Spring

Be very careful out there. Went out to clear away some gardeny shtuff in the first bit of warumth from the sun this year and I came across a worm the size of middling big anaconda! i blame the government.

The facts

Does shouting FACT! after making a statement make it sound more factual?

What's that about? - part 1

Buying petrol at a local station, they were offering designer sunglasses for 4.99 with a petrol purchase. What makes them designer glasses? If they weren't designer glasses, would they have three lenses and one ear hoder thingy? your thoughts please.

Where did the time go?

So Son number two is twenty one next week and is home from London for a few days, thereby ensuring a watertight alibi for the time of the death of the King of Pop. He's being exactly what every young person should be, a political activist. He was a very long baby, according to all the expert mammies twenty one years ago, and remains long today, about 6'3" (don't know what that is in euros)in his fundamentalist sandals. He has long hair and a sporadic beard giving him a look of one of the morte commercially successful apostles,(due to lack of obvious ribs). He still knows everything, which is good, because i started to lose that particular skill when i was about 18. It's nice to have him around have him around the place again, pottering about and playing a few bits and pieces on the piano or guitar, interacting with the other kids, who haven't seen him for six months or so. he's off into town shortly to man some stand complaining about Shell or Iran or the government or riverdance. Fair play to him!

The Weshtern Wampire and the Walwo Race

So the Volvo Ocean race, or the Walwo race as it's called by my Spiddal friends has proved a remarkabe happening. The city looks great the beaches spotless, the buzz is definately pre-recession decadence, the craic and music first rate. the place is wedged all day and night even by Galway standards, even by race week when the fianna Fail Tint was the place to be standards. Massive Sailing craft in the bay flanked by dozens of hookers and gleoteogs, ribs, dinghies and everything else that floats (apart from human turds, God be with the days) but Oh Lord what weather! Unimaginably wonderful sunshine for the past week! yes! A Whole fucking week of it!!! In Galway!!!! the whole experience has been surreal. The vast majority of Galwegians would have probably assumed it was going to be a flop that would be a further slap in the face to a country deflating quicker than a really quickly deflating baloon. But it's been glorious. The experience is as if someone told you that the real Santa only starts coming to you when you're forty. Everything in the previous thirty nine year's life experience tells you that it's just more bullshit designed to break you're spirit, until you wake up that morning to tjhe most wonderful (insert fantasy here). Fair play to ye walwo People of Galway, each and every one.
Unfortunately the bit of decent weather has me shuffling indoors to my dark smelly crypt for large periods of time due to the emergence of a shitload of pollen which is almost as irritating as canvassing politicians, or the people who canvass for the politicians who are too scared shitless to canvass themselves. Every year sees me snuffling and feeling my way along walls to my doctor's surgery for the annual steroid injection, fearlessly running the risk of arse puckering in the quest for relief. Hot yet this year however. I've been following advice I got from a nun and eating mostly radishes. I know, I know, it sounds like yet another chapter in the clerical abuse report, but so far the jury is out. This week has been the first week I've suffered with symptoms, which is about a month later than usual. now it's also been the wettest May in 14 million years which may be the cause. We'll see (or not as the case may be)

Deceit

My earliest memory is of looking out of a playpen at my father. He was in the living room carrying on a conversation with my mother who was in the kitchen. She would occasionally miss what he said and would ask him to repeat it. He would rephrase what he had originally said, which i found puzzling, so I assume I had a very limited vocabulary. I knew my mother was asking him to repeat something. I knew he was saying something different the second time around. Whereas I may have been mistaken in then jumping to the conclusion that he was deceiveing her the second time around, it may have been that i could sense something unspoken in his actions. There was a large amount of deceit going on, as we found out later when he left home and married his mistress of many years. however, before this happened, my parents came to an agreement that he would continue to live with us until my sister and i were finished school, so they then cooperated in keeping the deceit going. Growing up, I never had a great level of certainty about what was really going on and who or what to rely on. I remember as a young teenager I spent a lot of time in a friends house, where the several sibling and parents were constantly having standing up rows with each other and storming out and slamming doors, only to resolve their differences minutes later in waves of laughter and hugs. It took me a year or two to figure out that my family was the disfunctional one! but the worst deceit of all took place when I was three and my granfather bought me a red drum with pictures of soldiers on it for my birthday. My parents hid the drumsticks and told me it was a stool. I sat on that drum for a year. Probably explains my distrust of drummers ever since!

pin ups

Local election fever has kicked in on the streets and the villages of Galway, even if the only feverish people are the candidates i was driving through Oranmore yesterday on a family drive (remember those?) when among the thousands of posters we passed, I noticed a one picturing a young blonde with rather scary lipstick. Underneath her name, slogan, and sundry other information in a font so small that i practically had to park the car and stand onm the roof in order to make it out was the party name, Fianna Fail(The senior party in the current government). It was the first Fianna Fail poster I had seen so far. On another poster in the city centre I spotted a nicely suited, earnest looking gentleman whose face rang a bell. Then I remebered that I had had previous dealings with him many moons ago , in the early eighties when he did a passable line in Moroccan black. Only in Ireland!!