Evening all. Remember me? Back in the long long ago, I used to write on this blog quite regularly. These ticktap words, as powerful as a bird on a feeder, were once upon a time quite common. But life and life’s obstacles get in the way, and it is with an effort I open up the blog writing side of me again.

Resistance; there’s a lot of it about at the moment. We’re marching, and campaigning, and getting angry in the face of danger that is real. Good. Galvanised populations encourage me and give me hope, whereas cynical resignation most certainly does not. The future is uncertain, and amazingly enough it is not unintentional. The British move towards Brexit is going to be disastrous for several different reasons, but mostly because they don’t know how they are viewed by other countries. The UK is not important by itself, and that is going to be news to a lot of its population. And Trump is a collapse, not an advancement. He is not a strongman or a skilled businessman, he is a failure in 140 characters. However, the people around him are not failures, but are competently malevolent to any progressive agenda. Watching his moral compass become the new normal is awful. Social Media is the new depressant, or at least, it’s influence is more pronounced. I miss the days of kittens, and I don’t even like cats.

My wonderful ladies are written, and are being edited. I made a synopsis of each chapter that is one page long, noting how many pages were in each chapter. First job was to make each chapter the same length, as much as possible. Then look at each new chapter, and figure out what the purpose of it was. Then to clean up each sentence, word by word, to as minimal as possible, and if it can go out it should go out.  I’m up to page 24. One hundred pages plus to go.

This has been a difficult week. I’m older, had another birthday. Getting older is a privilege, I am not denying that. But oldness I now know leads towards that ultimate sadness, and so this birthday is just a day, now. Oh look, another year. Onwards. It is also the week that contains the anniversary of the loss of my mother, and the subsequent schism of my family, so the divisions get writ large this week. It is quite something to remember the day that led to the loss of one of the most fundamental people in your life, then get out of the car and try to start the day. I remember the grief being utterly stilling, there was no defence against it. Now, there is merely a terribleness to it, that does not drown me the way it used to. Oh, but how I miss her, though.

And now, to bed. I wish you all peaceful slumbers and a kindess of dreams. Night night.

There is today a great deal of discussion on the need to repeal the 8^th Amendment, and to grant further access to abortion within Ireland. Folks on both sides raise their voices to make their point, and our leaders frown, silently, on this worrying demand that will not remove itself. These women are sent abroad, are removed from society, are cut off from dialogue, and still they insist on having their demands heard, even fulfilled. How much easier it was when these women were physically and mentally silenced in laundries, their labour used to make the nuns wealthy, their babies sent away to foreign lands to remove even the hint of decision being their right.

Women. Bloody, whiny, demanding, insisting women, with their agenda and their support and their lack of silence. They don’t earn enough money, or garner enough respect, for them to be mainstream, but they won’t make the bed or clean up our messes unless we tend, in some way, to their complaints. Well, I’ve been thinking, and I believe that I may have a proposal for those who despair of my sisters’ demanding ways. I think I may have come up with a simple, god-fearing, religion-preserving method where these annoying women are finally made happy. It creates no sin against a god, any god, but will make those folk who fear annoying their god, or fear even more the granting of agency to women, all happy and relieved. And here it is.

Let those who insist women should not have the right to choose, be the ones to continue the pregnancies themselves. Should they insist on the right to life of the unborn, let their uterus be the allotment they take ultimate control of. This right to life overcomes all other considerations, such as the wishes of the woman, her physical health, her mental health, her intention and her will. Therefore, if this right to life overrules all other considerations, let the pro-life folks’ own bodies be given over to unwanted fecundity. They themselves seek to remove abortion, and state that it causes the greatest harm to the mother. Therefore, in their surrogacy, they will do the greatest good. Let they give their own internal organs, their time, money, mental and physical health and future in their pursuit of this ‘greatest good’.

And as for those men, who insist that women should not have the right to decide what should happen, then let their own wives, sisters, and daughters be utilised in the great cause to preserve life over autonomy. Thankfully, no permission need to be looked for, be it legal or personal, for as we know no woman has the right to decide what her body does or does not do. Instead, her body must not be used for her own good, but for the greater good, a good decided in metaphysical terms rather than in real ones.

And once the child is born, in a hospital system that considers the comfort or dignity of a woman in labour as a secondary consideration, the child can be deposited into the foster care system of our country. As we know, the ‘pro-life’ group have worked tirelessly to ensure that it is the best system of care in the world, where no child is ignored, neglected or suffers.* No doubt that they will have nothing to worry about.

So there you have it. A simple, straightforward solution that confirms that every sperm is sacred, and which will allow full and complete righteousness to rule over rationality and the rights of citizens to preserve their physical dignity. I am sure those who read this blog will agree that it is the best solution; it certainly improves upon the idea that a woman might decide her own fate. May our betters keep us from such a conclusion.

*I make no insult against those who work in our state child care system; they appear to me to be tireless and optimistic, in a system that is anything but.

Cora Sherlock: potential surrogate? 

The child should be having his bath right now. Jo Frost would be all shocked-looks to the camera at my parenting skills right now. But I’m getting plenty of evidence that there are a lot worse than me out there, so excuse me if I forgo the obligations for 15.

I am beginning to believe that Alan Rickman held the complex universe together; look at the world since he died, for Pete’s sake. All goes wrong on the international and national sphere. All is uncertain and nothing is clear. Dante’s last circle awaits us.

I get holidays in a few weeks. Hope the time passes quickly.

There is a certain element of Irish thought that accords English institutions a large amount of respect! We review the long history of its institutions and its traditions, many of whom were responsible for our own, and decide that it has a greater understanding than we ourselves possess. However, for many people, the events of the last few days have been a huge awakening, wherein we realise that we may have vastly overestimated an nation and its population by some massive degree. In short, people, the English are as thick as two planks! What the hell is up with these people, because it certainly seems they are not connected to the same reality as the rest of us!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

Hey, miss me? I’ve not posted much lately, mainly because I was too busy. The main reason for that was a little thing called the UCD Festival, which took place last Saturday. I have been working on it since last November, but things really went up a gear since May. It meant that for the last two weeks, I’ve been at my desk at 6.30 am every morning in an effort to get all the Schools ready, and this last week has seen things reach a frantic, three-seconds-for-every-job pace. Saturday had me awake at 4 am, in the car at 5.05 am, and not really wrapping things up and leaving until 4 pm that afternoon.

I haven’t been this tired since the kid was a newborn. I have pressure behind my eyes and my brain won’t stop. My skin feels weird, my muscles are all twitchy and I’m fairly sure I have high blood pressure, there is a thump-thump-thump feel to my spine I can’t get rid of. It’s not that I’m slow, it’s that I can’t even get started. The kid as well won’t let me leave the room without him, he’s seen so little of me right now. Hmmm.

Still, the day itself had some amazing moments. There was the great fun of showing my sister and her family around campus. The attendees to conferences who were dying to see their old campus again. And seeing the campus decorated was a pleasure. Check out #UCDFestival for photos.

And there was this. The artist in residence, Michael McLoughlin, created an instillation called ‘Fabric’ with me. It was based on an idea I had, to interview the men and women on campus who make life there possible. To that end, we interviewed support staff and administrators who had worked there for years, and who would very much be the students face to face experience of UCD. It took a lot of work, but nevertheless we got it done. I took a quick video on the phone, about two minutes long; 

Did it get a lot of praise? Nah, not a bit. I doubt many reading the notes even found it worth attending. Made me think of this (which is by Bill Watterson, not me, and I never said it was);

In that I’ve ended up being snobby and elitist in an effort to shine a light on the essential but mundane. Still, there is a victory here, and that is something to be proud of.

In any case. Normal programming can now resume. So swimming, and maybe writing, can start soon.

But enough about me, how are you?

In honour/fear of the event I’ve forced my characters through, it seemed only fair to do the following.

So by this time tomorrow I’ll be walking and then running the damn thing. Wish me luck….

Life goes by whether you want it to or not. You are, if you are lucky about it, going to get older and accumulate experiences. If you’re not careful, their importance and effect will be reduced. It’s far too easy to see one week become a month, become a year, become a decade, and you find yourself living the same life with the same unfinished aims and with nothing further to aid to your life.

One reaction to the passage of time is to become more conservative, to actually avoid change. This might explain why I was so deadset against Windows 10 and how bloody annoying it is that it seems to have installed itself on my computer anyway. It means that I don’t care how good Noah Wyle is, he is no Jon Stewart and he can sod off. It means that in terms of politics you see generations making the same mistake over, and over, and over again, with no voice loud enough to say ‘excuse me, can we think about this for a second?’ It becomes the same seaside caravan in Rosslare each year, and nothing ever seems to improve.

You know the one I mean…

So I have decided that even if I make the wrong decision, and I’ve spent a lot of my life being afraid of that, I’m getting less afraid of that being the outcome. I’m feeling more reckless these days, perhaps with a clearer view of my own mortality, and so might soon make a decision more on my internal desires rather than wot will please t’ neighbours…

No, I don’t know what I mean either. But watch this space. Literally. This one right here, beside the full stop coming up. Okay? This one.

So. Writing. For about two weeks now, I’ve not written a word. Instead, I watched thoughts about writing come and go and pass me by, like seeing something pass me as I sit by a river. Instead, I’ve been going into work at 6.30am and working away.

Interestingly, you don’t accomplish a great deal by going into work at 6.30. You just accomplish more of the same. As is pointed out to me in many different ways, the life of an administrator is essential, but unimportant. I’m a cog, and not much more. So I go home as tired as a Benny Hill cliche with no real sense of having done very much.

And the writing, well, as it moves away from me I’m seeing how unlikely it is that I can do anything with it, or accomplish anything. I’ll have to dig at the mountain with my pick axe for a very long time to sculpt anything out of it. These ladies deserve a decent platform and I’m honestly wondering if I can do it.

It is scary how persuasive that voice is, that says to leave it, someone else can do it. My personal motto is Stultum est non conantur. That would prove me the biggest idiot.