Iron Men Cometh, Iron Lady Vanishes

As I hobbled to the shops with my sheepdog to buy the papers, my hero, Alpha Romeo, swung around the corner with Sunday papers in tow. We sat in my garden with a pot of peppermint tea and read the interview together, I wish the photographer had let me make a smiley face, eleven years after the event I am much relieved to have spoken out and hopefully bring some relevant dimension to the increasingly vitriolic debate.

I've got a bandaged nose from my minor op and instructed to rest. The good timing of the anaesthetic after-effects on this particular day is I'm still a bit high, or rather less sensitive and while the interview brings back memories, seeing the lapse of time and the inaction of the State has angered me more.

Being so post-op tired I'd love to watch a movie on landlady tv, but it's been broken since I went into hospital. When A. R. leaves, I decide I'll fix the tv myself and remove the mountain of books and photos that saddle the gadget table, prise it away from the wall only to find enough dog hair to stuff a mattress. Groan, now we have to hoover while the princelings slumber.

The problem is the TV is set into a shallow recess and flush with the wall, no visible cables or plug, it's a a cool  MTV crib kind of thing that the cost centres insisted on back in Tiger days as well as a fridge that spewed ice. At least I didn't buy bank shares, I say that a hundred times a week.

Flattened by the exertion, the anaesthetic and unproductive effort I sleep like a log in the afternoon. We adults don't get enough sleep, but when I do, I'm like a different person, imminently more capable and tolerant. I wonder if Margaret Thatcher, who survived on three hours sleep a night would have been a less confrontational woman had she had her rest, would the Argentines have their own island back. I wonder if Enda could break the stranglehold of the unions and the dissent in his party if he arose at 4am each day to do battle. Where's his mettle?

The phone rings, it's a man who would never ring for an idle chat, what man does you might ask? He's seen the newspaper interview and wants to clap me on the back down the phone. He's in my house within the hour, his mountain bike strapped to his jeep, his lithe figure propped up on a stool, aviators on, Americano in hand. They don't come more Tom Cruise - the movie version I mean. Or is it Hugh Jackman? Maybe Val Kilmer? One of those super guys.

Approaching Valetta by boat, could be Ironman's Swan 60

I nod towards the gaggle of gadgets in our midst. He turns, he lifts the great slab of 50 something inch screen off the wall. I'm his able assistant while Sir Leigh arrives and thankfully takes over from Tristan in the chef department. Unplug, reboot, we're in business within minutes, two ironmen to the rescue in one day, not bad in landladyland.

Because my friend doesn't understand blogs, I had to show him a sample of this one, where his petrol head ally Baron von Richterscale appears, and now he wants to make up his own name, but that's not really cricket.

After dinner I left him and Sir Leigh to talk about a plan that will change the face of Dublin, change how we use the city, how we see ourselves and how others see us. One that Sir Leigh has worked on and I have seen gather momentum over the last few weeks. So it's time for me to retire. What will I call him? Initially, Dublin's Eligible Cool Lad About Now, will do.

Don't know why he hasn't been snapped up yet.

Artful Dodgers

Back home in landladyhouse starved of the attention of the lovely nurses, I find the only option is to go to bed as the TV isn't working and the four male occupants have given up on fixing it.

As I scroll through my messages I find photos of an exhibition I attended last Thursday. Sir Leigh and I saw two very different but significant players in Irish art. I feel an art critic moment coming on as my general anaesthetic does its wonders.

We decided to see John Doherty's show at the Taylor first, where his familiar and precisely rendered relics of Irish towns and villages are on show. From bookies to sweetshops to petrol pumps, his work may be acutely and architecturally conscious of linear detail, light and shade, but it is his mastery of colour that raises his quotidian subjects to quiet heroics.

Elsewhere, his treatment of the sea and its artefacts is as heroic as the little shops he foregrounds. The 'Buoys' series is a study in the dominant form, tactile engineering and rusted rivets fully realised, while the subordinate coils of rope and loops of chain sit like ghosts, bit players in the frame, their unadulterated form laid bare for contemplation.

Many red stickers later, John was in positive mood, with a show in Sydney on the horizon. 

The Oliver Sears Gallery around the corner was crammed with his many fans to view  the 'modello' of his major piece - giant haystack, not the wrestler, but an actual clochan shaped haystack, like they had in the old days before bails and now those big coils we see in fields. The full scale piece can be viewed in his studio in St Alphonsus Church, Drumcondra. Why talk about the haystack when there’s so much else going on this show ‘The Consideration of the Planets – everybody sidesteps the white paper figures on the landing, a knee-high horde marches upwards to an unseen room on the next level, Sir Leigh thinks they’re wrapped wine bottles. They’re a bit like the Ku Klux Klan. The artist’s wife tells me they are nuns walking towards a furnace. When Paper Figures showed in Paris, it was accompanied by music. This would be more powerful and focus us as their position on the landing doesn’t make for good viewing, when you stand back and look from the adjoining room you can make out the wimples turning to each other whispering, or looking down at the ground, and you wonder do they know where they're going.

There are works on paper, and his bronzes, but for sheer diversity, for Damien Hirst-style response, there’s Consumer Landscape, an installation of painted cans encased in open timber boxes.

I meet the blonde barrister/writer and note a few more from the bar in the room, I ask is it a bar outing and she reminds me the artist's wife is a barrister, aha. I wonder if there’s a collective noun for them, an argument of, a brief of?

Having spent the previous afternoon down at the Courts with my very first legal counsel and conducted an interview on Tuesday about my 2006 case in the European Court of Human Rights, I'm wondering, yet again, if this could be a new career. Another couple of years study, while I write. Who knows?

Drugs that Work

I feel like a hospital spy. April has seen me in an inordinate amount of medical situations. Most unusual, I rarely ail, but I've had a combination of sport injuries and now a bit of polyp issue. I write this from my hospital bed.  It's never a good time to get sliced open, but I'll just be an overnight case. Alpha Romeo drove me in yesterday's tantalising sunshine - it's always good to be delivered by a friend, so calms the nerves.

Mass Channel

Landlady fridge has been stocked, cost centres and gentlemen lodgers are left to their own devices for the weekend. Overnight guest rule not to be overturned one hopes.

We were still in the traffic when I got a call from the hospital checking I was on my way, and from the moment I arrived, it has been friendly and extremely efficient. Everybody listens. The theatre medics shake hands and put me at ease, my doctor reminds me again what 'we' are going to do. I drift into oblivion and awake beside a very attractive blonde nurse, Martina, assuring me all has gone well. As I resurrect into the real world we exchange life stories, a truly lovely experience, a kindness in relative fear. If the sublime contentment with life after a general anaesthetic could be bottled we'd live in a gentler world, maybe that's why the drugs are illegal, but for a few hours I enjoyed a blissful state of post-op harmony.

I'm trolleyed to the cheap seats - semi private means six beds and I've been put in the cardiac ward with five elderly ladies, only because they've no bed elsewhere. I've figured these ladies were the right age to have been in the Mad Men era, say 20 years old in 1960. What changes they've seen in Ireland - marriage ban lifted, the pill and condoms legalised, divorce, same sex marriage even and the advances in medical treatment they've received here that's sustained them, kept them alive longer.

I've had regular monitoring, blood pressure, temperature, pain relief, nice food, warm smiles, great care, in other words.

So it makes me wonder how in 2012 a young woman in a Galway hospital had to endure unnecessary suffering, left unmonitored and her young life cut short because of a conflict in religious/medical ideology.

There is a mini-tv attached to my bed, when I turn it on there are only three channels, RTE1, radio and EWTN a global religious version of CNN. I watched some of it for research of course, there was news of John Paul being canonised soon, of the third secret of Fatima and all manner of religious current affairs. I’m well aware that most of our hospitals were founded by religious orders at a time when they were much needed, but now the service is predominantly funded by the HSE, therefore the taxpaying electorate, and by our private health insurance.

The label on the long arm of the tv reads 'Mass daily at 11am on Channel 13'. Perhaps the long arm of religious influence in life-saving medical treatment should stop at the hospital door.

Best Foot Forward

When I had two good knees

Wednesday morning I'm at St Vincent's Trauma Clinic and the wait isn't so bad except there's nowhere to rest the throbbing leg. I have a book, Tatty - the name, not the condition - an iPad to write on, forms to be filled in for a mindfulness class, which ask all sorts of mood questions in different ways just to catch you out.

There are quite a few leg and arm cases around me, young and old, the main problem is the audible tv show on the wall, Jeremy Kyle, with crazy mean people saying crazy mean things to each other.... a teenage mother who doesn't know who the father is.. I think that's all a bit depressing for the outpatients already in pain. Everybody is studiously avoiding watching it, except the man beside me is trying to explain it to his elderly mother and keeps repeating ‘it’s all about sex'. It's really too early in the morning to be listening to him too. So I'm assiduously clacking at my keyboard, looking busy.

The student nurse calls me in, the orthopaedic doc can't read the notes, I explain in detail from memory what the damage is, then the senior guy arrives, he talks about skiing a lot, slightly embarrassing, I feel guilty taking up their time, although, all the cripples outside have foot, knee and leg injuries and they probably had a stupid fall as well. A new knee brace is fitted to keep the joint from rocking (what a pun!) and off I go in search of an iron to replace the caramel clogged one at landladyhouse because I forgot the gentlemen lodgers like to iron their shirts.

En route, I get the call from the Sunday Times to say they're going to run the story in the News Review section, I was just thinking a little column in the opinion page, if anything. They want to send a photographer. Holymotherofdivinesweetjesus. Tesco don’t have any irons, we’ll have to try another day, so I leg it home for Mr De Mille and get ready for my close-up. I put a black jacket on over the tracksuit bottoms which conceal the chunky knee brace and try to clear a space on the table so it looks like a tidy office.Mr De Mille does his best lights, camera and action, I want to smile into the camera, its eleven years since the event I am interviewed about, but a jolly face won't work.

At this point I’d like to remind the dublinlandlady reader that levity, not brevity, is the soul of wit, and I am departing from the serious matter of the interview by making light of my domestics while more than slightly traumatised by the idea of the piece in the paper.

With all this going on, I’ve managed to overlook an important meeting in the courts, in Smithfield which couldn’t be further from landladyhouse on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, so I superlash into town and hope legal counsel hasn’t got the clock ticking. If I had any idea how this case was going to start, never mind end, I’d write about it, so we’ll all have to wait in suspense, it’s another one of its kind, testing Irish legislation, when I’d rather get on with writing another book.

After all that, the new, new thing, I think, is Mindfulness, a sort of talking yoga for the mind and body. Anyway, it’s a recession by-product and I’m lucky to have been given a place on this course so I must turn up even with all the trials of the day. I think the idea is to be conscious of your thoughts, and how they’re interpreted, choosing to step back or let them stress you, I’m still figuring it out.

I arrived in time for the meditative body scan, where we must start with focussing on the big left toe, as I lie on the floor, warm under a blanket, restful after the hospital, photographer and court; I concentrate on the toe and rub it against the fur of my Ugg. I think of the Boston amputees, the dance teacher, the little girl who loved Irish dancing, and am so grateful to have that toe. I can’t think of anything else except how lucky I am to have all the toes on each foot attached to my legs and, albeit one wonky knee.