Mind the bump
There’s nothing like a bumper shopper to make a dull task more interesting. You know that other person who just randomly happens to start their shopping experience at the exact same time that you do? You get that awkward laugh as you both find you need to weigh your broccoli at the same time… you gaze over their shoulder to see which baked beans they prefer out of sheer bored curiosity? Maybe both of us have children who, without any need for introduction, choose to play hide and seek together. That’s a bumper shopper.
Today I got one of those rare nemesis bumper shoppers… they’re much more fun. She annoyed me when she didn’t say ‘thanks’ as I held the door open for her. She pushed past me to get the better pick of the trolleys. My mission throughout the shopping trip is therefore to piss her off in return. There are so many ways to do this – dropping tubes of KY jelly into her trolley when she’s not looking, or maybe I might use her temporary absence to shake up one of her bottles of soda to exploding point. Maybe I’ll snap open a tin of sardines and drizzle some fishy oil through the innards of her handbag while we’re queueing or poke my finger through the cling-film on her juicy steak chunks so that blood trickles through her shopping and onto her stupid shoes, it really depends on my mood which will be highly volatile until roughly April next year.
Pregnancy is a good enough excuse for anything… technically I could murder someone now, and get away scot free! For now it’s mainly being used as an excuse to watch porn and eat enormous amounts of toffee ice-cream and raw chilli (all at the same time). Hey… anything to distract me from unhealthy vices is good, right?
God be with the days before Christianity
I’m reading ‘The Mists of Avalon’ right now, a book about Arthurian legend from his mother and his sister’s point of view. In them days, it was all about appeasing the Goddess and natural ritual and Bardic poetry and such other lovely stuff, as Christianity and convents slowly crept into their consciousness.
I can’t help but be slightly jealous at the constant mention of the Bealtaine fires. May first every year, everyone in the community douses the home-fires, then celebrates life and re-birth during a giant hooley by a huge fire. As part of the ritual, it’s required by the Goddess that random people should couple up… so named the unity of the Great Mother and her young horned God. Not an orgy, no no, just appreciation for the exuberant healing powers of spring. It’s not just at Bealtaine either… they get to do this every quarter of the year to celebrate the ever-changing stages of life and death. This is most likely the origins of bonfires at Hallowe’en, then? Can you imagine loads of skobies all dressed up as Gardaí and Zombies all shaggin’ away after their sugar rush because the Goddess wants them to?
Pity they didn’t have Youtube back then!
Scandalliss!
I don’t get it!
I just joined a group on d’Fb called ‘Campaign against cutbacks in Crumlin‘ and did a bit of mooching to see what all the mammies and daddies had to say.
Small children and long waiting lists… cuts on cardiology and Orthopedics, to name but one or two, the coiffers apparently empty. I remembered suddenly a flashback of a news article about a brand new hospital in the City Center, due to start at the end of next year. How can that be? It’s to be a state of the art sort of place, with ‘up to’ 399 beds (each with its own en-suite bog), entirely covering an area of one million square feet of shiny angles glinting all over the kip. €750 million is how much they *think* it will cost, but given that the Luas’s grand total outweighted a space mission to Mars, I’m a dubious on-looker.
Pants. I’m not a patron of Crumlin, we attended the other two. It all started for us in Temple Street Children’s Hospital, a bizarre building full of stairs and corridors and lifts that can’t remember where they’re supposed to be. Statues of Mary and prettily hung pictures of pasta and paint and glue adorn the place and it has that oh-so-familiar smell of cafeteria and pee.
Then we were promoted to Tallaght Hospital for sick young ‘uns and were introduced to a mecca of enormous corridors and lifts that served us coffee. All you need to do is zoom in on the M50 and you’re laughing.
This new place is pretty much next door to Temple Street though. Just one hospital, to swallow up the existing three, in the worst place possible, right smack in the middle of Dublin City. It’s a complete bitch to get to, what with wrestling one-way streets and badly timed traffic lights and busy traffic sludge… with the added stress of trying not to crash into Luas drivers who shoulda gone to Specsavers… it’s a nightmare.
I’m sure it’ll be very pretty an’ all, but the only catch is, they have to sacrifice a load of today’s babies through lack of care, to do it. That’s sort of Satanic if you think about it.
And we’re all just standing here watching and saying ‘Ah jayzus isn’t that scandalliss?’.
I don’t get it.
No one gets hurt if they don’t act funny
There’s a very excellent scene in Tarantino’s ‘Reservoir Dogs’ – I’m sure you know it. The Fun Lovin’ Criminals robbed a sound byte for their ‘Scooby Snacks’ track it’s that cool. Skip to 1:20 in the following video if you have no clue what I’m on about.
I was reminded of that quote tonight.
I stole Pacino’s cat. I fear that if it had been left with him any longer it would soon be an ex-cat. It’s tail is, for the want of a more scientific term, pretty crusty. It looks like you could break it off and smoke it.
I heard Puppychild giggling in the bedroom earlier… I went in to investigate to find her upside down, her upper shoulders dangling under the bed – she looked like a decapitated pink chicken. I heard the engine-roar of a large cat’s purr from the darkness somewhere.
“What ya doin’?”
“Playin wit the cat!” said a muffled child’s voice.
“Are you torturing that poor animal?!”
“Torture? That’s a good idea!! I like that!”
Ham Shank
Several highly disturbing thoughts swirl around my head on a daily basis, it seems unfair that I shouldn’t declare at least one of them here;
Laughingboy is but eight years old now, and he will grow into a man, even if this idea seems absurd to me… there’s little I can do to stop this happening. Men have needs, needs that require locked bathroom doors and copies of Victoria’s Secret. Laughingboy will have needs too, I get preludes every now and then when I unwrap his nappy of a morning to be greeted by a wee stalker winking at me. If your average bloke chokes his turkey at least 356 times a year, who’s going to do that for Laughingboy?!? Do I bring him on holidays to Amsterdam for a month around his birthday to make up for lost time? Do I put an ad in the local newsagents window for some willing lady to do the job every Tuesday?
I once caught a middle aged lady giving her poodle a ham shank on a park bench one day… I wondered then what would happen if she had a disabled son instead of a stupid looking dog? Hang on, I just have to go and vomit for a second…
…that’s better.
I wonder if most people in my position would ever think about the dangers of re-absorbed baby-batter and the side-effects thereof, or is it just me? Mothering is such a weird job sometimes.
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.
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…
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
Dance, bitch!!
I just found this and had such a good time with it, I thought I’d share it.
Maxi Cane has written a savage article about men’s versus women’s magazines and who they do (or don’t) exploit. He mentioned a few magazines he’ll be reviewing, and that led me to google FHM, my once favourited rag. I don’t really buy them, because there’s so much to be had on their website.
If you are (ahem) one of the few who only read FHM for the articles, you might be aware of their reviews e.g. their 100 greatest websites ever! which led me to something too odd for words:
Now call me easily entertained, but when I click a link and find a guy in a chicken-suit sitting on a couch who suddenly stands up to face me, I get a bit edgy. I’m told to enter a command into the dialogue box at the bottom, so I did.
“Wave”
The dude in the chicken suit waved.
“Dance!”
The chicken began to do a Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He was very good!
“Thanks :)” I said… I felt bad. I felt I had to step back and think of some oddball things for him to do.
Poor bastard. Some people just have the weirdest jobs!!!
