The Pyjama Gang
If there were such things as fashion police, who would they be and how would they enforce basic fashion sense? Like those depressing notices you see in hospitals and Post Offices telling people that indecent behaviour will not be tolerated – in modern society, in a reasonably intelligent world, there should be no need for notices like these.
I now live in what could be called the arsehole of what was a quiet rural communtity. It’s a lovely place to live in if you ask me, a small housing estate that keeps itself to itself with ivy decorating trellised walls and planters holding pretty exotic grasses adorning the doorsteps. There is just one phenomenon that irks people of our surrounding hinterland no end… the pyjama gang.
These are a small gang of teen-aged girls that just happen to be travellers. Nope, I’m not going to go on another rant about travellers because I’m too damn tired and I couldn’t be arsed. Whether it’s a coincidence that these kids won’t be told or not, that’s up to your own judgement. Fact of the matter is, a few locals have pointed the phenomenon out to me in dismay, and seem to have elected me the fashion gardai. What the fuck am I supposed to do?
This is Elaine Carmody, a lady who is the victim of a recent fashion shut-down in a Tesco outlet in Cardiff. She was booted out on her ear for wearing her PJs during a brief attempt to buy smokes from the store. Other news stories declare parental dismay at the fact that some people couldn’t be arsed to get dressed to bring their kids to school. There’s a flat-out blanket ban on pyjamas in Shanghai, China. But – what is the difference between pyjamas and tracksuit bottoms? Is this new invention of pyjama jeans included?
If pyjamas are banned on the basis that they look stupid, shouldn’t spandex cycling gear also qualify?
In the case of my local pyjama gang however, the problem runs deeper. They don’t wear pyjamas to the local shops because they’re too lazy to wear clothes, they wear them because they have bigger pockets. There’s me being all racial again! Just because they’re travellers, doesn’t mean they’re out to rob everyone!!!
Wrong.
I interviewed the dude in the local shop in the hopes that he too might introduce basic clothing laws, but he spent our conversation venting a huge lament over his loss of stock to dressing-gown pockets, and telling me how much his new CCTV system cost. The suggestion to ban such clothing was lost on him, I guess I’ll try again when he’s calmed down a bit.
So, I suppose my question is, if I were to tackle these girls again to ask them for the basic courtesy of getting dressed before they leave the house, how do I bridge the gap that is the bleedin’ obvious? Do I point and laugh?? Do I hire goons to knock on their doors late at night? Even if I could get the leopard to change its spots, who’s to say the new spots won’t have deeper pockets!
Why am I bothered anyway? Oh yeah… pride and sense of decency. Damn it.
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #6
The one thing that’s very obvious about pregnancy is the gruesome. Films focus on the gunge and the pain, TV documentaries love to stress how horribly things can go wrong… they show husbands fainting, vomit inducing stretchmarking, hormonal shriekage way beyond banshee capability. Gore sells. Even friends and well-wishers love to tell horror stories about labour and pregnancy without much consideration for the woman they’re talking to, the person who is by now a mass of nerves for no reason at all. It’s very hard to take all of this with a pinch of salt.
This is a post about some of the good things, the great things, the things you crave for again once baby’s been born and epidurals are but a fading memory.
1: The Dentist. There is no better excuse not to go. Amalgam fillings aren’t generally a good idea during pregnancy unless there is dire need for them, so it’s best to wait until you’ve got your body back before visiting the surgery. So, the guilt at not making that horrible appointment is completely and beautifully absent for a whole nine months. The fact that the baby is in the meantime robbing all of your calcium stores should probably not be dwelled upon. Losing teeth isn’t so bad, one less to clean, eh?
2: Weight Gain. Eating for two. While health experts say that this theory isn’t necessarily true, it’s lovely to be able to eat six Weetabix followed by two apples, then two super-noodle sandwiches smothered in chocolate sauce, all washed down with three cartons of orange juice and NOT feel disturbed and gluttinous afterwards. A little voice obviously told you to do it, and I don’t mean the one your psychiatrist’s concerned about. Getting fat is fun, don’t try and tell me otherwise.
3: Hair. I’ve lost count of how many people have commented that my hair’s gotten all bright and shiny. It’s lovely. The reason is purely because pregnant women stop moulting so their hair becomes thicker, and the glands are slightly oiler than usual. It does what it’s told… its fringe stays on its best behaviour… bad hair days become a rarity. Of course it’ll start falling out in clumps once the baby’s born, but let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.
4: Hiccups. There is no bad mood, no amount of spilled milk, no gaping mire of disapointment that can’t be lightened instantly by a dose of foetal hiccups. The kicking is of course a thing of beauty, a welcome sign of life, but hiccups are something else entirely. After a bit of research I found that they’re not caused by a deficiency or abundance of anything in the mother’s diet, they’re just caused by a tiny diaphragm practicing wee breathing excercises, it’s owner probably wondering what the hell is going on. Think of the cuteness of puppy hiccups, but muffled deep down inside your body. Absolutely bloody amazing.
5: Drive. Thank God for gay men, I say. If it weren’t for gay men, there’d be no porn for women at all. No, we don’t want to see scantily clad men holding a mop or an iron suggestively, we want to see men perform gravity defying acts with their bits, thanks very much. Happily there are open minded blogs out there who have provided many hours of entertainment for hormone-laden horny pregnant women (think Phoebe and her Evander Holyfield phase) like myself… some links of fascination might be – Sex Is Not the Enemy, Youporn (obviously), Altporn.net, Boob.ie (Yay for those wimmin who embrace their inner lesbian!) and CarnalNation, for when you just need good old fashioned educating. Yes, I will indeed miss this part of pregnancy.
6: Lazy. Yeah, I’m lazy. Now I have an excuse. Get over it and make me some tea.
Did I leave anything out? I’m absolutely positively sure I did… another thing about pregnancy is that melted brain. It’s lovely having a temporarily shrunken mind, blokes have it so handy (;-p). Help a girl out will you and remind me?
Household chemicals- not just for making bombs out of.
Being a 30 something fun-lovin’ chick with a hectic social-life, I chose last New Year’s Eve to clean out Laughingboy’s fishy bubble-generator. That was when I discovered that distilled water is more expensive by the gallon than petrol for some reason. I decided to innovate, and got to boiling kettle after kettle of normal water and sat patiently all night waiting for it to cool down. The excitement was pants-wetting.
Four months later, and I discovered that I’d grown a very magical but totally useless algae-garden which had swamped the air-pump and rendered the bubbles obsolete. Bugger. There goes the idea of putting REAL fish in there.
Last week I re-hashed the whole process and got clever with kettles again, this time adding two capfuls of pure bleach to the water as I poured it into the tube. I was so smug at my smart-arsednedness, I was sure I’d cracked it, but no.
I turned around from administering Laughingboy’s meds on the fishy bubblemaker’s maiden voyage and was met with this disturbing entity:
It would remind you of going to a pub in the UK and watching the barman pour a pint of Guinness. Complete bubble fail.
Back to the drawing-board, then.
Smell ya later
My pet hate of the day is the farting air-freshener.
TAT brought one home last week and as much as I bitched and moaned about his having been duped by Godawful fake smellies and the fact that the refills are thrice as expensive as the gizmo that farts them, he set it up anyway.
It’s like a big stupid white dildo on the shelf there, reminding visitors that we stink.
I hate it.
Whenever I walk into the room it farts at me. This is okay during daylight, but at night it’s a whole different story. I reserve the right to wander into the kitchen at 3am for my nightly fix of chocolate biscuits and milk without having the bollix scared out of me by a farting air-freshener. It sounds just like a cat, hissing violently at me as I walk past. It gets me every time. Sometimes it sees me coming and farts directly into my eyes, scaring me and blinding me in one fell swoop. Other times it waits until I’ve just passed it, then hisses at me behind my back, causing me to scream in blind panic in my sleepy state and whirl round jiu-jitsu style to face my combattant feline attacker. Then I just feel stupid.
I moved it to the shelf above the TV yesterday. That didn’t work, it just farted on my TV dinners. This morning it got moved to the computer table and messed up my mouse’s mojo with its sticky effluent.
Tomorrow the farting air-freshener faces death by pressure cooker. Pine fresh my arse.
Eastery Artistry
Easter Holidays. A time to reflect about how much fun school actually is. A time to figure out ways to entertain one’s children without involving the television or the outside world because it’s feckin’ snowing out there for some reason.
I thought about making something chocolaty but given that I’m pregnant, it turns out there isn’t an ounce of the stuff left in the whole house. I thought about glueing eggshells back together but eggshells are flaky things and refuse to stay in tact under the pressure of a five-year-old’s grasp. I’d hard-boil them, but hey, we’re in a recession.
It was Puppychild who suggested an Art Attack. It’s one of her most favourite TV shows, bar Supernanny and Spongebob Squarepants. I showed her the website and guided her through its archives, asking her to pick an art project to do. I expected her to choose something involving fairies or fashion or something pink at least, but no.
She chose the severed hand.
I’m so delighted she’s inherited my sense of the macabre. TAT objected that this art project isn’t exactly Easter related but I disagreed… it does have loose connections to the theme of resurrection, if you think about it.
I put a spell on you…
One of the biggest things I missed about my next door neighbour when she moved away were the snippets of eyebrow-raising advice she used to dole out. Given that witches never really speak about being witches, especially to relative strangers, I felt honoured that she’d envelop me into her circle of trust and tell me of her voodoo shenanigans. After all, there’s a fine line between an open-minded person and someone who’s all too willing to go behind your back and bitch about what a weirdo you are, especially in Ireland.
She loaned me books about rituals. She taught me how to make altars so that I’d have my own personal space to meditate in, a space that meant something only to me. I learned amazing things.
How to get rid of an unwanted live-in houseguest:
Place a witch’s broomstick in the hallway beside the door, and stick a fork into the bristles. Within two weeks, the unwanted guest should be a thing of the past. I may be rough on specifics… maybe the fork needs to be made of a certain type of metal, maybe the broom should be upside-down – it’s not really something I’d try, but her story amused me. A friend of hers did this trick, and within two weeks was separated from her husband. Turns out that she herself was the disruptive influence in the house and her leaving was the best thing that happened for everyone involved. Eerie.
How to nab the house of your dreams:
Whether you’re bidding for a house, or hoping to inherit and battling with siblings, or maybe you just fancy the look of someone else’s gaff (I keep thinking of The War of the Roses for some reason), apparently there’s a fail-safe trick you can do to assure that pile of bricks will someday be yours.
Once a month, given obviously that you’re a female, you need to sneak onto the property, squat, and leak a few droplets of your own menstrual blood onto the soil surrounding the house. I’m not sure what your alternatives are if you’re post menopausal, perhaps crones in covens stockpile menstrual blood in their freezers? It’s an awfully personal question to ask.
I would seriously love to know if this actually works. There’s a beautiful house nearby, a stone-walled three-storey haven surrounded by mysterious woody hinterland with an elaborate tree house just about visible to plebs like me who gaze wistfully from behind a steeringwheel as I pass by every day. If I was caught mid-squat, I’d be scarleh, it’s not like I could pretend I had dropped a contact lens or something. If anything I’d be looking at a two-to-five stretch inside.
It would be kind of worth it if not for scientific experimentation though. Any takers?
Time to put what where our mouth is?!?
I love the way Thai folk get straight to the point. There’s no lying around waiting for others to do the dirty work for them, if you annoy them somehow, they’ll tell you unapologetically. We Irish could do with taking a leaf out of their book.
They’re pissed off with their government too.
“We will curse them, the aristocrats, the powerful people,” screamed Nattawut Saikua, a leader of a That anti-establishment street faction known as the Red Shirts.
“We will curse them with our own blood!”
And that’s just what they did. Thousands of supporters all donated a tablespoon of their own blood towards the cause, which was collected in gallon bottles, then slooshed in a dramatic gore-fest all over government buildings in Bangkok. That’s stylish protesting, that is.
All right, so there’s the dubious question of AIDS – how to test the donators, if tested at all? The Thai Red Cross objected strongly, citing the protest as a waste of much needed blood. Fair enough.
I can’t help but wonder if protesters in this country could do something like this, instead of gathering en-masse in Airports and hiding in buildings in sulky protest to the massive disgruntlement of the general public; would something grotesquely perverse work instead? If not blood, then there’s always the other option…
After all, it could be said that our country’s leaders are for the most part taking the piss.
Why don’t we give some to them for free?
In a world where sanity is a commodity
This is a blog post which probably should go without being written, but given the cathartic nature of blogging, fuck it.
Echinacea failed me last week for a change. I found myself standing in Laughingboy’s bedroom in dismay as our family doctor spoke on the phone to the ambulance crew in the background and my little boy fought to squeeze oxygen into his clogged up little lungs. Auto-pilot took a while to take over, but next thing I knew, the bag had been packed and I was riding in the back of the ambulance with the sirens blaring. “Hey dude, they’re playing that for you! How cool is that?!” The irony hit me that ambulance sirens are only cool when you’re not on the stretcher, so I shut up to the quiet amusement of the paramedic.
He’s home now, fully oxygenated and saturated with antibiotics. I was getting used to his hospital room, it was peaceful in there, apart from the odd 3am emergency helicopter landing outside our window.
I had a rough night last night… I dreamed of wading through rubbish-dumps full of rotting corpses, and trying to hawk two black bags full of household un-want at a car boot sale, also full of dead people. It’s strange, but Puppychild losing her blanket has affected me far more than her.
One of the people who babysat her during our wee trip to the hospital took it upon herself to decide that now was the time my five-year-old must grow out of her comfort blanket, see. So, it went in the bin. I thought it would have been a proverbial bin, but it wasn’t. By the time I had phoned to retrieve it (to stash in the attic until Puppychild reaches twenty one), the bin-men had come and gone, apparently. Gutted doesn’t even come close. It’s amazing how like a pet a raggedy smelly old blanket becomes.
I’m thinking that some people actually deserve to have their toilet-seat superglued.
Earlier today a woman behind the counter in Avoca Handweavers smiled at my swelling belly and asked me how long I had left. I hear that question a lot, and the answers are getting frighteningly short so today I changed tack, because I was in the mood. I gasped in indignance and retorted at the top of my voice; ‘ARE YOU SAYING I’M FAT?!?’, and stormed off with a big smile on my face. It felt good. I think I might leave that as my standard answer from now on.
Human milk rules
When I had Laughingboy eight years ago and came face-to-boob with a myriad of problems caused by his developmental delay, I had no idea where to turn. The nurses in the maternity hospital were less helpful than they were physically violent… it’s a weird thing entirely having your delicate lady lumps viciously man-handled by a bearded nurse, and being woken every two hours to ‘try again’ when I was severely sleep deprived wasn’t very nice. They put me off the whole idea to be honest.
There are various local groups and enterprises that are there to help in this situation, but the vast range of opinions can be confusing, so I’m delighted to see this new parent-orientated version ‘Friends Of Breastfeeding‘ evolving.
“Friends of Breastfeeding was formed by a group of mothers who met on online parenting forums. Many of these mothers found the internet to be the only place they could access true support and reliable information and advice about breastfeeding. The need for two things was clear to everyone involved – better understanding of breastfeeding across the general public, and improved access to good breastfeeding support in Ireland for women who want to breastfeed their babies.”
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Feeding Puppychild was an entirely different, easier and much more lovely experience. She and I would retreat to a quiet place and she would make the back of my neck tingle as the flow commenced… we would sit there for as long as she needed until her eyelids drooped. I can’t describe what an addictive feeling that is, it’s a maternal opiate. They told me when I had tonsillitis that I had to cease breastfeeding while taking antibiotics. Turns out this was complete bullshit, and the horrendous rip through the sacred bond that followed was totally unnecessary. I wish parental support and advice could have been around back then.
Now I have a new problem. Puppychild now realises that this new baby won’t be fed by magic glittery bottle like her doll babies are, rather he or she will get milk from mummy’s boobs.
Puppychild is fine with this. Her curiosity is encouraging, in fact. A little too encouraging.
She asks me every now and then if she can have a go, and is perfectly accepting of my reply that there simply isn’t any milk yet, until the baby actually appears. But, there will be a day when she will be entirely more insistent that she have a go of my boob, straight from the tap as it were.
I’ve never heard of anyone else dealing with that problem before. I don’t want her to sense my revulsion at the idea, and I definitely don’t want the relationship between Puppychild and her new sibling to be founded on jealousy… it’s a horribly awkward position to be in, and yet it must be breezed through like a hot knife through butter.
I suppose the problem lies in society. The YouTube clip below creeps the hell out of me, it makes me gag and retch that a child so old still breastfeeds, but Puppychild wouldn’t flinch. She’d see it for the natural act that it is. So – is this my problem or her problem? I’ve no idea.
The Birds
When I first saw the Hitchcock version I was nonplussed. What’s the big problem with rake loads of crows hanging around? Around here, they do it all the time. Okay so they don’t do it all the time, just at certain hours at random times of year… I’d do a proper study on it if I could be arsed – maybe some day. It would remind you of a Westlife concert – thousands of people all flocked together – it makes you wonder… what’s the attraction?
One thing I have noticed though, is that they like bin day. I’m impressed that they’ve figured out what day that is, most of my neighbours haven’t even managed that yet. Rubbish mysteriously appears everywhere robbed from slightly overflowing bins, and neighbourhood kids get dirty looks from their elders even though they had nothing to do with it.
Rancid pineapples and small milk cartons are carefully placed on the road by un-seen forces, and when squished by cars, are devoured within minutes. How clever is that?
I made a quick, very boring video of it with my phone recently as the murder flocked in the field next door. From there, they move on to the trees overlooking our houses, and stay there for a while, just watching and learning. What’s really creepy is that if you were to go outside and throw bread for them, they don’t come over to eat it, they just remain. Staring. Plotting. Then they just… bugger off.
Thus ends my highly scientific wildlife observation. Look out David Attenborough.
