Part One

1. Get into the driver’s seat.
2. Check mirrors.
3. Signal.
4. Slowly enter traffic.
5. Navigate this:

Part Two

1. Get into the driver’s seat.
2. Check mirrors, signal, slowly enter traffic.
3. Avoid the child.
4. Put car into reverse.
5. Navigate around this:

Part Three

1. Get into the driver’s seat.
2. Check mirrors, signal, slowly enter traffic, avoid the child.
3. Release the hand-break.
4. Hill start up this:

Part Four

1. Get into the driver’s seat.
2. Mirrors, signal, slowly enter traffic, avoid the child, release the hand-break.
3. Wish me luck on the upcoming driver’s test!

I’m sitting here minding my own business, when I see this:

Hello!

Huh. Who might you be?

“Me? Oh, I’m just a nice little figment of your imagination, brought about by an overly busy day. Consider me your point of de-stress.”

You? You’re my point of de-stress? You seem very sure of yourself for someone I’ve just met. You certain about that?

“Oh yes.”

How you doin’?

Is that…a cheesy grin? What have you got to be grinning about, might I ask?!

Yup. I even have…

Saave your love my darling, save your love…..

A mustache. Seriously.

“Well, I’m in love.”

In love. My imaginary figment is in love.

“Yup. His name is Juan.”

One?

“No, Juan. You’ve met him.”

I have.

Yup.

Hipster scarf and all

Oh good Lord…

“We’re very happy together.”

I can see that. Is that a hipster scarf?!

“He’s very on trend.”

I wouldn’t be sure about that, hipsters aren’t hip any more.

“That might explain why his sister thinks he’s naff.”

His sister?

Help meeeeeeee

Oh sweet Jesus.

“You okay?”

I take it, so, she’s not a fan of your relationship.

“Not really, she doesn’t believe in same hand relationships.”

…

And what do the rest of your family think?

Squeee!

Oh they just adoooore him!

Our heroine slams down the laptop cover, resolves to not eat any more cheese late at night, and goes to bed….

I had one major job to do today, which was to find a set of keys I have around here somewhere. These keys were important; I had to find them. I asked my husband if he’d seen them and he told me that if he was certain of one thing, it was they weren’t in the car. I agreed with him, he never put keys there, too risky.

So I set my alarm early to try and get time away from my little boy, so as to go at this uninterrupted. It’s not easy to arrange.

“Yeah, good luck Mummy!”

As it was, he was awake before me, and I had to get him to drift back asleep before I could slip downstairs. I walked into the kitchen and became aware for the first time of just how many places there were available to store keys.

Wait- did that pile just move?!

I tried the rats’ pile on the butcher block near the light switch. No luck, but I did find two rolls of sellotape and a pocket warmer (don’t ask). I also found an unopened pack of plastic key holders. I have no idea why I have these, I don’t own that many keys.

Then it was the drawer near the radio, and there was nothing there. There was, however, a usb key that I had thought I had lost. Huh. I pulled out my bag, which is huge. It can hold several manuscripts as well as all my usual junk.

Because it’s bigger on the inside..,

This is usually a good thing. But now it was a cause of concern. I had to pull out everything from all the various compartments, and as I have seen Amelie and never clean my handbag out as a result, this was going to be icky. I discovered a hairbrush I didn’t know I had, several hundred tie backs for my hair, small notebooks full of notes about various stories, seven lipsticks, eight pens, and a scrap of paper covered with a list that makes no sense whatsoever:

1. Bus packed, change shift
2. Flooding out – posters?
3. Man arrives
4. Lunch with nice lady
5. Paranormal investigation. For 20 minutes.
6. 3.40. Photographer … walks past.
7. Change shift.

It’s like the Voynich Manuscript. I have no idea what I am referring to or when it was written. Clearly it’s about a journey, but where? And to whom?

No time to think about that now. I need these keys, and I need them by 7.30am tomorrow morning. So now I am on a quest, a mission, to hunt through the land and get these keys so I can unlock any and all doors I need. I go through the remainder of the bag – nothing. I go through my bedside locker – nothing. I go through my usual places –  nothing. I go through all the unusual places – still nothing.

We’re now reaching Sherlock Holmes territory, in that as all the likely places have been reviewed, it’s time to review the unlikely or impossible places.

From Alice X. Zhang

That means checking out the hubby’s car. I am just ruling it out, I know they won’t be there. I get the keys and go out, unlocking the passenger door. I open up the glove compartment and what do you know?

The goddamn keys. Sitting there all innocent and untroubled and wondering what took me so long. How they got there is a mystery, as neither of us remember putting them there. Personally, I’m going with blaming the kid.

A plain brick wall is lit by a single light, and a mic stands ready.

Our hero appears, smiling too brightly. She taps the mic.

Hello, is this thing on?

Silence greets her.

Aha ha. Hi all, and thanks for coming out tonight. I’m on my holidays from work, and I thought I would make a special effort to talk to you all this week, seeing as so much time is going by so quickly.  There is no real news to tell you: my little bouy is getting tall and strong, and stole the show at his auntie’s wedding down in Kerry recently. And-

A hand goes up from the audience, and a voice calls out: “It’s spelt ‘boy’?”

Sorry?

“You said bouy? It’s spelt boy?”

I am typing this on my ipad, and it is somewhat difficult to edit. If you could just bare with me-

“Why?”

Sorry?

“Why on your ipad? Don’t you have not one, but two laptops?”

Yes, I do, but the main one is in the kitchen and I can’t use the other one at the moment, so I’m working on my ipad. So I think that I-

“Why can’t you use the other one?”

…

“Well?”

I have forgotten the password. Can we move on, now?

“Well, that remains to be seen.”

Oh do please shut up. Right, the rest of you, any more clever comments?! Or has the local element of care in the community exhausted it’s troop of helpful advisers?

The audience gives a collective gasp of horror. A disgrunted whispering starts.

I’m sorry! I am, I didn’t mean to be so rude! But I’ve had no sleep, and it’s taken twenty minutes to get this screen working, and he only sleeps for thirty at this hour, so the time is flowing away with each minute I spend trying to get this to work, and I just lose patience! If you could just-

The same hand goes up again. “Can I ask, did you have a nickname as a child?”

I don’t see what that has to do with anything.

“Humour us, please. What was your nickname as a child?”

[Our heroine gives an unclear mumble]

“Sorry, what was that?”

[Nothing else for it. She lifts her head and looks out into the audience.] The Hulk. Okay? My nickname as a small child was the Hulk. On account of my charming personality and excellent impulse control issues.

Grr. Arrggh.

The audience titters. “And how is that working out for you?”

Oh shut up! Thank you ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been a lovely audience!

This video is by an American, Jim Allen.

And this video shows Jim Allen and his wife.

And is his wife ever shown. As in shown up.

No matter how bad you are, you aren’t this bad!!

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=add_1374479949

upon hearing Peter Matthews in the Dail last night.

http://imgur.com/bfd564g

Interestingly, since we moved, he’s our local TD. I’m thinking of standing just so I can call him a bollix in the debate.

Having heard the tapes regarding Anglo Irish Bank, and learnt that Savita Halappanavar’s husband is receiving abuse, while the most pathetic of legislation slowly makes it way through the Houses, I cannot but become aware of a slowly growing opinion … Is it the case that the only time there is any progress in Ireland is on foot of people who are not Irish?

Yeah, you heard me.

There was at least one other death in an Irish hospital similar to Savita’s, but there was no outcry from her family, at least, none that I’m aware of. And the corruption in those tapes is not an agency for regulatory change, but instead is a cause of private anger that is not translating into public agency. Seriously? Do other people not see the problem here? Is it just me?

Patrick Neary, Financial Regulator and example of Irish uselessness.

Please give me your thoughts on this one. Some of you live abroad, some of you are from abroad, some of you are planning to work here and some of you are trying hard to work anywhere else but here. What the hell is wrong with us that we are so without any sense of moral justice?

I mean it, what is wrong with us? How do we fix it?

Let’s start with a simple question. Do you think that Anglo Irish were wrong, and should be charged with a criminal offence?

I was sitting in the Westbury hotel having coffee with an ex at the end of November 2012, when I made a slight joke about my weight. He gave me a look of relief, smiled and said, “Oh, thank goodness we can talk about it. What the hell happened?” What happened indeed? By the end of November I was over 200 lbs, 205 lbs to be exact. And here’s the proof:

Yup. I know.

That’s me, as a size 18, in November of last year. After I reached that dreadful weight one afternoon, I just made a decision. I took up with reddit.com/r/keto, and signed up with www.superbetter.com and www.myfitnesspal.com. I started to eat less, drink more water, eat more high fiber foods.  I also signed up to the UCD gym, which contains this:

Gym? What’s a gym?

This is a 50m pool. And at least three times a week I swim fifteen lengths there in under 30 minutes. That’s 1500 meters, so it is, and that’s how I spend my lunch break. There’s been plenty of moments when I clung to the edge of the pool completely exhausted. But the memory of that reflection in the photo above, and the idea of my son being ashamed of me, kept me going. And this is what I look like now:

Glammed up for the book reading in Kytelers.

I’m now a size 12, and losing all this weight really does do something to how you view yourself. This is the size I was when I was late twenties, early thirties, and seeing that figure in my reflections is almost, not quite, but almost like getting some years back. Certainly better than the alternative.

So that’s last year’s project done. Next up, world domination.

An update to my post here, about the stepfather who called off paying for a wedding.

Mother and Daughter, it seems, have now moved out and in with the groom. They took a lot of things that weren’t theirs, especially considering that the mother had never worked while they were together. They’re scaling back the wedding, he’s heard, but she got in trouble immediately as she tried to write a cheque on the account he had emptied, which he did precisely to avoid her putting him into debt. They’re now looking to the groom’s family to help out.

Yikes. Very very glad it’s not me. Our cake day was much less fraught.

Waaaah!

It would appear that there is going to be a legal, permitted termination option offered to Irish doctors, on foot of the Savita Scandal. This means, or appears to suggest that if the life of a woman is in danger, a hospital/doctor will not be prosecuted if a termination is carried out. This option does not come into play if the health of the woman is in danger, but the risk to life is now a factor.

Of course, this is a good thing, in that the removal of legal doubt, and danger, to patients is to be welcomed. However, this is an area where there is an absence of clear thought or clarity. Instead, what I see happening is that we are once again creating legal situations on the basis of poorly thought out assumptions and beliefs, and that was huge injustice arises. So I’d like to take half an hour to write out some ideas and thoughts, and would very very much appreciate your views on this.

Lets say there is no such thing as a soul. Doesn’t matter if you are thinking of a catholic one, or any other type of religion. We’re just some what astute apes, who have managed to walk upright for about a hundred thousand years. What would that mean? What implications would exist, if we decided there was no afterlife? Would that mean we could treat each other any way we wanted, without consequence? And what would that mean to the idea of maternal care? Who cares if a baby survives pregnancy? Would we be happy with the situation that is said to exist in China, of late terminations in the seventh, eighth and ninth month? There are photos that exist, via Google, of a late termination at eight months; you can enter “late term abortion china” into the search engine and hit ‘Images’, and up they’ll come. If we’re soulless, why would this matter?

It would matter, even if we’re soulless. We may not have a God to exert approval over us, but we can exert approval, or an ethical approval, over ourselves. We would be our own references, and the behaviour we exert over others would be the criteria for how all of us would be treated, potentially. By failing to treat the unborn with respect, we create a world where none of us have respect. We fail them, we fail ourselves and in that failure is the creation of a hell on earth, soulless humans or not. The criteria here, would be to have a society of best practice; what action or actions does the least harm or corruption of an ideal of respect for all? A pregnancy shouldn’t end, to avoid a fine, this means that the death of an unborn is a means to a lesser end.

Lets try it another way.  Let’s say we do have souls. All of us, before we are born, are granted a form of immortality in the manner described by the Catholic Church. Should we then, when a woman is dying because of a failing pregnancy, let her die rather than remove the unborn child? The fear in that circumstance is that the child’s soul is equal to the soul of the mother. However, one important point to note is the amount of pregnancies that terminate naturally by themselves. And that is about half. Many of them end in their first month, without the parent even being sure they were pregnant. This ending of a pregnancy is something that is completely unremarked by those that call themselves Pro-life. There are no calls for research to prevent these losses of souls, no suggestion that this should be halted or even any concern over them at all. It would appear that the major concern is the intentional removal of an unborn. If that is the case, would it not be the case that the saving of the parent’s life is a sufficient reason, for if it is not preserved, neither the mother nor the child are saved? If we cannot keep the soul of the mother, how can we describe ourselves as moral at all?

As I said, I would very much welcome your thoughts.