the time for not being given a contract of employment. That was quite a stressful time as I was doing this myself without the assistance of a solicitor, but I felt it was important that the club took responsibility for his actions. I had been in touch with one of the members of the Executive Committee of the club regarding the behaviour of Mr Pig and he referred me back to Mr Pig, talk about washing your hands of responsibility.

Oh… and I had discovered that money had gone missing… yes, back to this… a few years after I left, the lackey for Mr Pig was discovered to have been defrauding the club. I believe she was charged but the case was dropped so as not to embarrass the club. I say I believe, there are court documents referring to it but it never got to court as far as I know. I knew what she was up to, part of the ‘You’re Fired’ conversation was me saying that we should have a meeting about the missing money that had mysteriously reappeared after the lackey returned from her holiday. She was up to it, I knew she was up to it and she was rattled. Hand on heart, I think I was fired because I wasn’t prepared to let this go. I’m not saying for a moment that Pig was involved, but Pig was FUMING that I would DARE question his beloved lackey.

So why write about this now, years after the event?

Well let me tell you what a little birdie told me last week…. Last week Mr Pig was asked to leave the building, hand over his keys and passwords and asked not to return. I wish I could tell you why but I’m none the wiser, but if I do find out I’ll be sure to let my 10’s of readers know! JUSTICE! JUSTICE!… well not quite. I think I deserve an apology from the club. I might even write to them and spill ALL of the beans I know.

AA Gill gave me nightmares

It’s been quite a while since I felt compelled to sit at a computer to write, but here I am, 8.30am on New Year’s Eve, up and at it so I could write about the night AA Gill scared the shite out of me.

I was a big fan of AA, I’ll call him AA as I know his first name is Adrian but his second name shall remain a mystery, not because I can’t be arsed to look it up, it’s because that’s what I called him. ‘Did you read AA’s article’ I’d say to the husband. The answer was always no because I was the one who got the Sunday Times Magazine first and it was always the first article I’d go to. I didn’t read it because I had a dream of visiting all of the restaurants he reviewed, I read it because I loved the way he wrote. You’d open the article with one eye closed and the other squinting, hoping the review was good. He could be a savage bastard at times. He wrote a great write up about a trip to Dublin several years ago which ended up in Kavanaghs, more commonly know as The Gravediggers, waxing lyrical about the creamy pints and I thought, hang on a minute pal, you don’t drink. He must have had those pints by proxy and I wished I had been it. When he died I stopped reading the reviews as it was never about the restaurant, it was about the man who wrote them.

So to the nightmare, we’re nearly there…

Before Christmas the eldest child Sorcha and I were in my favourite place, a book shop, when I happened upon his book. I was buying books for the girls for Christmas as I always do, but after spending upwards of €300 in a chemist buying face, feet, legs and arms products for them and having come out of several periods of unemployment I had quite gotten out of the whimsical habit of buying for myself so I left the book on the shelf. At one stage I’d only buy books from the biannual book fare in Holy Faith Clontarf at two euro each, or three for a fiver. I’d be burdened under the weight of them and flying high knowing I had my reading sorted for the next 6 months. I remember buying the second and third instalment of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy in November and keeping them so I could read them on my holidays the following June.

And so to the nightmare, we’re nearly there…

On Christmas morning you can imagine my surprise when I opened one of my presents from the girls and there it was Pour Me: A life by AA Gill. I’ve brought many an author to bed with me over the years, much to the disgust of my husband, he doesn’t like the light being on when he’s going to sleep. Who does to be fair? And now I had AA in my bed and no sign of the Blonde, or my husband for that matter, he was fast asleep on the couch and I’d tucked a blanket around him to keep him there. I didn’t tie him up in it you understand, just keeping him warm so he doesn’t come up to bed to talk about the things he likes to talk about such as politics, the orange monster in the White House, the clown in number 10, the demise of Ruth Coppinger’s career when she wrote, and I quote “Extremely concerning that young man is killed, brandishing a knife but not armed otherwise…” how the Yorkshire Ripper was finally caught, who won the St Ledger in 1984, why it is one of his favourite horses and where he was when he watched it.

And so to the nightmare, we’re nearly there…

Last night I read about the first time he went to an Irish pub in London with his friend Mark. Mark was of Irish descent and incredibly proud of it. My favourite part of the description of him was that his nose was like a broken bannister. The thing about Mark was, he didn’t give a flying fuck about anything, at any time or any where and AA loved him for it. It also scared him a little and as time went on he had to extract himself from this friendship. Maybe the nightmare was because there were two people from different backgrounds forming a bond that led to a path of destruction. Maybe the nightmare was because AA said he drank his first proper Guinness in London, an oxymoron surely.

And so to the nightmare…

I was in the Ramble Inn which has been closed since March due to the pandemic and is what is known as a ‘wet’ pub. When this is over I want to erase that phrase from my memory and never speak of it again. It’s a pub that is right around the corner from where I live and often pass it to go to my preferred local, but the Guinness is good there, the patrons can be rowdy and I’ve seen my share of fights in it. The atmosphere was particularly dark in my dream, small groups huddled together whispering, looking out of the windows as dark clouds gathered bringing an eerie mist with it. In reality, for those who know the Ramble, you’d have to stand on the chairs to look out the window they are that high, but hey, it’s my dream and the windows were big.

Suddenly, a young man burst through the doors, blood streaming from his eye socket where his eye had been gouged out. He was screaming for help but no one wanted to help him because somehow, his screams were insincere, his stumbling around was overacted, he was smirking. The small huddled groups became one, some people were screaming others whispering furiously about what to do. I was one of the whisperers, telling my children to run to the toilets and hide. The young man stood straight and grabbed a girl and dragged her out of the pub to more screaming and panic. This man went after them to get the girl back but came back bruised and bloodied and empty handed. Out of the mist more people came with gouged eyes and broken limbs trying to get into the pub. We barricaded the door as best we could but were overcome and more people were dragged out and this man stood tall and kept trying, and sometimes succeeding in saving people. We were overcome. As each person was taken they were bitten and became part of the army of destruction. This man picked up the leg of a broken chair and ran out the door beating a path so we could escape. We ran. I got to the top of the road outside the opticians where John the optician was calmly smoking a cigarette and drinking tea and asking me what the craic was with all the screaming and shouting. I took my vape out of my pocket, stood against the wall and told him it was a zombie apocalypse but this man was dealing with it. I knew by him he wouldn’t be bitten and he’d win. I wanted him to win but I wanted to watch it for a bit longer because it was exciting to watch without being in it.

As I was waking from the dream, I realised that this man was AA Gill and I was Mark.

The end.

#AAGill #SundayTimesReview #Nightmare

Festival Season

Festival Season

 

There seems to be no end of festivals to choose from these past few years and if my eldest child is anything to go by, she only has to hear of one act that she likes and she has it booked. Three days of little sleep, praying for sunshine, packing for a week, pot noodles, a slab of cheap booze and colourful wellies are the only requirements for a successful weekend.

Back in my day, when Moses was still being written about in Deuteronomy, we had Slane. I went in 1987 to see David Bowie. I liked the idea of going to see him because my Aunt Lilly had a dog call Major in the seventies and myself and my sister sang Space Oddity to him constantly. That, and Life on Mars were my entire repertoire  of  Bowie songs but that didn’t stop me from putting my hand into my pocket and spending my hard earned cash on a ticket.

 

I learned a few things on my day trip to Slane:

Health and Safety did not exist. A dozen people in the back of a Hiace van and the only requirement was to bring your own cushion.

When you run into a field full of cows for a wee they WILL herd around you.

I’m afraid of cows.

My pelvic floor was strong enough to stop in mid flow, particularly around cows. My pelvic floor left me for a younger, prettier woman circa 2001.

A field full of cows to wee in is a blessed relief when the only other option is a portaloo.

When you have to walk a couple of miles to get to the venue, flagons of cider are easier to carry.

Warm cider tastes like cow piss.

I still don’t like cider to this day. Well, the odd bottle of Strawberry Kopperberg isn’t so bad.

Mosh pits are for hard bastards and when you start to see steam coming from your clothes it’s time to leave.

I’d rather eat balls of my own shite than experience the horror of a hot dog from a van.

 

I had one of the best days of my life.

Is Santa Claus Coming To Town?

Christmas morning has to be the most magical time when you have young children. The build up of course starts in January when you pick up a bargain or two in the sales, hide them, forget where you’ve hidden them and forget what you’ve bought. My eldest daughter recently found two TY beanie babies behind the freezer in the hall that the price tag indicated I had purchased when we were still dealing in pounds, shillings and pence! October is where it’s at though, the ads for toys really come into their own then and you find yourself scribbling furiously as your child shouts out ‘I want one of them’ ‘Mammy, Mammy, Mammy, Mammy, can Santa buy me that?’ ‘When is Santa coming?’ ‘Why does Santa have a big belly?’ ‘Is Daddy’s belly bigger?’ ‘Kerrie said that Santa will think you’re bad if you don’t leave carrots for the reindeers.’ SHUUUUUSSSSHHHH, enough or he won’t come to little girls who ask too many questions. About that carrot business, I nearly broke my teeth biting one on Christmas Eve to bring that authentic feel to the experience and the following year had to blag a lie about Santa wanting to share his biscuits and that besides, carrots make the reindeers fart. Crisis averted.

Before you can say goodbye Halloween, Christmas Eve is upon you and must be planned with military precision. New pyjamas are laid out, baths are had, and the heating is cranked up a notch to make the little dolls sleepy. Final threats are made about bags of coal and bold girls to hurry them up to bed. You have to keep an air of nonchalance as if you have nothing better to do then watch telly until your eyes turn square as you sip a glass of wine and occasionally open the oven to check on the ham you are baking slowly in the oven. You listen out for the tell tale signs of a soft snore before you get into the business of Santa Coming To Town. Milk in a glass, take a sip, spill a bit on the fireplace, take a bite out of the carefully selected biscuits your children think Santa and his reindeers would like best. Talc the floor and make footprints in it.  Luckily, my mother in law only lives 5 houses down from me so all presents are wrapped, bagged and ready to go and just need to be picked up and put into 3 piles, eldest child on the left hand side of the couch, middle child on the right hand side and youngest child to the right of the smaller couch. Bam… my work is done. Or is it? You start counting what each child got, is it enough?…. OH GOD I DIDN’T GET THEM ENOUGH! Did I? Fuck it, can’t do anything about it now. Can I? What time is it? Are the shops still open? FUCK, I’ve had wine. Why did I drink wine? Why am I such a bad parent? Why? Why?

Of course the trick here is to buy them one big thing in a big box. It doesn’t matter what’s in it, only that it’s big, it took you two days to wrap and you cursed your own existence and the cheap shitty tape you bought in Penny’s when they had a perfectly good roll of Selotape in Tesco only yards away. And presents should ALWAYS be wrapped. I’ll never forget the look of disappointment and sadness on my face when I got lazy one year and bought Santa sacks. You need that ripping and squealing, ripping and squealing sound on Christmas morning.

And then it happens. Your youngest child that you want to put in a china cabinet or freezer to keep them small and innocent comes up to you and says, at age 7 years and 5 months, not even getting to the 7 and a half stage, ‘Ciaran told me there was no such thing as Santa.’ You can’t believe your ears. Your mind and legs turn to jelly as you digest these words. Your pallor resembles the colour of recycled toilet roll. Grasping walls, stumbling over your own feet to sit on the nearest chair, wiping your brow and the shine that has appeared on your upper lip you gather yourself. You smile, you tell them not to be such a silly billy and that Ciaran will not, I repeat NOT get any toys from Santa this year. You ask them how on earth Mammy and Daddy can afford to buy all those lovely presents. Sure if there was no such thing as Santa who takes care of the polar bears? Oh look, a biscuit, lets watch telly and see if you like anything that Santa can bring. Then your thoughts turn to the offender, the Christmas Wrecker, the stealer of innocence. He might only be 10 but you want to tie him to a pole and inflict bodily harm. You want to beat him with balls of his own shite, to within inches of his life. You want to call over to his parents and SCREAM, WHAT SORT OF AN ANIMAL HAVE YOUR REARED? But you don’t, you just keep your eye on him for the rest of his life waiting for him to turn out bad.

But, the damage is done, the doubts creep in, the awkward questions keep coming. Christmas morning, why is there a smell of talc here Mammy? Fuck, why didn’t I get a cat to piss on the curtains to mask the smell? How can Santa go to all the houses in one night? Why did you go shopping and not bring me? What did you buy? Kerrie’s chimney is blocked how can Santa get in? But you keep the lies up, they trip off your tongue, you squeeze one last year out of it. My youngest daughter was twelve when I came clean. She knew that I knew that she knew but we had the chat, JUST in case there was any lingering doubts, I didn’t want her to start secondary school and be made a fool of.

So is Santa coming to town? Too bloody right he is, we sat down to write the first of many drafts of her Santa letter last night! 

People watching in the enchanted forest

I hadn’t quite prepared myself for my day today. The message I got was to go up to my husband with a sandwich and relieve him of his duties for an hour so he could do what men do best, sit on the jacks and read the Racing Post for an hour. I know it’s still November but being a Saturday my husband decided to start his annual Christmas Tree selling, really just to show people he was back and would be there for the duration.

Being the wonderful wife that I am, I added love and devotion into that sandwich making. Thick crusty bread, Carroll’s ham, white cheddar cheese that was on special offer (I normally go for red) and brown sauce. I carefully washed out the flask that hadn’t been used since last year to make his a flask of tea, no sugar (I don’t love him that much, I was having some of that tea and I don’t take sugar). To finish off, a bar of Cadburys chocolate (I was definitely having a bit of that!).

Armed with my life sustaining bag of goods I set off to our man made enchanted forest in a car park in Raheny. The sandwich was devoured, tea was drank and the first ‘favour’ asked. Could I stay while he got his phone fixed? His phone has been broken since JULY.. but in fairness, in went into it’s final death throes today and in this age of technology, not having a phone is akin to having a one armed lumber jack with a compound fracture on his other.

Like I said, I was ill prepared for the day. No hat, no gloves, only one pair of socks and too short jacket. As you can imagine, I didn’t have too many customers, so there was a lot of sitting around on walls and the arse was frozen off me. I didn’t even bring a book but I did have my phone and found a wifi hub which was fine until my phone went dead, so I people watched. There was the man who liked to sit on the benches and drink bottles of beer. I wanted to zip his hoodie up and drag him to the nearest St. Vincent De Paul to get him a warm jacket. He had a hat on at least so I knew he would survive the winter, if his liver didn’t pack in. There was the man who passed by on his way to the shops, very well dressed for the weather. He had the slow steady gait of a man who had spent many a year on this planet, slightly favouring his right side and the cuff of his trousers on his left leg was caught up in his sock. Again, I had an almost uncontrollable urge to go over and ‘fix him’. He had an old but well tailored coat and a woolly hat to finish his look. Under is hat he had a big pair of earphones, they looked suspiciously like a pair of Beats. If the trouser leg didn’t get me, it was the urge to lift his earphones up to hear the heavy bass tone and the ‘parental supervision required’ version of the latest rap from Eminem.

My favourite though was the little girl with her dad and her even littler sister. They were here to pick a tree and she was given the task, but only after her dad and I established that she was a good girl, that she had written her letter to Santa and she could spell superfragilisticexpialidocious (only joking). She took her job very seriously and walked through the trees like she was Michael D Higgins greeting the Irish Rugby Team. Each tree got a quick feel, a smell and occasionally a few words were spoken to them to see if they cut the mustard. She had a firm idea in her mind of what she wanted, she was a practical child, the tree had to be taller than Daddy but not too tall that it became bendy and not too fat in case she couldn’t open the door. Decision made she transformed herself into Kofi Annan, saying goodbye to the trees not lucky enough to be part of their Christmas celebrations. She gave them words of encouragement, telling them she liked them a lot and they smelled so Christmassy. She stroked them as she passed and as I picked up the tree to give it to her dad she said, ‘No Daddy, the man will deliver it’. After diplomatic discussions between said Dad and child, the tree was taken away as I watched with a tear in my eye. I wanted to take her away, I wanted to wrap her in Christmas paper, pop her in a gift bag and put her under my tree as my own special gift.

It’s going to be a late late night…

Oh dear, the pressure of being a parent is unending at this time of year. I just got a text from my middle daughter, a teenager in transition year in school. Or as we would call it, The Doss Year. The text said ‘Man can we stay in tonight and get loads of nice sweeties from tesco, and watch the late late toy show (and maybe get chinese) I love you xx’

See what I mean about pressure? Shocking basic grammar mistakes in that text, although I am thankful she never got into txtspk or I would still be trying to figure out what she was trying to say. So now I have to shower as my hair is stuck to my head from lack of washing yesterday and vast quantities of ointment on my face. I’ll have to drag myself off to Tesco to scan the sweet aisle, agonising about getting the balance right between eldest child with braces and what might stick her gob together if the sweets are too chewy and youngest child who really only likes minty sweets. Of course Tesco are doing an extra 25% off if you buy 6 bottles of wine which I will be compelled to buy ‘for Christmas’,

As for the Chinese take away, another avenue fraught with danger. Eldest child will want to order from some new place she discovered a few weeks ago, I’ll be beating a child to go around the corner and order from the local and at least one of them will want Indian or something from the chipper.

I can’t wait. I’m going to clean out the fire, do the all important sweet and wine shopping, buy what ever the hell they like for the dinner and if I have time, knit myself a Christmas jumper to rival any they may throw on the skinny frame of Ryan Tubrity, our host for the most important event in any Irish persons calendar. This year will feature St. Brigid’s GNS choir for the first time, a school I am proud to say I went to and my daughters went to also. Bring it on Tubs… 🙂

And in the latest development from the world wide web this happened… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDRBjkNh3tU Go on, pick up some Irish Culture…

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