Trolls, Trials and Tomes

I was so exhausted after two weeks with a student who, in fairness, was no trouble, it was me, talking 200% more than average and mentially being on home-duty every morning and evening... that I couldn't even blog.
Now there's a pile up of landlady lore before the next fella moves in. 

Morning holds such promise with freshly brewed coffee, an allegedly low-cal cereal and opening hopeful emails, any day now a publisher will write back. With good news this time.

Europe might be out of the recession but I for one know that it won’t be over in this house until I unsubscribe to emails from jobs.ie, eTenders and GrabOne.  I don’t even know why I bother scanning the list of jobs for IT/foreign language programmers on Google, because any of the ones I could do, like PA with English, they don’t even reply to. Last year was the upskill, interview, CV, recruitment drive. I can either say it was a complete waste of time or it gave me a perspective on a niche sphere. Well, it is a sphere that is a complete waste of time if you’re not in IT/Finance/Marketing/PR/HR, masters level liberal arts and twenty years of business practice counts for nothing these days. Yet I was told my CV was intimidating, my references were outstanding and could overpower a boss, so I should remove my achievements and big-up my typing speed (70wpm in case you’re interested). I even did on-line tests in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and was impressed by what my laptop could achieve as I dithered; now I know what Macros are for.  

As for eTenders, I might as well unsubscribe now. The last time I tendered was at the invitation of a semi-state to be on their conservation panel. I had to take out Professional Indemnity insurance just to submit, at a minimum of 1,000 euro that turned out to be a complete waste of time and money.

That leaves my email inbox with the odd Twitter message, Facebook telling me to say happy birthday to loads of people, sales of sex toys and invitations to galleries and book launches.

It’s a shame our two major galleries are all but closed and there are no blockbuster exhibitions to excite tourists and denizens alike. But emails from the private galleries still show commitment to artists, they're putting on regular shows, there's still money to buy art, just not new money. Green on Red, Kevin Kavanagh, Oliver Sears, Cross Gallery and the Kerlin are all still doing business.

Without email I wouldn’t have got my invite to Roddy Doyle’s The Guts launch or Joe Joyce’s Echoland.  Three Booker winners at one of them, veteran investigative journalists at the other, talent and good will everywhere. I’m glad I went, bought the books, had the chat with friends I haven’t seen in ages and resolved to persevere even more on editing my own novel. 10,000 of my 125,000 words cut in the last two weeks, ouch.

Now that I’m contributing opinion pieces to the Irish Independent, how could I give up Google? They mightn’t want to interview me but they save me all those years I used to spend in libraries. And as for email, I wrote an article in 3 hours last week and was able to verify all my facts by contacting expert friends in high places, without getting out of my pyjamas.

There’s a lot to mistrust about the internet, there’s scary Ask.FM, scary Eric Eoin Marquez, loathsome trolls on Twitter, it’s up to the rest of us to uphold good standards and cut out the crap.

I met a man recently who would have nothing to do with any of it, a much respected literary agent. He doesn’t have a mobile, a web-site, email or use the internet. I contacted him by landline, left a message on his answering machine, he phoned back, we talked, I posted a hard copy of 3 chapters, in an envelope with a stamp.

We got along very well, but he sent me away to ‘do more work’ and I don’t think he meant writing blogs to distract myself from the task in hand, back to the book…

He represents 160 authors. Sure, who knows….

Pest Control

There just had to be a drama between the time the Dail *rose* and the Supreme Court *sits* otherwise what else would I have to write about? The #royalbabyboy ‘GAL’ is so over. Collapse of trial for corruption in rezoning is so soul destroying and worst of all the Revenue trousering several hundred in property tax out of my bank account is sending me into a melancholic spiral, so much so, I’m doing two weeks Bean an Ti duty with an Italian student to cover it. I can’t remember the last time I served dinner seven nights in a row, never mind FOURTEEN.

Before the Rat Attack

When Cost Centre #2 sauntered in from his internship last night starving (they send him home in a taxi, but he doesn’t get time to eat all day, bless) he threw a withering look at the war zone that is now the garden.

‘Did you catch him?’

‘Not, yet.’

‘Everybody knows rats are the most evolved species, they’re smarter than humans, they outlived dinosaurs,' he proclaims.

At that moment the creature appears and struts around the garden sniffing for food, starting to climb up a table. It’s jaw-droppingly arrogant, to think I’ve been sitting out there for the last few weeks, thinking it was a leaf falling every time I heard a swoosh sound, it was the bastard scuttering down the wall.

‘He’s outsmarted you,’ CC#2 guffaws, ‘Rat 1 Mom Nil.’

Thanks David Attenborough.

He looks up the internet, most hits are for peanut butter, all the experts say that’s the thing they can’t resist. Cost Centre #1 is out, but at least he has set the traps with bacon so now it only fairly befalls the other one to improve the strategy. Fairness is something my sons have no concept of. Nor do I think they ever will have. Perhaps some wife along the way will beat it into them.

I donate my rubber gloves to the operation and we sacrifice a knife that will have to be thrown out. Attenborough ventures out with the bowl of peanut butter and complains bitterly about the placing of the traps. Everything anybody else does in landladyhouse is *shit* according to him. Indeed there was a book published a few years ago, just for boys like him I'm sure, called ‘Is Everything Shit, or is it just me?’ Sorry, I digress, this is painful to write.

The War Zone

Attenborough says he refuses to deal with any deck-kill as he expertly smears the peanut butter over the raw bacon.

McGyver (CC#1) returns and checks his traps, commenting Attenborough is a wimp and anyway he saw the rat first and did all the work, you get the picture.

We turn out the lights and wait for action. A Random Cat arrives to balance nature, this is when I’d normally bang the window to get rid of unwelcome feline. Oh, for my sheepdog now (she’s on her annual slimming holiday in Glandore with my neighbours).

Attenborough and I stand on seats inside and crane out the window, as if it's going to run up our legs. He points out the cats ears curving and turning as its sonar stealthily detects the position of the rat beneath the deck. The rat's sonar being more advanced it must be deflecting or disguising itself. Note I am trying to convince myself it’s in the singular, contrary to hardware man who says ‘if you see one, there’s more’.

The varmint seems to have outwitted the cat as well, the floor show ends without incident and Attenborough decamps to Playstation.

‘I told you they were smarter than humans, only them and sharks have outlived dinosaurs, you don't expect to win do you?’

It's always his parting shot.

So, this morning I survey the battlefield after the deluge, the apocalyptic thunder and lightning of last night. The rain set off one trap, the magpies and pigeons have been cheekily nipping at the others. No casualties yet. Would that they were just drowned in a sewer somewhere far away. In the meantime I’m trapped indoors.

And this should be a lovely morning when I’m sending two chapters of my novel to a charming-sounding agent. Only, guess what, the printer ink ran out on last two pages. It’s not the end of the world obviously, but I can’t print the cover letter either. This has never happened in the entire time I’ve worked at writing voluminous reports. Never did I run out of ink before. Well, Copy Graphics in Clonskeagh to the rescue.

Maybe it's a sign.

I'm fed up with signs. This life is full of them and we all know Ireland is the worst small country in the world in which to follow road signs (as opposed to the TBSCITWIWTDB*).

I'm not good on garage maps, too awkward to hold while driving, but I’m great on googlemaps. There should be a Destiny App, a Fate App, you could just go to their list of FAQs as every effing service *provider* suggests you do when there's a lack of er, service, and not just get the favourite options but the preferred answer based on your Facebook/Linkedin Family Album/horoscope menstrual cycle data.

Now there's a thought, anyone know a neighbourhood nerd I could call?

At least Pest control arrive tomorrow, they'll be taking the kids away first.

Speaking of whom, they both fell over when I told them the Italian student was 44, can't wait till I hear them try and pronounce her name, Tiziana. Tee hee.

*You'll just have to Google it, clue: Enda

Lady Bits and Bobs

Friend 2 days after surgery

When I started writing this blog in January, it was at the invitation of writing.ie to contribute something, try a different voice to my fiction and non-fiction writing. I couldn't think of anything to write about, I was beset with worry about financial restructuring, finding a 'proper job', seeing my two sons through third level and trying to figure what the future held, the last few years not being the future that I'd studied and strived for.

The idea of renting out rooms was the last resort, but not the last straw as it turned out. I started writing as if I was sending an email to a friend, which is pretty much my own voice, a familiar one, where all is not despair, in fact we turn despair into harangues with expletives about the sanctimonious cant we get from politicians about austerity, the Troika and making us pay for the émigré tycoons, while squeezing SME credit and hiking our taxes.

So without the expletives and with the imperative to laugh, the posts went up and on and on.

And while having four men in the relatively small house can be a little busy at times (and the washing machine might not endure they're assiduous laundry exertions), they are rarely here all at once. And this weekend they're all missing.

So it was that I found myself with nobody to turn to when I got my first attack on twitter yesterday, and nearly 300 comments on the Irish Times website in response to my article http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/anti-choice-logic-untenable-in-cases-of-fatal-foetal-abnormality-1.1412366

They were mainly supportive, kind and sympathetic. It was the twitter exchange between a pro-lifer and a tolerant French woman living in Dublin that had me aghast.

I desperately wanted to say that protocol is to write to the newspaper or comment on line, but not go direct to the author of a piece about her own life. Anyway I blocked them, the French lady sent me an apology, which shows how decent she was, the other one continued to rant about the headline, which shows what she's made of, I suppose.

Other people's Blogs are about useful things like gardening, cooking, farming, writing even. And I'll start writing about writing whenever I get published but in the meantime I'll do what I can to make women's lives a bit more tolerable when they get the awful news no woman ever wants to get, that your baby is going to die. And that is the end of that for now.

Being well enough to get out this afternoon, I visited my friend who is just out of hospital after a hysterectomy. That was something they used to do to old women, remember? She is far from old and could still have babies, though she has three grown up children, it still takes away the choice and we like choice. But, a bit like Angelina, it was a case of lop it out before the trouble really starts. It's an operation no woman wants to have to face unless she has to. Yikes, men can father children into their eighties.

Cutting out the potential for being a mother again, well, it hits different women in different ways. Some are thrilled, don't feel a thing afterwards, others will definitely feel a line has been crossed and sadly there's no going back. Dear tanned friend showed me her scars; wow I'd say the doctors were dazzled, flat brown tummy, three tiny plasters. She pointed to the one over her belly button SQUEAMISH ALERT. 'This is where they pulled it out.'

Gosh, women are brave and beautiful.

Be Generous - Tweet Good Thoughts

I hadn't anticipated becoming a twitterati, nor indeed still writing a blog mid-year, there's only so much you can say about your gentleman lodgers and your cost centre sons before they come crashing down on you. Gentleman Lodger #1 to the best of my knowledge doesn't even know there is a blog. The longer he is here though, the more bewildered he seems, something to do with the late rugby nights he keeps and the fact that landlady has been going into Oireachtas Hearings. It's so nice not to have too much discourse at home; just a passing comment from CCs and GL#2 suffices. I don't want to go into detail with a man who likes to keep things simple.

But GL#1 (Adam as he was the first on planet landlady) must have noticed how busy I've got, I haven't had time to do his washing, a bad habit to have gotten into anyway. Especially when the Cost Centres came home from Life festival in Belvedere (go google) with sacks of rancid clothes and now there's a right back-up.

I thought it was a bit of a swizz that Groove Armada pulled out of the festival, though the last minute replacement with Leftfield wasn't bad, amazingly enough I have both of their actual first CDs. I know that's amazing because the Cost Centre's are confused that I had their music before them.

Speaking of Leftfield, I was invited to the United African Nations celebration of their Golden Jubilee on Saturday and roped blonde Racquel along. Great hair, great costumes (not us). There was a doctor from Galway doing wine samples from her distributorship (Kinnegar Wines) of South African tipples. She worked in a hospital as a cardiologist and was taking the train back that night. Amazing what people do...the second Reisling was my favourite, the fourth sample pretty much meant it was time to go and eat. Saturday night, no bookings, after a big rugby match? Best to turn up needy, we got a high table in Keshk, the place where you can bring your own wine, amid two 30th birthday parties, a good reason to hurry the (very good) food and move on.

It still being early we joined friends in the calm garden of Dylan, rested on comfy sofas and toasted Sir Leigh's birthday.  You see, one of the ideas of tweeting is to be generous, so I'm mentioning all the nice people I met.

It's a good thing in life too, not imposing your anxieties, prejudices and ideologies on others who don't share them. I’m only beginning to discover the cut-throat raw edge of politics and campaigners of late. And I'm just an on-looker.