Little Bursts of Happiness

FIRST FEATURED ON SUNDAY MISCELLANY May 2015

My brother Tom loved life. Not ‘life’ in the sense of ‘having a life’, which is how I have always defined it. I was always focussed on moving forward, my eyes pinned on the future. Life to me meant having a career, learning to drive, buying a house, finding a husband ,having children; responsibility - paying bills, working. Life has always been something of a slog - a means to an end. 

Tom simply loved the feeling of being alive in the moment. He loved laughing and talking, being creative and revelling in what others had created. He loved dancing, and making music and getting high. Tom found the world a difficult, unjust and cruel place so he created what he called “bursts of happiness” as he called them, to get him through each day. That was why he drank, because it made him feel more alive. I drank too. But then the drink stopped working and made me feel dead, so I stopped. Tom kept going back to try to recreate the magical feeling of excitement he once had - but in the end, it failed him. 

Tom and I were Irish twins, 9 months apart. When we were together our spirits melded and often we created the natural high we had experienced through love and laughter as children. 

I took Tom to see the pop group Bow Wow Wow at the Camden Palace when I was sixteen, and he was fifteen. Small and baby faced, I knew there was no way he could have got in without me. Already working as an apprentice hairdresser, I carried myself like an adult and with the heavy New Romantic eighties make-up I easily passed for mid-twenties. 

I put some of my signature black kohl on Tom’s big blue eyes, and dressed him in a torn punk T-shirt and skin-tight jeans and gave him instructions on how to act as we travelled on the tube together to cool Camden Town.

“Don’t smile – let me go in first, just stand close behind me and DON’T mess about and make me laugh.”

It was a Saturday night and the queue to get into the Palais shuffled briskly with bewilderingly fashionable New Romantics. Tom was into punk: driving us mad with it’s tuneless pounding; worrying my mother buying frightening-looking singles and T-shirts with names like The Slits and Discharge emblazoned on them. He wasn’t a pop music fan and was disgusted with my love of bands like ABC and Heaven 17, punk seemed to reach his very soul. Punk became big at the same time as Tom was reaching puberty. He was angry, but unable to express it in the same way as many of his peers, on the football pitch or by scrapping in the schoolyard.  Punk gave voice to Tom’s pent-up masculine anger in a way that nothing else could. Plus it was all about safety pins and vomit and snot – so his sisters found it disgusting and our horror always amused him. 

We blended easily in the crowd. I was wearing a voluminous white frilly blouse – and my maroon-dyed hair had been streaked with white blonde that day in a hairdressing experiment at work. I had scooped it up and sprayed it into an enormous, fluffy quiff. Tom had gelled his hair into spikes and had safety pins stuffed into the side of his mouth, hoping that nobody had noticed he hadn’t pierced them through. He did an impression of a depressed zombie and I had to restrain myself from laughing. He was determined to get in – to prove himself to me. 

We passed by the enormous security men unnoticed, and when we got inside, it was all I could do to stop him running up and down the stairs of the enormous, gilded amphitheatre with childish excitement.

“Calm down,” I kept telling him, “we could still get chucked out!”

We didn’t even go the bar. Drinking wasn’t the point then. It was the music and just being there. 

From the top balcony we watched the band. Tom said they were crap. A Malcolm McLaren invention. Then we went down to the floor and danced wildly, mimicking the ludicrous sway of the fake New Romantic pirates in the audience, laughing out heads off. Neither of us felt truly a part of that scene, we were too young, and too suburban. We were safe and happy in our little twosome, throwing our arms around under the strobe lights - drunk on life.

Tom died six years ago. My heart broke. For a long time I mourned his wasted talent, his drinking, the hopelessness of a life half-lived.

Since then, bit by bit, in my baby sons smile, a rainbow stretched across Killala bay, a shared old joke with my husband, I have come to realise that life is, perhaps, best lived from one little burst of happiness to the next - exactly the way Tom lived it.

He burned bright and that night in Camden we exploded into life together. 

That’s more happiness than some people experience in a lifetime.

Ireland's Marriage Referendum

Yesterday evening I went out canvassing for a YES vote with my friend Stephen Cooper-Fair in Killala. He had been out canvassing all last week and was feeling a little delicate from facing all those NO voters. 'There were some lovely supporters,' he said, 'but the 'no' votes can take it out of you. 'I'm sure,' I said, but really, I hadn't a clue what he was talking about. It's a referendum. People are entitled to their opinion right? 'Can we just leaflet drop?' he said. I had a nice pudding waiting at home so I was happy to get it over and done with but by the time we had done the main street my canvassing fervour was up. 'We'll' just call in here,' I said standing outside the house of my very favourite lovely-little-old-church-lady. 'She's probably a no,' I said,' but we'll have a nice chat anyway.'
Stephen looked a bit reticent but, naively, I wanted to try and ‘bridge the gap’. I really like this lady and wanted to help her make sense of all this gay-marriage business. I wanted to introduce her to my friend and explain that when Stephen and his partner Norman Cooper-Fair had their civil partnership ceremony a few years ago, while it was a warm and lovely celebration, it was not the same as a wedding. Weddings are big showy, public celebrations - the very nature of a civil ceremony is muted, clinical, apologetic. Second best. This couples' quiet, loyal, long-term love deserved car-horn honking and hats; the kind of wedding I aspire to for my sons - whether they choose to marry a man or a woman. I wanted to tell her about my friends Garry King and Gunnar Senum and how they have been together for nearly fifty years. They are more settled, sage, solid - and still sickeningly in-love than any other couple I know. In another life they would be not only parents, but grandparents and the fact that they are not is a huge loss to the world. Garry and Gunnar got married, two years ago, on the beach outside their house on Fire Island, New York by a dear priest friend who knows a good catholic when he sees one. I wanted to tell her about my dear friend Paul Pga Kane who is Godfather to our eldest son Leo. How is not only an attentive and caring godfather but a proud gay man. His joining with our family in that spiritual role is not only testament to our love and respect of him as an individual, but a reminder to our sons that we are a family that always stands firm against discrimination, even if it comes from within our society or our church, because it is not just wrong politically, but personally too. I wanted to tell her that my brother, Tom, who died a few years ago, and about whom she, and all of my church community were so kind and sympathetic, was also gay. It was never an issue for his family but Tom struggled to come to terms with his 'otherness' in a way that I hope our next generation of gay brothers and sons will not have to experience. I wanted to tell her about how the gay television personality Anna Nolan chose to come to a fundraiser for beautiful Alana, daughter of local family Una Morris and Dennis Denis Quinn over the IFTA’s in Dublin for which she had been nominated for an award. She did this, not just because she is a good, honourable person, but because of her compassionate love of children and her belief in family. Yet - today - Anna does not have the same full family right as the rest of us.
I wanted to tell her of my own mother’s hurt and disbelief when her friends and peers, people who she believes to be nice, intelligent people, express anti-gay views. How one afternoon, a year ago, we sat in her kitchen and watched the campaigner Panti-Bliss give that inspiring speech on my i-Phone. Mam cried remembering, not just her own son, but all the wonderful gay sons and daughters she has known in her seventy-something years. My mother, and her parents, despite being part of the conservative Irish Catholic generations, were always inclusive and embraced difference in people. It was a point of Christian pride for them. No half measures or do-gooder lip service. Everyone is invited to the party. My mother often feels isolated and silenced by her conservative catholic peers and that hurts her because she loves the Ireland of her childhood but finds it hard to reconcile the 'old fashioned' ferar-of-change ideals that sometimes define it. I wanted to tell this nice lady that my own personal experience of gay friends is that they are they same as the rest of us in Every Single Way and that I believe, I KNOW, they deserve the same rights. Because we live in a democratic society where everyone is equal. I wanted to explain that, in my experience, being prejudiced against someone because of their sexual orientation is the same as being prejudiced on the grounds of their height. I wanted to see if, as a person she knows to be sane, and reasonable and who probably knows a lot more gay people than she does, I might answer some of the questions she could ask of me. Like how would you like it if one of your sons was gay? I would not mind one bit - however I would NOT like him to be treated as a second class citizen because of it. Would you leave your child overnight with two gay men? Absolutely. If I was younger and one of them asked I might even consider co-parenting one with them! Do you think homosexuality is against nature? Yes – but then almost everything today is against nature including flushing toilets and all modern medicine. After all - if God gives you cancer and wants you to die – who are we to try and fix it? We need to apply the same humane and intelligent discretion across the board. If we don't allow men to marry because it's 'against nature', then equally we should be skinning rabbits for clothes and dropping babies while squatting out in the fields. Now I come to think of it isn't ALL marriage against nature? As for children, surely we need to focus our efforts on making sure that all children are protected from abuse before we start prescribing on who can and cannot have them. Currently a psychopathic paedophile lout has more rights to parenthood than a respectable, hard-working loving gay couple. I just wanted to say all that to my nice church lady - give her my experience of knowing a loving gay people - before she made up her mind.
However, as soon as she saw the leaflet there was no discussion. She immediately and vociferously told us that she was an unequivocal 'no' voter. She used the words ‘in all conscience’ and kept saying 'they' (have civil partnerships) and 'while I applaud THEM'. As I stood there, blushing with a mixture of embarrassment and shock - I realised two things. The first was that, while I know this lady is a good Christian person, she clearly, genuinely views homosexuals as utterly 'other' than the rest of us. That can only be based on not knowing any (openly) gay people. The second was simply this. While my sensibilities are always deeply offended by homophobic views that is quite different to be offended as an individual - which is what was happening to my friend Stephen. In effect he was being openly told that he was a second class citizen - TO HIS FACE. What puzzles me is that when this lady saw me coming to her door with YES leaflets and a man she did not know who may or may not be gay, that she didn't have the instinct, out of social delicacy, to simply lie. To take the leaflet and nod benignly out of sheer politeness. Like I do when she comes to my door with priest-recruitment leaflets. Wow - I thought. She doesn't hate gay people. She just doesn't think they are 'proper' people.
'I am so sorry,' I said to Stephen as we walked away. Sorry didn't begin to cover it. His face was flat with hurt. I am guessing he's been wearing that expression a lot lately. He has spent the last week out canvassing in a county that is AWASH with NO posters. Every no voter he comes across is effectively is telling him that he is not a valid citizen; that he is not a 'proper' human being. It hurts. It would hurt me - but nobody will every say it to me. They might dismiss my opinion but nobody is going to dismiss me. They don't have that right. They do have the right to do that the Stephen because he does not have the same, full rights to the most basic, the most important, the most sacrosanct thing in all our lives - the right to family. He can have a bit of a family. A 'partner' with legal rights if he dies. But he can;t have a 'proper' family like I can because he is a second-class citizen. And that's just plain wrong.
'Enough is enough,' I said, ' you sit in the car and relax,' I said, 'I'll do the running about and no more house calls.'
Stephen kept going while we didn't do any more house calls, he did hand out a few more leaflets to men out mowing their lawns. He doesn't know this but his stoicism made me cry. His determination in the face of an adversity that I did not full realise the painful extend of until last night.
So if, like me, you are voting yes tomorrow, please share this post with any 'no' or 'not-sure' voters you may have among your FB friends. I'm sure I have a few out there. And if you are one of them, thank you of letting me stand on your doorstep and introduce you to my friend Stephen. I hope you will consider voting 'yes' thus giving him the equal rights that I believe he, and all Irish citizens deserve.

It’s official.   Hotel buffets are the work of the devil. Either that or I simply I can’t do them.

The last time I moved over to the dark side food-wise was after a trip to the wonderful Kelly's hotel a number of years ago. Three nights and four days we were there. Breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea – and then the thing that finished me off altogether- "kids' dinner buffet" at six. Two hours later, as a plethora of miniature cream cakes were sitting struggling with my big lunch for digestive space, I was firing delicious homemade chicken goujons in on top of them, and begging my already stuffed son to go up again because "it's free". By day three, I was waddling down to a gourmet dinner in my husband's tracksuit bottoms like a scary trailer-park American entering a bratwurst-eating contest.

Generally speaking, I can handle a breakfast buffet. There is an air of hearty optimism in eating early and everyone knows it's not humanly possible to stay in an Irish hotel without eating one's own bodyweight in fried meat before 10am. Otherwise what's the point? If watching your weight, you leave one rasher on the plate, then replace it with fruit, yogurt and cereal to compensate your system and keep everything 'moving'. 

On your way past the breads table, you spot a pain au chocolat and grab one saying, "I'll have it instead of lunch." You eat it in the lift on the way up to your room to put on something with a looser waistband but still, it's early. The day is ahead of you, and the good thing is that you are so stuffed you could not possibly eat another bite all day long, and you are going to go for a long, long walk and... 

"Lunch? Are you mad?" I said to my sister when she said she had booked us into the Radisson Galway for lunch, after I had just finished inhaling a pile of creamy scrambled eggs, delicious, dark chocolaty wild mushrooms and half a sizzled pig. "I couldn't possibly eat lunch!" My mother and sister looked at each other. "You'll be hungry by two," my mother said. "It's a buffet," Claire said, then her face clouded with the realisation of what she had done. "Please don't torture me."

"With what?" I said, offended. "With the running commentary," she said. "I don't know what you're talking about," I said, "I'm just going to have a small plate of light salad, and some cold meats is all."

"Here we go," she said.

When lunchtime came, I took a small plate and headed towards the salad and cold meats section, announcing, "I'm just going to have a starter and that's it."

By the time the others sat down with their starters, I was up again "sampling" the smoked salmon and a cous cous dish I had missed the first time around.

"Will I or won't I have a main course," I agonised for the next 10 minutes. "I mean, it's paid for – and I could not have potatoes…" My sister tried not to involve herself in my torturous decision-making process but blinked, silently, in irritation. 

I went up and had the full roast, and justified myself loudly and needlessly with every mouthful. Then, because I had already indulged, I sampled every pudding until I found one I was happy with – and made myself feel so thoroughly miserable I had to sign up to Weight Watchers again.

Too much choice makes me greedy and neurotic. The hotel buffet as a metaphor for modern life.

TURNING FIFTY

I wrote this a year ago just before I turned fifty - and I am fifty-one in a few weeks. Yikes! Time really is flying! The picture of me is at the age which I wished time would stand still - my wedding day aged a mere 34. My hey-day.....hey-ho.....

TURNING FIFTY

I turn fifty soon. It’s not a shock really, I’ve been testing it out for the past year by saying ‘I’m fifty’ to everyone I meet. Most peoples response is, ‘You don’t look fifty’ which I know is intended to be a compliment but is actually a depressing prediction. If people feel they need to tell me I that I don’t look fifty when I actually am fifty then that must mean that looking fifty is a really bad thing and sooner or later, on some unspecified date in the future I will look fifty – whatever kind of haggish hideousness that’s supposed to look like.  A whole half-century; in the number itself I imagine I can already feel things slipping away; my looks, my health, my children. I don’t want things to change, to keep moving so fast. I thought I didn’t mind getting older but now I feel afraid of becoming old. At the same time I hate the ageism that makes us all want to stay young – pretending that fifty is ‘the new thirty’ when in actual fact fifty is fifty. You don’t get time back – no matter how ‘young’ you look. Why can’t it just be OK to be fifty?

I loved turning forty because everything was in place. I was a published author, married with a child and living in Mayo. I had a huge party to celebrate, not just my landmark birthday but the fact that I had truly ‘arrived’ in my own life. I thought I knew everything – actually at thirty I thought I knew everything – at forty I knew I knew everything. Now I know that I know nothing and you would think that would make things easier? But it doesn’t – it just makes things scary. 

I certainly understand a lot more about life than I did ten years ago, but that is mostly because so many people I loved have died. Knowing more about life has always been something I aspired to, but I am beginning to feel that perhaps blind ignorance is the way to go.

I knew what I wanted my thirties to look like (write a book, find a man, get married, have a child) and my forties (write more books, be wife and mother, get house into IMAGE Interiors) but I have no idea what to ‘do’ with my fifties. I feel I have the writer, wife, mother thing licked now. I’ve had my house photographed for a magazine, I have all the friends I need, I have nothing left to prove. I’m not a madly ambitious person; I don’t want anything more than I have already like a bigger house or more children (joke!) yet there is still something missing. I tell myself I need to start doing what I am doing better – but I’m fed up with judging myself like that.

The deaths of my brother at forty-four and my best friend at fifty last year have begun to terrify me afresh. I feel I am counting out the decades now – whatever way I cut it, there are more behind me than ahead of me. I’m lucky because I have a great life and all the tools I need to carry it on, yet I’ve got this horrible feeling that I may have not having read the instructions properly. That there is some part of me that’s like the new barbeque we bought five years ago, used once, then left rotting in the shed until it became an unrecognizable heap of rotten wood and rust. 

My oldest friends are travelling to Dublin to join me for lunch on the actual day, and I don’t want to spend the afternoon sobbing into my big-treat Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud lunch like the confused, menopausal teenager I am right now -  SO - here is my wish list for my fifties. 

I want to write one really fabulous book a year. I want to be in a loving, vital relationship preferably with my husband. I want to be one stone lighter than I currently am and start treasuring my body so it’ll carry me through to old age. I want to enjoy strong relationships with my children. I want to worry less and have more fun AND I want to learn a new skill. Not something ‘good’ like Pilates or curtain-making – but something frivolous and useless like learning the bass guitar. I’ll be SO good by seventy that I can tour America with some amazing indie band who think it would be cool to have an old, eccentric lady-novelist rocking it out on bass for them. Yay! One decade closer to seventy! Now that’s something to aim for. 

the black sock incident

We were preparing the house for Auntie Sheila’s annual visitation. 

First two weeks of September, my Mam’s sister Sheila heads for Ballina from her home in Fermoy and we know its time to get out the Vim and the rubber gloves.

Sheila is not fussy, as she keeps telling us – and on no account are we to scrub and clean in her honour. However, The Black Sock Incident is still fresh in my mind. A number of years ago, Sheila was staying in my home. Sheets were washed and ironed and the room aired. The night before she was due my friend Dee landed on my doorstep and bagged the guest bedroom. Dee is the cleanest person I know. A compulsive bather she is comprised more of rose-scented cosmetics than she is of human flesh. She sleeps cocooned in a pair of freshly laundered cotton pyjamas - surely we could risk one night? The next morning the bed looked barely slept in, so I patted it back into shape and said nothing. When Sheila arrived I showed her to her room and introduced her ‘freshly made’ bed. A keen Agatha Christie fan, my small assertion alerted her to the possibility she might be entering a crime scene. On the auspice of admiring the faux brass details at the end of the bed my suspicious aunt drew back the duvet and with an ‘I thought as much’ look that Poirot would have been proud of revealed, a lone black sock. 

She drew herself short of saying ‘freshly made eh?’ and while I explained it was only Dee and only one night we both knew that I had lied about a matter of cleanliness and so it might as well have been a dead rat. 

The fallout from this is that my sister and I go onto Red Alert a few days before Sheila comes to stay with our mother - and rush over to do some deep cleaning and high dusting.

The semi-detached cottage looks out on the River Moy and is the home my mother grew up in. It sat empty for some years after my grandmother came to live with us in London, and now my own mother lives there.  It is a museum to three generations of our family and we all think of it as our real home, so giving it a good skinning once a year is no bother to us.

 My sister and I both have a different ethos about house cleaning.. I like to live in a reasonably clean home but I don’t think it’s important. As a writer, I try to avoid developing a bourgeois relationship with tidiness. Claire, a businesswoman, is committed to the mop. She openly says things like, ‘I hate crumbs’ and ‘we don’t like mess’  and ‘just look at the state of my kitchen.’

The dreamy writer and the practical, perfectionist businesswoman - we are polar opposites. However, when my sister and I get into the rhythm of each other we effectively become the same woman. 

‘Did you bring rubber gloves?’

‘Always -no point in having a shellac otherwise.’

‘Makes sense.’

We love each other wildly. 

‘They need a polish’ – I said when she had mopped the tiles in the hall.

‘What do you mean?’ 

‘Remember Granny and the tiles?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, ‘ remember I’m ten years younger than you?’

I reminded her about the years when our grandmother had lived with us in London. With both our parents working, Granny Nolan babysat Claire and oversaw us older children in our chores. Mine included polishing the brasses on the front door and the red floor tiles in our hall. 

‘The tiles in London were the same as these’ I said looking down at the mopped floor. 

 ‘People don’t polish any more,’ I said, ‘it was kind of therapeutic.’

Claire’s face darkened at the thought there might be another level of perfection to reach for that she hadn’t thought of. 

‘Polish the floor?” Mum interjected ‘don’t be ridiculous!’ 

But my fire was up. 

‘Have you got any Duraglit,’ the other two looked at each other, ‘for the door knocker? I’ll give it a quick lick.’

‘Hoover the upstairs,’ Claire said, ‘downstairs is done.’ 

I bowed to her greater judgement but as I was putting the Dyson back I caught her rubbing the letter-trap with an ancient rag and a rusting tin of silver polish. 

Granny would have loved that,  I thought. It’s in the blood.