Slane

‘Slane’ is on today.  I’m not going, unlike the rest of the country.  I’ve a big application form to get stuck into.  Although it’s for a music project, that doesn’t sound like a rock-and-rock excuse.   If I was in my Mam’s in Meath, there’s a good chance that I’d get an itch and try to find a ticket.  But the rain falling against my window in Kildare, dampens any such notions, even though I was a big Guns N’ Roses fan as a kid.  ‘Appetite for Destruction’ was one of the first albums that I got on tape.  My lovely nordie aunt Moira bought it for me.   Between my mother and my aunt, they got confused with my request and it appears that Moira asked the long-haired young fella in the record shop for ‘’Guns ‘N’ Daisies.’’ Oh, how they laughed.

Just knowing that Slane is on, fills me with nostalgia.  The castle set in the big field that doubles as a natural amphitheatre, along the River Boyne.  This pretty little village transformed for just one day.

It’s my aunt Olive, my father’s sister, in the ‘old kitchen’, in 1985 on her way to see Bruce Springsteen.  She’s wearing a bright blue jumpsuit, as only she could, with her long blonde hair.  Eleven-year-old me sits quietly and admires her style.  As she stands there with her hands in her pockets, laughing, she is unaware that I am watching.  I don’t have the word for it then, but she looks so confident.   None of us in the knowledge then that she would die so young and that Moira to follow just months later - The screech from my mother as I share the news from the phone call, standing in the middle of the farm yard.   

It’s Lord Henry Mount Charles on the Late Late Show.  He sounds too posh to live just the road from our house.  He takes all of the hob-nobbing with music royalty in his stride.

Impeccably dressed, but wearing odd socks. 

On the telly. 

Imagine. 

It’s seeing his distress on TV after the 1991 fire at the Castle.

It’s the post fire Guns N’Roses concert in Slane that I go to with my new-on-the-scene boyfriend.   He’s a biker and musician, a beautiful Jesus lookalike, with better hair than me.  He’s more of a heavy metal fan and tuts at the idea of being here.  It’s the first time I took a day off from my Saturday job and my boss isn’t best pleased.  The sun beats down and I get spectacularly sunburned, but only down one side of my face – nowhere to hide in this big field.  We meet Jesus’s friends, one more uber-cool than the next, who similarly tut about being here.  I am totally morto at my tomato face, but the bikers seem too cool to notice.   The skin on my face peels for weeks afterwards.  Any wonder then, that I turn into the ‘Have you got your sun screen on?’ Mammy type figure at other concerts I’ve been too, slathering unsuspecting young lads in cream.

I eventually make it back to Slane for Bon Jovi in 2013, only because my friend Maria gives me two tickets.  Conveniently, my cousins who are coach operators, are bringing bus loads to the concert.  The bus is full of neighbours and relations.  I hate queueing at concerts for a drink, so decide to do my drinking before we get inside the grounds.  Seems like everyone else has the same idea.  The Nurse’s bra is full of silicone-like pouches, substituting the intended medical liquid with alcohol.  I admire her Festival Fitness, as well as her impressive cleavage.  

We get inside the gates and my cousin who had said ‘Stay with me Lucy and you will be grand’, disappears within minutes and turns up the following day missing his jacket.  Truth be told, the concert is all a bit blurry, but maybe that’s how best to watch one of your childhood heart throbs after all these years.  Jon Bon is looking well all the same, but the music is pure cheese.  I’m tutting but singing along … wooo…. Ooooh …. Livin’ on a pray ……. yer…. 

Enjoy Slane today peeps.  I’ll be with ye in spirit x

Holding Hands in the Countryside: The Chastitute and a Senorita

It’s Saturday night and Mr Private wants to go to see the play, ‘The Chastitute’. ‘Seriously?’ I say, in the same high pitched voice that my daughter sometimes uses. He is serious. It’s part of his one-man-mission to convert me to all things Kerry – GAA, coastlines and now, John B. Keane. Friday night was ‘my choice’ (the rather excellent feature film ‘In View’ in the IFI), so I don’t protest. It’s all about compromise after all.

The play starts with the lead actor on stage with a thick Kerry accent and a pair of wellies. I sigh and resign myself to two hours of stage-Irish. It’s centred on bachelor farmer John Bosco McLaine and his endeavours to get a woman in 1960's Kerry. McLaine is a ‘chastitute’, which is described in the play as a person without holy orders who has never lain down with a woman… a rustic celibate by force of circumstance’. Whatever chance McLaine has of meeting his match is further hindered by Catholic guilt delivered with gusto from the pulpit. In fairness, the script is hilarious, with a wonderful turn-of-phrase. It’s hard not to look at it with my work hat on, wondering what the budget for a fine cast of 13 actors is, no half measures with the costume or set design. There is no shortage of guna deas's here either to lure McLaine.

There are poignant moments throughout the play when I got a real sense of the loneliness of men, just a few short decades ago in rural Ireland and I’m reminded of my father’s males acquaintances. The Protestant, who I would watch in wonder as he sat across our kitchen table, drunk as a skunk, balancing peas on a fork and somehow making it to his mouth without spilling them. In his posh accent, thanking my mother for dinner, always addressing her as ‘Mrs Russell’, despite her insistence that he call her Kay. I didn’t know that the Church of Ireland faith existed until he walked through our back door. The drink made him brave enough to talk, with a glint in his eye, of ‘senoritas’. For years, I took these creatures he spoke of as girls of another religion.

Shy Boy, who couldn’t look me in the eye, head down with his hands in his pockets, watching as his brothers and sisters married off and left, one by one. His father telling my father that I was a ‘grand lassie’ and wondered if Shy Boy would wait for me. My twelve-year-old cheeks burning as my father said it to me, half joking, but deadly serious. Shy Boy would later be the main carer for his dying father, the love between them a sight to behold, but a tenderness that he never shared with a life partner.

I remember too, talk, with lament, of fine men with good farms of land and overbearing mothers. No girlfriend good enough for her darling son, who in turn went wild with The Drink from loneliness after her death, the farm gone to ruin.

It’s easy to dismiss ‘The Chastitute’, or my childhood memories as a thing of the past, but my recent experiences of and stories exchanged through online dating would suggest otherwise. Loneliness is not peculiar to a time and place. The isolated rural farmer may be a rare breed today, but the modern day chastitute is there too. There’s many time-poor adults balancing busy work and complicated personal situations. The Catholic guilt, replaced now with the culpability of a failed relationship and the upheaval caused to children caught in the middle of a bad situation. The guilt associated with wanting to feel happy again. The anxious 40-something, her biological clock ticking like a time bomb, trying not to appear too desperate, not realising that her date is so grief stricken by his own situation that he can’t even hear what she is saying. Ironically maybe - all of this at a time when options for dating, civil marriages and gay marriage have never been so plentiful.

The end of the play is surprisingly dark. No happy ever after for McLaine.

Mr Private holds me tight as we walk to The Westbury for a drink and I feel like a senorita

Holding Hands in the Country Side : My Mr Snuffleupagus

Okay, so, I fancy myself as a Carrie Bradshaw, a la ‘Sex and The City’, with my ‘Holding Hands in the Countryside’ homage.  There are similarities – we both write about dating ... Actually, that’s where the similarities end.  She is a fictional character.  She wakes up looking fabulous and rocks the most bohemian outfit with coiffed hair, which typing away on her laptop with steaming coffee from her awesome, clean and tidy apartment in NYC.  

The wagon.  

Being a pretend person, she can describe at length every aspect of her relationships, including that with her no 1 guy, Big.  I, on the other hand, tend to jot my blogs on the ‘notes’ on my iPhone, often late at night, between two snoring children, with pjs that have seen better days and then upload to my blog, with little or no proofing, to my laptop.   The other rather big issue is that I am dating someone who is intensely private and therefore, not keen on any kind of exposure on the W W W, despite good wishes and comments from my readers who are only dying for the goss.  

Mr Private has met so few of my family and friends, that it’s quite possible that he doesn’t exist at all.  Like the character on the US children's TV series Sesame Street, Mr. Snuffleupagus, you will have to decide for yourself if Mr Private is real, or if this Big Bird imagined it all.  

Maybe if I could share a bit I could convince you?  What’s to know?  Interesting fact of the day?

He loves Rice Krispies.  

‘swear.  

I assumed when I was rummaging in his cupboards (as you do, when you are newly dating someone), that the crisped rice cereal was for pint sized visitors, but no, this grown man walked among with aisles of supermarket choice and opted for this culinary feast to start his day. 

I feel bound to stay with him long enough to adjust his taste buds to something more grown up.  He had his first pancake making lesson with me at the weekend.  It was messy, no one got hurt and we both got fed.  It’s one of those many bite-your-lip moments when you are getting to know someone, where you say NOTHING for fear that he thinks you are trying to change him ( … as if… ).  Like when he puts on THOSE SHOES again and in your head you are thinking ‘you are fucking kidding me’ and imagining them decommissioned to the bin. 

The alternative - I could throw in the Rice Krispie towel and buy him Superman pyjamas?

It’s strange how he has put his arm around me at football matches surrounded by thousands of people, kissed me on a train station platform packed with commuters and held my hand in city centres.  And yet, we remain largely invisible, but there in the moment, it all feels very real.

Glimpses of JR

It’s the folded piece of paper that I come across among the pages of my 2015 work diary yesterday in my office, when I’m searching for something else.  It reveals itself to be the receipt for food and drinks served on the day we buried you.  ‘John Russel funeral’.  Missing one ‘L’ in Russell. 

It’s the ‘beautiful day’ comment when I’m so distracted with work that I didn’t realise that the shining sun is welcoming the month of May.  You could never understand how I was so unaware of the weather when I would speak to you on my lunch break of sorts, eating a sandwich at my desk.    

It’s the man walking across the lobby today.  He has the cut of your jib, one hand in the pocket of his good trousers, walking along awkwardly, minding his back now, damaged over years of hard graft.  It’s the brightly checkered short-sleeved shirt, the copper magnetic bracelet, hair combed to one side making a good attempt to conceal the bald patch, the strong leather belt accentuating his soft pot-belly.  Either here to see his consultant, or accompanying his wife to see hers, but she’s nowhere to be seen.  He looks lost, but won’t ask for help.  He is jingling keys in his pocket.

It’s the receptionist as he registers my mother.  

The usual.  

Name.  

Address.  

Date of Birth.  

‘Single or married?’ he asks her.  

When she replies ‘widowed’, he doesn’t react and keeps typing, head down.  

Despite the fact that he has just punched me in the stomach.