He Without Sin and All That Crap...

The news about David Norris reached Barcelona. I sure don't read the news when on hols, in fact, I don't read it much at all, but being a cryptic crossword addict I did need to log into the Irish Times every day to feed my habit, and so it was that the whole thing caught my eye.
My first reaction to his standing down was that welling up of tears that you have to swallow because you're in a public place, and about a minute later I thought to myself 'wow, this must be how gutting it is for Catholics when they hear that their whole organization has let them down.' So I decided not to go easy on David. After all, I'd just read that he tried to get clemency for someone who raped a boy. I was gutted. My role model crumbled. The gay community looked seedy and it reinforced some peoples opinions that being gay is nothing but sex and immoral carry on.

But then I came home, and found out the facts. Here they are: Years ago, a gay guy slept with another gay guy who was a few months below the legal age but he wasn't going to let on that he was that young. Later, the fling goes sour and the older guy is up for rape. The guy involved was 15 remember, not 5. And if you scroll back to last year I did put up a link on my blog that goes through the legal age for sex in different countries after visiting Berlin where the 15 year old daughter had the boyfriend over for the night.  If I remember rightly, Spain was the youngest, where you can do it at 14. And of course you do have to ask yourself how would people treat this case if it were a heterosexual one?
Ok, I don't know the circumstances - none of us do - we only know what the newspaper tells us, and that goes from the tabloid sensation to the highbrow analysis. And ultimately, it is not David Norris who was involved in any crime, he wrote a letter to support someone, and he had only heard one side of the story himself. Sounds very human really.
For me, the bottom line is this:
David Norris is gay and not a member of a political party, Ireland is a very homophobic country still twisted with cronyism and corruption.  David Norris was leading the race, so can you imagine how many people must have been working around the clock to beat him down?
A gay man with the courage of his convictions and a track record in enforcing human rights may be a noble thing, but it may not be the thing that represents Ireland. And that's why I'm gutted now.
I don't agree with David Norris that writing that letter years ago was an error of judgement. I believe it was brave, because it was controversial, but let's face it, he was being honest, and that's something that 'the victim' possibly was not. But of course, the law is an ass, and we don't know the full story.
We lost Clinton because of an affair and got Bush instead. I sometimes wonder if Bush had been caught having a bit of extramarital sex would there be less soldiers dead? But that's it, an affair will bring you down but sending people off to war is fine. isn't it?
One thing I'm wondering about now though is this - if you can't campaign for the presidency because you once did something that was slightly controversial to some people, how the hell will we find any candidate at all? Then again, sometimes, some things are more controversial than others. I believe that if you investigate any of the potential candidates you will find buckets of dodgy carry on, but at the end of the day they are not Gay, and I have a feeling that it is not about 'doing right' that worries people, but more about 'what looks right'. After all, a Gay man in the Arus, what would the neighbours say?

Barcelona Beach: the Rat, the Nudists and the Megaphone

Just to get one thing straight: we (meself and hersel´) are having a (metaphorical) ball in Barcelona. Note: I`m beginning to navigate the Spanish keyboard and have found the bracket symbols, along with things like the ñ,¿, and ç. Don´t know what they´re all meant to mean, but I do know that all those people who have bets on with Paddy Powers that we (see brackets above) would not last a day in Barcelona ( two queen bees and all that) were absolutely wrong. The absence of our 7 children for a whole week and the fact that two divas are sharing one room in a hotel has not yet led to catastrophe. Not even close. So as usual, Paddy wins.
Well we planned out our day today -  we were to go up the viewing tower in the Christopher Columbus monument, followed by a bus tour to the Park Guell. So it panned out the usual way that planned days pan out: we went clothes shopping and ended up on the beach. I´d read somewhere that there was a nudist beach in Barcelona, and that it was beside a gay beach. Well being a fan of both nudists and gays I decided that seeing as we had gone the wrong way anyways - in relation to the park and monument, that we may as well keep walking along the beach until we saw a white ass and then settle there for the afternoon.
Hersel´shrugged, but bought some sandwiches and drinks and tagged along. It turned out that the gay beach and the nudist beach were one.  And hang on, it wasn´t a gay beach at all, it was a homo nudist beach, all dangling dongle and no rubenesque ladies aesthetically rubbing oil along neck and nipple. And here´s what I hate: it was seedy. I don´t hate seedy, I just hate the fact that seedy and gay and nudist tend to get flung together into the same box, because come on, they are all so damn disconnected and yet...
I didn´t let it put me off even if I remembered the gorgeous nudist colonies I´ve frequented in France, all family friendly and that kinda thing, where couples were couples and it didn´t really matter if you were gay or straight or whatever. (Some of my best friends are heterosexuals by the way).
So we´re just about to sit down on this seedy beach and there it is. One big MASSIVE dead rat. I mean hello, I live with teenagers who exaggerate everything, but this was like (or as my teens would say: laak) huge laak, laak as big as a little dog laak. And I thought it was asleep beside the bins but hersel´ being a scientist and all that was able to confirm that the monster was dead, so I said that she could have my sandwich if she liked and suggested that it might be an idea to visit the next beach up; the one that the locals go to.
So that´s where the megaphone comes into it. We´re there after paying 17 euro (I still can´t find the euro symbol on the Spanish computer) for an umbrella and two deck chairs, and we have no bathing costumes because we had wandered here by mistake anyway and even if we were to go swimming we were thinking nudist ( as in nice French family friendly nudist and not all seedy nudist)  but then the megaphone began. It was all about where not to swim and what not to do and to mind your belongings, but I couldn´t help thinking that this must be what it´s like in communist countries - and Spain, God forbid, is not one, but the shock of this megaphone blaring away made me feel so much like I was in Cuba - laak - that we had to have a few Mojitos on the beach, because that´s one thing you can get there, apart from seedy and rats.
Well that was about it for today. The top of my right leg is a bit red and sore but the rest of me is as Oirish white as ever.
Tomorrow we´re going to the Guell Park and up the Christopher Columbus yoke. I´ll keep you posted...

Things I Saw in Barcelona

Ok, we've only been here not a wet day. The word not was meant to be in brackets but I can't find the bracket sign on the Spanish keyboard. Well it's Barcelona, what do you expect? The home of the throngs of Spanish students who hang around the suburbs of Galway in packs every summer and  say 'th' for 's' and are much more touchy feely than Irish teens and prefer drinking Nestle Ice Tea to going bush drinking with hip flasks of vodka.
But seriously, I'd seen the postcards, I'd Googled it, and Galway does have a Tapas bar, so I did have some idea. I was thinking about my first ever awareness that there was a country called Spain. It was at about age 8 when I started collecting stamps. We got ones with Espana written on them, and a man's head. It was, of course, Franco. So disappointing. I liked the stamps with Magyar on them and wonderful pictures of all sorts of great things that seemed to be going on in Hungary.
Franco is dead now so to get back to Barcelona... it's the same anywhere really: no matter what you see in picture or movie form, it's different when you're there. Yes, I've seen a good few of the wow factor places so far, and I've had numerous platters of tapas, good Rioja and some fancy aperitif. But I saw things that make it a journey rather than a holiday. A woman hanging clothes over the balcony on some back street, a child getting slapped by a mother who was a slapper in more ways than one. An ancient couple holding hands on the dusty afternoon pavement, sat in a city park and ate water melon, that sort of thing.

Yesterday we went on the cable car over to Montjuic, if that's how you spell it. There were three people ahead of us in the queue, two men and a woman. One of the men smoked a pipe, let's say, more in an annoying leftover hippy way than in a very British Gentleman way. They were Spanish, not surprising considering I'm in Spain I suppose, and he started playing music out loud from his phone and singing along to it in a very annoying, cannot sing sort of way. But come on, I'm on holidays, who cares.
The couple he was with would have been your average ageing hippy kind of couple, what drew attention to them was that the bloke was on a wheelchair and was in a really bad way. No speech, skin and bones, muscular spasms - just about hanging on in there if you ask me. His head rolled, his legs tangled and his arms went everywhere. She seemed to be getting through to him though, and you could see she was pure mad about him - kissing him, holding his hand, the usual carry on of any couple I suppose.
Damn it was a journey getting on to that cable car. First the half hour queue, then the lift up to it, then another long wait and eventually in we all got - or at least attempted to get.  Yer man's wheelchair wouldn't fit into the cablecar. In, out, front ways, side ways, not a hope. So his missus and the other guy, I decided the other guy was his brother, lifted him out of the chair and carried him on to the cable car. Then they held him up to the window and you gotta believe it, but when that man smiled and made noises that we all understood to be the same feeling of elation that we all got trundling across the bay on a cable car, you could have cut the air with the emotion on board.
When we got to the top the three of them said bye to all of us and waved as they went back down on the cable car. Myself and herself headed towards the nearest bar and we said nothing, because after all, we're two lesbians, and if one of us gets emotional the other will get even more emotional instead of just saying 'ah would ya ever get a grip on yerself'.  So I said nothing, but I thought to myself 'and there I was this morning, the mother of sorrows because I don't have the figure of a model'. I have to say, I didn't feel sorry for the guy at all, I felt uplifted because he demonstrated that life is great no matter what shape you're in, as long as you go out there and live it.
So we drank white wine and walked through the cactus garden and I felt a connection with the guy on the cable car because if anyone had asked either of us at that moment why we were doing what we were doing, we could both quote the great Bill Clinton and say: 'I did it because I could!'

Blognapped!

Last year we were robbed – if you read the blog you’ll remember :  a shower of shits rummaging through the house at 5am, until herself decided to take them on in her negligée. Then there was the bit with the cops coming to the house which was more like a live setting for a Father Ted goes Crime Scene, and later how even though I was the one who was robbed, I still get into trouble with said cops because one of my many dodge mates managed to get the laptops back from under a bush up the back roads. (Got my little Bobbi Brown make-up kit back too, and my driving license.)

Well this year’s burglary was more virtual, so to speak. I log in to my lovely little blog and there it is gone. I kept on typing and retyping all the variations to the word Arsekick that you can think of, just in case it was me, not them, but no, it had been taken over by some strange website with the word Spank in it.

Where do you go to find a stolen blog? I mean, it has to be somewhere, and who’d want it really? Well eventually the I.T. manager where I work ( I have a new job, I’ll come to that later) found it for me. Apparently, html has it’s own little lost and found office, and whatever he had to do to get the blog back I can only say: be nice to I.T. managers, for theirs is the kingdom of the internet and they shall inherit respect from every other department in the company.

But you haven’t missed much – I’m still not finished writing the definitive modern Irish novel, and I’ve kept off the streets which really deprives one of a good muse – although now that I’m back in the corporate world that may all change.

While I was offline I wrote the blogs in my head, and they are now gone to the place where some psychiatrist might find enough material for a PhD.  One of them was going to be about dying my hair blonde and how the boxes of dye say stuff like ‘honey blonde’ or ‘platinum’ but in reality it’s ‘straw yellow’ which is better than the original ‘donkey’s ear grey’ so I won’t complain.

Then there were the two business trips to Germany where I wanted to write about how the trains are always late and that although I thought the Germans had become very cosmopolitan, they are actually getting worse but fair play to them for starting to sell proper cheese and onion crisps, you couldn’t get them back in the day when I lived there, and also, fair play to Lidl for bringing those little Nurnberg sausages to the rest of the world, because there was a time I only ever got to eat them on German trains.

And then we were up North to my beloved Belfast. It was a long weekend with the kids. Now that they’re teens we can do grown up things together, but the bottom line is that they cleaned me out and for a deluded moment I thought it was love and bonding when they smiled and hugged me for spending hundreds of pounds sterling on some designer label clothes that look the same as the ones in Penny’s to me, but how would I know, because as they soon reminded me – I know nothing.

 But that in itself is a blessing really, because if I’d never had kids I’d never know that I know nothing, I’d only know that I’d have no kids and too much money. Shucks. On the way back we had a family chat in the car. I told them what my wishes were should I pass away, I told them how to get on with their lives, and to celebrate my life and not mourn me should I get run over by a ten-ton truck. I got emotional, and they were silent. They were so silent that I began to worry I’d upset them but then I noticed that they all had their headphones on and hadn’t heard a word I’d said. That’s probably got something to do with me knowing nothing though.

Took a spin around the Newtonards peninsula but was afraid to get out and walk on the beach because of all the flags. There was definitely a blog in me on that one. And the peace line – we saw the peaceline in Belfast. In my head I was thinking it would be a nicely painted line with peace written on it – ah no. Berlin eat your heart out.

So we’re off to Barcelona tomorrow – myself and herself that is. A week. Odd choice for two people who hate the heat and want a nice quiet break, but there you go, see, I’m just some imbecile who knows nothing…

Something About Tuam

  

Years ago, it might have been around the turn of the last century; I decided to return to Ireland having lived abroad for about 15 years. I had missed everything I’d left behind when I first left, and of course it never crossed my mind until my return that perhaps all of the things I missed no longer existed, including my former self considering that I left as a young and wild twenty something year old and returned as a middle aged struggling mother with kids who were at that age when it would have been easier to keep a herd of lambing sheep in the kitchen than three toddlers. So in short, it didn’t really work out. Dublin was in the middle of a crazy boom that meant overpriced accommodation, horrendous traffic jams and queues to pay a tenner for a cup of instant coffee.

In a desperate attempt to give it a last chance, I quit my job and headed to Galway with the husband who’d been offered a job there. We moved into a house on the outskirts of Tuam, which is about twenty miles from Galway, but being city slickers I foolishly assumed that we would be living in the suburbs of Galway. Nothing like it: we had to learn how to deal with bulling cows, bog land and a village that consisted of a petrol station cum shop, pub and whatever, with a church across the street. But there was Tuam.

On one of the more desperate days of asking myself why the hell I had exchanged the metropolis of Bavaria for a one-horse town with an annual duck race, I took a visit to the local town of Tuam. It was raining, and once I’d had a ramble around a few shops selling buckets, brushes, horse feed and gates, I made my way down to the supermarket. Realizing that I didn’t have any coins on me I turned away from the trolleys to go inside and get some change. As I did, I almost hit into an elderly man bringing back a trolley.

SuperValu Tuam - Where prayers mean more than money

‘Here’, he said, handing me the trolley, ‘take this one.’

‘Ah no, it’s ok, I told him, I don’t have any change on me to give you the euro.’

‘Yerra forget the euro’ he said, ‘just say a prayer for me instead.’

‘I will’ I said, ‘what’s your name and I’ll say a prayer for you.’

He gave me his name and I headed towards the supermarket while he headed to the car park. But then he turned back.

‘You know what’ he said, ‘if you really are going to say a prayer, would you say it for my friend Michael, he needs it more than I do.’

‘I will.’ I said, and we parted ways.

That day was one of those moments when I realized why I’d wanted to come back home. It was because I’d yearned to live in the world where small things matter. Or no actually, where small things are big things. I might be an atheist, but I did pray for both of them.

That was years ago  and soon afterward I moved into the hippy nirvana of Galway so I’d almost forgotten about it until yesterday when I was back in Tuam and pulled in to get some petrol. There were two pumps but the one that was free was only for diesel, so I parked behind the petrol one where an elderly man using a walking stick was filling his car with petrol. I took out my novel realising there would be a long wait before this old guy came back out again. But before he went in to pay though, he moved his car over to the side so that I could move in and get my petrol. As he slowly made his way in to pay I asked him if he had  purposely moved away to let me get my petrol

‘Indeed an’ I did’ he said. ‘Sure it’ll take me so long to shuffle around the shop I didn’t want to leave you waiting.’  And bing - there was that same old feeling that I remembered from Tuam. 

‘Thanks’ I said, ‘you’ve just made my day.’

I didn’t know his name, but I decided he might like a prayer, maybe he was that very man who    needed the prayer more than the other one, maybe I had cured him with my prayer. So I muttered a prayer as I drove past the High Cross of Tuam and decided that it was definitely no coincidence that Tuam produced the Saw Doctors along with all those nice hardware items and horse shoes. 

 Because there's something about Tuam...

Blood, Water and Other Thick Things...

There should be a National Auntie Day, and I’m not talking Hallmark here. Now I should know about these things because I am an auntie, an ex-auntie and an auntie-to-be. The auntie bit is simple. My brother has two daughters and one of them is also my godchild. Considering that my brother is a mass going atheist and that I myself am a church boycotting religious deserter with a penchant for spirituality (who spent two hours last Saturday in a church watching my daughter being confirmed – kids choice and all that lark), well considering all that, you’d wonder why I was asked to be godmother, and that goes back to my point: it’s because I’m the auntie. Aunties are family and you don’t have to explain certain things to them, they just know. Aunties are people who are expected to have big ears, hearts and wallets. And even if they can manage two out of three, they’ll be doing alright.

The auntie-to-be part is the other brother. He’s in his mid or late thirties, I can’t remember, but because he’s the kid brother, the other brother and I still think it’s a scream that he’s getting all grown up and talking to girls, let alone marrying one and having a kid with her.

The ex-auntie bit is more complicated though. You see when I was married; I was an auntie to my husband’s nieces and nephews. Then you get divorced and you realise it’s not just the bastard you married who you leave behind, no, there’s a landslide. It’s awkward, and in fairness over the years some of them have kept in touch, including my ex-godchild who I met at an ex-niece’s wedding last summer. The ex-godchild reckons I owe her quite a tidy sum of money, a few teddy bears and a visit. The ex-niece told me to stop saying how much she’d grown, considering she is now almost thirty. (But like the brother, if kids don’t retain their snotty status they’ll pass you out and I’m having none of it.)

This weekend, as I mentioned earlier, my daughter made her confirmation. I sent my kids to a multi denominational school where they learn to embrace all faiths and none. I wanted to save them from what I consider to have been the most dangerous place for children for the past 200 years: the Catholic Church. Of course my daughter is a bit of a rebel, and in an attempt to be different from her mother she insists on hanging out with Catholics and has now been duly confirmed as being a member of the gang.

So we made a day of it.

And that’s where the aunties come back in. Not that either of her aunties or any of her ex aunties showed up for the day or anything, but one auntie did come: my auntie.

I’ve really only gotten to know my aunt in the past few years. Well that’s not quite true, because you remember who was nice to you and who told you to shut up and be quiet when you were a kid, and she’s on the good list from back then.

And as a rule, nice aunties don’t break their patterns. Even though I’m pushing 50, my auntie still brings me presents and gives me white envelopes. She is impartial, non-judgemental and being an aunt means that despite being family, she is that tiny bit detached enough not to get pulled into the usual family brawls that surround these occasions.  That’s not why I like this auntie though. I like knowing an intelligent, thinking woman who is more physically active than I am despite being in her 90^th year. I like listening to someone talking about the past with a critical eye instead of saying how wonderful everything was back in the days of repression, poverty and abuse and that we all need to go back there. It’s refreshing. I love hearing things about the family from years back that I didn’t know. When I hear about my own godmother (rip) pushing people out of the way with her stick, I recognise my own behaviour and begin to ponder on the genetics of being a bully. And of course, I’m beginning to see my aunt as a role model: she gives me hope that I might be around for another whole lifetime’s worth of shenanigans and that I might manage to reinvent myself more than once.

But I could also see my future if I do get there. People tend to assume that because you’re old, you are still living old values and that you are a bit dithery, slightly deaf and mildly mentally handicapped.

If my aunt wanted to, she could have come to Galway on a motorbike, or hitch hiked, and yet I kept hearing people say things like ‘aren’t you great getting the train to Galway.’ Why is an active adult woman so great to get on a train? Is it because somewhere on a piece of paper it says that she’s almost 90? I realised that if I make it to 90 I’ll be treated like I’m 9. My aunt tells me that it can come in handy. She says she can ‘do feeble’ when it suits. Some of the time I got pissed off listening to people patronise her, but most of the time I felt smug and all of the time I wished she had a walking stick to belt them with. They say blood is thicker than water, but mud is also thicker than water and so is chocolate.  

Funny thing is; we are not blood relatives. She was married to my father’s brother. It got me thinking. I never would have known her if she hadn’t married into the family, so on that score, it’s purely a family thing, or is it?

I think Aldous Huxley got it right in his ‘Ninth Philosopher’s Song:

 'Blood, as all men know, than water's thicker

But water's wider, thank the Lord, than blood.'

  

Flirt School

 A while back a friend of mine was telling me that he’d been to a ‘Flirt Course’. I immediately thought that this was a great idea – not to learn flirting, but to run one. Most people I know are either single or due to be single shortly. So I decided to find out what the contents of the course were so that I could run one myself and clean up financially by getting a dozen or so desperately single people to pay money in the hopes of charming the opposite sex.

My friend told me that the first tip was never to talk about health or money on the first date, but that was all I found out about this particular course because on foot of it the guy started dating a girl who’d been on the course too (probably the real reason people go to these courses) and since then he hasn’t had time to do anything other than gaze lovingly into said girls eyes.

So I checked out some websites for online dating, put up a photo of myself as a young adult, pretended to be younger, thinner and basically an awful lot nicer than I really am, and off I went. The guy I met was handsome and in fairness, his face didn’t drop when he saw what I was really like. But then, within the first minute of meeting him, he took out a tissue, wiped his nose and began to go into detail about the terrible cold that he was getting over and would I like a drink. I decided that this information was only annoying because I’d now been trained into believing that a man should not speak about his health on the first date, so I gave him my sympathy and said that yes, thanks for offering, I’d have a glass of white. He came back with the glass of white and some horrific smelling herbal tea for himself, for his terrible cold that I knew all the details of at this stage. I thought to myself ‘I’ll let him off for slurping like a pig, cos after all, he has an awful cold’.

But then he started talking about money. And it wasn’t just about money in general, it was: ‘Now don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to buy a lady a drink, but don’t you think €6 is quite pricey for a glass of Pinot Grigio?’ I can’t remember what the exact answer was that I gave him, but I do remember that I didn’t stay for a second glass. Nor did I ever get around to opening a Flirting School.

 But is there a rule? Not long after that date I met my beloved. I can’t say what the chat up lines or the flirting entailed, because we didn’t meet on a dating website, and we never asked one another out for a date. But I suppose you’re more likely to stay long term with somebody who you say things like ‘stick on the kettle’ to, or ‘get up them stairs’.

Going right off the topic though, have you seen the little tracker thingy up in the right hand corner where I track my weight loss? I’m down 15lbs at this stage, and the group leader is giving me a pain and I’m at the bit of the diet where it takes ages and ages to lose half a pound and I’m kind off gone off salad. On top of that, Lidl’s have opened a real German bakery on their premises, and they have my very favourite pumpkin seed bread. I think one bread roll is equal to the amount of points in a glass of wine, which means that a bottle of bread rolls is 22 points.

I’d say at that flirt course that they told the women never to talk about diets on the first date.