Overheard in a supermarket queue…
A tall bloke in a hoodie stands holding a shopping basket beside a kid in a uniform, waiting at the supermarket till in front of me.
“Did ya learn anyting at school today kiddo?”
“Yeah me tree times tables!” says the kid.
“Roigh… what’s tree trees then?”
“Noian” answers the kid.
“No, a small forest!!” The tall bloke grins… “Try again – what’s tree trees?”
“A small forest!” says the kid, giggling.
“No ya big eejit, it’s noian!”
—
I like screwing with my kid’s heads too.
In dire need of a nap
Laughingboy has discovered the roof of his mouth. He wrote a song about it last night which was 182 verses long, and being the clever kid that he is, he knew that in order to get the entire song finished before school, he’d have to begin at 4am. ‘Iggle iggle diddle iddle iggle iggle diddle iggle…’ ad finitum. It’s very pleasant to listen to, but not in the wee squishy hours of the morning.
Then I discovered in my sleepy crankiness while loading Laughingboy onto his schoolbus, that somebody had come along during the night and torn my sapling plum tree to shreds. It’s literally in ribbons all over the front garden, with just a wee pathetic stalk jutting out from the ground where the tree used to be. It yielded three plums this summer, they were delicious. What sort of cretin tears up a baby plum tree?
Then I was treated like a lazy boyfriend at the opticians and was badgered into giving a reason as to why I haven’t called them in such a long time. They told me I have Blepharitis. I didn’t even know I possessed a Blephar.
It’s going to be a weird day.
Such is life.
She went far far away and left her cat with Pacino, who also bought her car and promised to forward the cash. A month later, the cat got run over but survived; the car’s fender got seriously bent, but survived. Pacino lost his job, but this is unrelated. The cat recovers quietly in the garden while the hair slowly falls off its blackened tail… I think it might be a Manx cat soon. I want to take it into my house and spoil it but Pacino likes the company. He owes me money, but that’s also unrelated.
She calls me up and panics over the line, which is difficult to deal with when there’s a five second time-delay; I keep interrupting her by mistake. She demands to know why Pacino’s phone doesn’t work and pleads with me to get him to forward some money else she’s out on her ear. She would then be forced to come home and find that her car is worthless and I don’t want to be around if that happens.
I have to go now and think up some harsh words for Pacino, but I’m shit with confrontation. I want to slap him and tell him to stop being a gobshite most of all, but that would only make me feel good because I’m not the one with the problem. I could go and mother him and try to get him to admit that he needs help, but he’s a proud fucker and would take an eternity to crack. I could waft a few hundreds in his face and tell him I’ll go halfway if he can match it, only to have him owe me more money that can’t be repaid. I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for her. I don’t know what to do next.
Penny on the track
Ruby boarded the Dart at Bray train station and sat facing the front, choosing beautiful coastal views over sights of suburbia. She settled quietly, slipped a stockinged foot from her shoe and rested it on the seat opposite, then removed her book from a battered shoulder-bag. She dived into its imaginary world as the carriage doors chimed loudly to signal their closure, and braced herself against the silent electronic backward lurch as the train began its journey.
Several passengers embarked to join Ruby in her lonesome carriage at the next station, but she was too engrossed in her novel to notice. The train heaved and threatened to topple her bag… she saved it and in doing so lost her place in her book, causing her to sigh and roll her eyes. She then noticed the girl.
A black haired doppelgänger sat on the opposite side of the carriage, with her hair tied up in the same fashion as Ruby’s own. She wore a blue tee shirt that matched the colour of Ruby’s jumper almost exactly. They both wore blue jeans and navy tennis shoes, their shabby bags nearly identical. The girl was reading a book intently, holding it in front of her face so that Ruby could read its title. She gasped when she saw that she was reading exactly the same book. She gaped in disbelief.
The stranger felt her ears burn, and looked up. She frowned to find Ruby staring straight at her and let her book slowly fall to her lap. Ruby smiled, held up her own copy, and fingered her jumper. The girl peered at Ruby’s book and raised her eyebrows suddenly, seemingly confused.
“Hi!” Ruby said above the hum of the clockwork clack of the train wheels; “Good book, isn’t it?”
“Umm… yeah, I’ve read it a few times now, it’s one of my favourites.”
Ruby sat in silence for a while and considered the situation, then got up to sit opposite the stranger.
“Hey, I don’t want to sound odd or anything but don’t you think this is weird? I just… I believe that some coincidences are there for a reason. Like”… Ruby blushed as she listened to her own voice – “like one of us has a message for the other or something. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, but, I don’t know what to say… that message could be anything, we could be here for hours trying to figure out what it is. Uh, my name’s Robyn though, does that help?” Robyn scrunched her nose in an awkward admittance of the setting.
“Ruby.” they exchanged smiles and both glanced out the window in embarrassment. Ruby considered giving up and returning to her seat… they were approaching Killiney Dart station, the part with the best view of the entire Dalkey to Bray coastline and she hated to miss it, but she stayed put, not wanting to appear rude.
The acceleration pulled the girls towards the rear of the carriage as the train lurched from the station, momentum building, the ocean coming into view. A sudden gunshot crack interrupted their thoughts and the seats underneath them jimmied slightly… the girls exchanged curious glances in the seconds before chaos ensued.
The carriage swayed slightly as another loud snap could be heard, and juddered violently as though it had driven over a giant pothole. A second later a more violent judder rocked the carriage and another shortly after that. The train began to shake uncontrollably, then buckled and tipped on its side as its wheels left the track and forced the girls into temporary suspension. Robyn shrieked and grabbed the nearest support bar, Ruby slammed into Robyn’s midriff and grabbed her waist as the train’s carriage blundered back into an upright position. They slammed against the glass and tucked their feet behind the hand-rail for extra support as the carriage lurched awkwardly screaming its metallic protest, the atmosphere lit with incandescent sparks. The girls watched in horror as the first carriage containing the driver and several souls left the cliff and plummeted towards the sea, screaming voices all around them drained Ruby’s face as she began to pray. Violent jerking as the second carriage tipped towards the the bottom of the cliff made metal howl under the strain of the carriages behind it. Two left. The third could not be seen from the vantage point of the girls, but the reactional movements told them it had probably followed suit over the edge of the precipice. Ruby closed her eyes.
The screeching at this point was deafening, passenger’s voices melted into the scream of tearing metal and bending steel… shattered glass flew in every direction and a final loud bang spun their carriage sideways against the inner wall by the railings as the carriages detatched from one another. The carriage slowed to a deathly silence. Ruby opened her eyes to find that the side of the train she had originally been sitting on was completely destroyed… everyone on that side had perished instantly, horror lay to their left as a small gathering of disjointed bodies could be seen towards the carriage front through the thick black smoke and random carriage debris.
The girls escaped cautiously and stumbled away from the wreckage in silence, both understanding now what the coincidence meant with vivid clarity. The girls separated, lost in the crowds of spectators, never to meet again.
Hours later Ruby sat unscathed on her mother’s couch under a thick blanket and held on to her sweet tea for dear life as she watched the grim footage replay on the evening news, her eyes glued to the images. Her breath caught suddenly. Without removing her eyes from the screen she felt for the television’s remote control and re-wound the footage for a second look… she gaped in awe as she watched herself stumbling away from the wreckage… alone. She could have sworn… the teacup fell and splashed her goosepimpled legs as she lost consciousness.
Tit for TAT
Gerry Ryan actually stopped talking about himself for long enough to let a very interesting subject through on his radio show this morning. That subject was male breastfeeding. Yes, that’s male lactation.
A young man named Ragnar Bengtsson, a Swedish father of a two year old boy has decided to conduct an experiment on himself to see if he can produce breastmilk in order to supply his future children. His theory is that if he stimulates his moobs on a three-hourly basis (playing havoc with his image at college), by December he should have stimulated enough hormones to produce milk.
This has been done before, apparently. In some cultures where powdered milk is unavailable, the death at birth of a baby’s mother has led its father to suckle the infant successfully to weaning stage. This fact amazes me… that throughout history, and in some parts of the world today, men are breastfeeding babies.
Three things are needed for boob-juice. Mammary glands, a Pituitary gland, and a hormone called Prolactin, normally produced by the Pituitary gland in the later stages of pregnancy. Men have (potentially) all of the above, given that they are born with the first two, the third requirement can in theory be stimulated into action without the help of artificial hormones.
I wish this guy the best of luck, without any fear of this idea taking off in Ireland whatsoever. Sweden’s male to female roles in the workplace are quite the reverse of what’s happening here, with 90% of women in the workforce and 16 months of paid maternity/paternity leave in most, if not all jobs in the country. This means that the concept of the ‘stay at home dad’ is far more liberal there. Children therefore bond with both male and female role models which can only be a healthy thing.
In Ireland however, men hold on to their well ‘ard image tightly while still wishing they were curled up in somebody’s womb. Most would happily pass a law against public breastfeeding, seeing it as an abomination, the destruction of the true purpose of breasts – the titty wank. It’s probably an unhealthy mindset, but I’m a sucker (sucker, gettit?) for butch. If I caught TAT suckling our future new-born child I fear I would grab that child and run as far away as possible from the beardy freak. But then, I’m not Swedish.
Having a child suckle a hairy boob, that’s an entirely eerie concept. Yes it produces skin-to-skin contact which is excellent for a baby’s psychological growth, but it somewhat blurs the idea of a nurturing mother, doesn’t it?
Then again, there are many women out there who don’t like the idea of breastfeeding for the fear it will saggify their breasts and muck up their nipple alignment which is devastatingly entirely true. Some don’t do it because they don’t have time, others are completely horrified with the idea. Isn’t it the right thing to do for the father of the baby to give breastfeeding a go if this is the case? Far healthier for the child, and daddy gets a taste of that wonderful bonding feeling that is a totally unique experience. It’s win-win, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?!?!?
PS… I’ve discovered via a link on the article’s web-page, that breast cancer among Swedish women has DOUBLED since the 1960′s. Coincidence or Kismet? I wonder…
Stuck in the middle
This isn’t a rant, or a ‘poor me’ exhibition, it’s more of a ‘point-and-laugh’ sort of situation. That’s all we can do, really. It beats going insane.
We moved into this house a few months ago and I expressed on this here blog a genuine gratitude to the Council and to the tax-payers out there for providing a family with a special needs kid a pretty excellent house indeed. It’s still an excellent house, but it feels sort of like a Karma explosion… as though we’ve used up our good luck for a while and it’s back to banging our heads against the wall again.
See… the reason this house is so great, is that we now have a mechanical hoist for Laughingboy so our backs are saved. The only problem is that we were supplied with the wrong sling; the hammock-type thing that attaches to the hoist that holds the kid… it belongs to a different manufacturer so it doesn’t fit the existing unit. I contacted the Occupational Therapist about this about eight months ago and the poor woman has been tearing her hair out ever since.
See… you’d think that the Health Board would sort this sort of thing, but apparently it ain’t their bag any more – they just don’t do grants because of cutbacks. They told us it was up to the County Council. The County Council told us to contact the builders, who couldn’t be contacted because their company went bust, because the County Council didn’t pay them for their work. Therefore the hoist machine we have now is unpaid for, and nobody wants to know… we can pretty much forget about a properly fitting sling. Time to start grovelling to politicians again? Ugh. I hate grovelling. I prefer manual lifting, thanks.
Then there’s Laughingboy’s wheelchair. You know those circus acts where the clown comes speeding out like a mad thing on his ridiculously undersized car? That’s what Laughingboy looks like. His knees protrude grotesquely from the chair, his ankles covered in bruises because his legs are too long to fit onto the footplate properly. He keeps sliding downwards into the chair like a naughty child at the back of the class trying to avoid his teacher’s glare, because his restraints had to be removed to stop them pinching his waist. He cries a lot, but you would too if you had to spend most of your day strapped to a kiddie’s tricycle.
We… that is Motability Ireland, Laughingboy’s Occupational Therapist, his teachers and us, his parents, began lobbying for this chair seven months ago, and it looks like it’ll be another six months before the red tape is cleared and the Health Board can be assured that the existing chair cannot be adapted any further. Only then will they think about clearing another one.
I’ve robbed a shopping trolley from Tescos in the meantime, if I pimp it out with a duvet and some pillows it should do the job nicely. We could walk down the median of the motorway on the way to school and everyone could beep and laugh. I’d wear a sandwich-board advertising the H.S.E., just to complete the irony.
You couldn’t invent this stuff, because if you did, nobody would believe you.
The post in which K8 is told to bugger off
I went back to the Megalithic Tomb today, this time armed with bad-ass thorn resistant gardening gloves and a heady thirst for archaeology.
I worked hard for an hour, and was delighted to find a sapling Hawthorn tree, almost strangled completely with ivy. I freed it up to give it room to grow, and sent it some energy as you do… then began to work on the area around the entrance to the tomb to see if I could get inside.
A car pulled up on the road beside the field in which I was working.
“OI!!! What are you at?!” a woman in a silver car shouted from her driver’s seat. As I approached, she wound her window up to within four inches, as though I was about to attack her from the other side of a heavily barbed fence. She had a face on her like a Chihuahua chewing on an earwig.
“I’m very sorry to trespass… I…”
“You’re not trespassing!” she interrupted.
“I found this tomb over-run with brambles and thought I might take it upon myself to clean it up.” I smiled my prettiest smile.
“You have no business doing that!” she shrieked. “I’m sick of young ruffians coming in like they own the place and destroying everything, sick of it!!”
“I promise you, I’m no ruffian” I replied; “I used to be an archaeology student and this sort of thing fascinates me. I’m destroying nothing, only cleaning the place up. I’m very proud of it.”
“I’m proud of it too, so GO AWAY! When one comes in to wreck the place, the rest of them follow” she shouted.
“I didn’t mean to offend…”
“Well then GO AWAY” she shouted even louder. I began to get slightly pissed off.
“Look, if you don’t let me do this, then I can’t find a way to protect it. The Council could come in tomorrow and bulldoze the lot and we’d lose a seriously amazing piece of history.”
“It is protected!”
“I don’t believe it is… I looked on the archaeology information website and can’t find any record of it.”
“SO WHAT?!” she scowled.
“So… could you tell me how I can get permission to access the tomb to clean it up and protect it?”
“You can’t have permission!! GO AWAY!!” She smiled a demonic sort of smile and shut her window. End of conversation. I walked away, furious.
-o0o-
What are the politics behind this? Does anybody know? If I’m not trespassing then who is she to tell me to leave?
I hope the tomb faeries break the pistons on her crappy little car. Stupid bint.
So close, yet so far.
Tomb raiding
I wrote a while ago (here) about my search for a Dolmen.
I failed this search for a very good reason; there is no Dolmen. There is instead a megalithic tomb, or *happy claps* possibly even a chambered grave. Thanks to the combined efforts of my dear old Dad, my neighbour, a website (what are the odds?!) and Google Earth, we found it.
Today, being the second day of our Irish summer, I decided to go and explore it. Yes, I have been given a myriad of household things to be done at Headrambles Manor, but… call me Ms Croft, the curiosity of ancient history got the better of me. Sorry Dad, the cesspit can wait.
Not much to look at, is it? Hidden in plain view by a thick blanket of raspberry brambles and nettles, the knarly looking Hawthorne tree should have been a major clue. My neighbour, before she moved away, wanted to visit this place at midnight on a full moon with me. I thought she was a bit touched for wanting to do so at the time if I’m quite honest, but today when I went to visit the tomb, I could feel what she was talking about. I felt like I was trespassing, dancing on somebody’s grave. It was not my place to explore… call me quirky, but I felt a very weird condensed sort of energy surround this place.
Armed with a pair of secateurs, hedge-clippers, gardening gloves and a ribbon, I attacked. No… wait… that sounds quite violent – of course I asked it for permission first. I’m not stupid. Just because I might not believe in something, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true. 1,000 ancient Irish Druids can’t be wrong, I’m not about to go inviting faery curses upon my family, thank you very much.
This is the tomb after an hour’s worth of pulling brambles apart. The ribbon on the left tied to a branch is a gift, I thought it couldn’t do any harm. The wee hill in the background is Carrickgollogan, or Catty Gallagher, if you ever wondered how Katie Gallagher’s pub beside Bray’s Dart station got its name, now you know.
At one point, a very loud “MUUUERURURRR” sound from behind startled the Bejeezus out of me. Turns out I’d attracted an audience.
After two and a half hours I had to quit to collect Puppychild, but I’ll be back. Apart from all the embedded thorns which I’m having a lot of fun tweezing out, I consider myself extremely lucky to have such an unusual pile of rocks near my gaff. Cleaning them out and taking care of them is kind of nice in a painful sort of way and besides, you never know when the Council may sneak along on a dark night and bulldoze the lot… somebody needs to classify it and protect it. That’s me I suppose.
Parknasillogue Megalithic Tomb: After a haircut
Today I mostly be feeling small
Wasting time on the internet, avoiding the doing of things that should be being done.
I fell upon the origins of the Universe
and realised that nothing that we do will ever be important. Absolutely nothing, big or small.
I can’t figure out whether this is depressing,
or a huge relief.
Who is this Murphy lad and who made him King?
Murphy’s Law really stuck it in and broke it off tonight.
Laughingboy has a feeding machine. He needs it because occasionally when I fed him by mouth in the olden days he would choke and turn blue, especially where giggles were involved, or distracting lights, or the need to shout took over. I could not explain to the kid that we only have one hole with which to shout and eat, hence the two cannot be done together, so we built him a stomach extension instead and fed him that way.
I took the bloody thing for granted, didn’t I?
I hooked him up after school, filled his feed bag with yummy Paediasure, set the dose rate and time, and pressed the big red button. Denied. I switched it off and on again, and pressed the big red button once more. Big flashy negative red letters razzed at me without a flicker of sympathy. Undeniably denied. I detached the clip at its side and peered at its innards, at which point a piece of broken plastic fell out. I said some very rude words and Laughingboy laughed. It’s well for some.
BUT!
K8 always has a back-up plan! Yes! In my crafty days back at the hospital when I had become but a shadow in the corridors, I had managed to steal a spare machine for this very occasion! I laughed heartily as I unwrapped it. I loaded it up and pressed the big red button. I got an ‘Internal Circuit Problem‘ alarm in big red letters immediately.
Shite!!!!
I am spending my evening injecting fluid into Laughingboy’s gut at a rate of one 5ml syringe every ten minutes until his quota of 300mls has been absorbed. It’ll be a Long. Night.
Meanwhile Laughingboy laughs. He knows there will be no school for the next 28 working days and he won’t have to fake so much as a raised eyebrow towards the cause. Fuck Murphy and his laws I say. Right up the Jacksie.
