heeler the peeler's supernatural tales of yoikes and honey if the house wants us to leave i really think we should just go

Valerie is a 65 year old woman who has been known to me for many years.
She is of an artistic temperament.
If I were to look for a solid witness to a supernatural event, she might not be the ideal candidate.
She is musically inclined.
Many years ago she was interested in creative writing.
I say she might not be the ideal witness because there is always the feeling with creative people that their imaginations are working overtime.
Take it from me.
Valerie has shared with me the following story which she insists is literally true in every detail.
Soon after she married she moved with her husband to live in a large house in a remote part of the Irish midlands.
Some months went by.
Each day her husband would go off to work and Valerie would be left alone in the house.
She was with child now.
During her days alone in the house she became uneasy.
She knew that the house had once belonged to an aristocratic family.
She knew also that there were secret passages linking the master bedroom to the old servants quarters.
She felt that these passages had in days gone by facilitated the sexual exploitation of innocent young women by a cruel rapacious landlord.
Her historical knowledge gave her a sense that evil things had happened in this house.
She says that on one particular day she had an actual encounter with something evil.
Her husband had gone to work as usual.
She was alone in the house.
She awoke to hear something moving around outside the house.
She had an impression immediately that all was not right.
The doors and windows were closed.
She heard the creature outside move into the house.
She heard it coming up the stairs.
She heard a snuffling sound from outside her door.
Then the creature went away.
When she told me this part of the story, I immediately interjected: "It was a dog."
Valerie replied: "No. It wasn't a dog. I knew what it was. Some part of me knew full well what it was. It was a supernatural creature. A being of evil lingering in a house where evil things had happened."
I shot back: "You were pregnant. Your body was full of hormones. Of course you'd be jumping at shadows."
She insisted: "This was a real experience."
Valerie would have no other claimed direct experiences of the supernatural until thirty years later.
But ah.
That's another story.

pictures in the hallway

Going to bed at 7am with the dawn already fully unfurled over the garden. Lovely fresh breeze ruffling the hedge. Gentle yellow light playing on the leaves.
I walked from the kitchen towards my place of rest.
Standing at the bedroom door, I looked back up the hall which was in shadow.
A question came to me.
What could be told about me from this hallway?
And another question.
What will people remember of me who live in this house when I am gone?
"He filled the place with paintings," might be an answer.
Even in shadow I could make out some of them from where I stood.
A nice Josephine Hardiman of Killinthomas Woods. A Jim Flack misty May morning. Another Josephine Hardiman of Banna Strand.
Where a man and a woman stand alone watching the breakers on the beach.
I'd asked her once: "Who are they?"
She didn't answer immediately.
Then: "James they're whoever you want them to be."
But I knew.
I had seen the answer in her eyes.
And in that painting he will be forever young and she be fair.
Ah.
No one will know the story behind the paintings I've brought to this house.
The Jill Allaway of the giant moon, and the bats, and the cross, and the trees, and the great house, which is supposed to represent my mind.
The Ger Osborne of the cottages below the mountains which he gave me as a gift after a photo of his that I published in the Leinster Leader got a strong public response.
The Mariana Gabor nude stashed in the cupboard because I never quite had the nerve to display it.
The shadows in the hall seem to brood now.
What will people know of me who live in this house after I've gone?
"He loved beautiful things and beautiful people," they might say fingering Lu Yi's Chinese fan which lies beside a photograph of Grandad.
Or holding the Matryoshka doll which Marriedski gave me.
The lovely Matryoshka doll which I can never see without thinking of her.
She was a lovely Matryoshka doll herself.
All the women she was were beautiful.
Holy God made an executive decision to part us, knowing full well I wasn't adult enough to have a friendship with a married woman who looked like Marriedski.
Not before she'd told me her dream though, and I'd interpreted it, and we both wondered what in God's heaven had just happened.
The kids love that Matryoshka doll.
It's a miracle they haven't broken it.
Okay, they have broken it but it's been repaired with superglue.
It might yet survive a generation or two.
To pose a riddle for those who come after.
And beside it are the photos.
A black and white photo of Divya Sharma looking very Hindu and mysterious.
My favourite photo of me, standing outside Uncle Scutch's pharmacy with a poster in the background for Lady Windermere's Fanny.
Photos of various dogs, put in place to cheer up the Dad.
Will anyone know how these objects came to be here?
How long will they remain after I've gone?
I turned towards the bedroom door.
Stretching out my hand, I ran my fingers along the cracked panel of wood.
I'd smashed it with my shoulder at the age of nine, hurling myself repeatedly against the door in lunatic rage at my brother who was laughing on the other side.
The splintered panel will also tell something about me.
Whispering down the years.
Perhaps I've yet to fully realise the gifts God has given me in terms of miraculous deliverance from the oppressions of mind.

our television listings

RTE1
(The Irish national fraudcaster.)
4.25 Murder She Wrote. Jessica thwarts a mass murder attempt while attending the Hopkins Poetry Festival in Monasterevin. She catches me in the act of trying to blow up every other poet in Ireland by placing dynamite in the hotdogs at the outdoor barbecue. As I'm being led away in handcuffs, Jessica asks me why I did it. I reply with a Scooby Doo homage: "I wanted to wipe out these pseuds so I could be Ireland's greatest living poet for real. And I would have gotten away with it as well, if it wasn't for you, you meddling senior citizen."
5.20 Nuacht. I have a theory about this programme. It's aliens trying to make contact with us through the airwaves. And they're not coming through very clearly.
5.30 The Bill. Cor blimey, it's the day of Police Constable Honey Harman's cor blimey wedding to suspected cor blimey murderer cor blimey Scott Burnett. Cor blimey this is just perfect cor blimey entertainment for children coming in for their cor blimey tea. Cor blimey.
6.00 The Angelus. Rung by Quasimodo. This is the only even vaguely Christian programme on RTE, and it consists of one minute of bell ringing.
6.01 News. Read by Chairman Mao.
7.00 Nationwide.
7.30 The Reel Deal. Traditional music programme. I don't see what's so traditional about awful music. But I'm sure this programme will help clarify the issue. Deedly deedly aye, indeed.
8.00 Eastenders. Anissa brings her Irish poet home to meet the family with interesting results.
8.30 Rachel Allen: Bake! This programme should have been called Rachel Allen: Half Baked!
9.00 News. Read by Pol Pot.
9.30 One Fine Day. Romantic comedy from 1996. Robert De Niro and Michael Douglas take the acting honours. That is to say they made the honourable decision not to have anything to do with this turkey. The actual stars are George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer. You gotta feel sorry for Michelle. I mean, imagine having a name like Pfeiffer. And then having to star in a turkey like this with that galoot Clooney. Truly she suffers for her art.
11.25 News. Read by Joseph Stalin.
11.30 Fascination. Jacqueline Bisset thriller about something or other that happens to someone or other before everything is either sorted out or not.
1.25 Monk. Debut of a news series. Quite why RTE would debut a new series at 1.25 in the morning is beyond me. Needless to say, the omens are not good.
2.15 Telly Bingo. An entertaining television programme, my kingdom for an entertaining television programme. Hint: It's not this one.



NB: RTE reserves the right to cancel advertised programme schedules at a moment's notice if it finds any women at all willing to come on air and say negative things about nursing homes, schools, indigent care facilities, Magdalene laundries for single mothers, or any other institutions run by nuns. RTE will in no circumstances allow women on the air who say they have benefited from the services provided by the nuns at such facilities. RTE in fact will not tolerate former residents of Magdalene Laundries who wish to praise the love, care, guidance, education and savour of life that nuns gave in nursing homes, schools, indigent care facilities, Magdalene laundries or any other institutions while receiving no wages, and at a time when the Irish State was providing no social services of its own, and Judge Liberals were sending any women they came across from prostitutes, child abuse victims, the poor, the criminal classes and anywhere else, to be looked after by the nuns, the same nuns who never under any circumstances turned such women away.

memories of sigmund freud

I first met Sigmund Freud in Berlin when he was little more than a young slightly precocious medical student with a few bright ideas about mental behaviours and experiential causality.
The era of his grand reputation was yet to come.
For a start, in those days he was still pronouncing his name Sigmund Frood.
It was much simpler.
The more famous pronunciation of his name (Froyd) was an affectation which came much later.
Berlin was an unusual place during that blighted and momentous period.
The collapse of the wienerschnitzel industry had forced the bourgeois middle classes to eat undiluted sauerkraut, and everywhere there were rumblings of discontent.
Frood moved through this miasma of discontent like the spectre at Hamlet's feast.
Occasionally he would shout "Achtung steinervortzels" in the street, but I think he did this as much for fun as for any other reason.
Perhaps in his own way he was testing the parametres of this turned in little universe.
There was a touch of destiny about the young man.
He had an air of unperturbable affability except when he got hit by a tram one day, and the mask slipped somewhat.
He had already begun to treat patients at rooms on the Wolkenkuckkucksheim Platz.
I remember one particular case he told me about.
An insane female called X.
Frood theorised that she'd been driven completely out of her tiny cotton picking mind simply because her father had named her X.
The shame of having just one letter in her name had been repressed from an early age, only to emerge now as full blown insanity.
Frood's treatment of her was considered revolutionary by the medical establishment of the era.
He would ask her to recline on a couch while he seated himself in an armchair behind her.
Thus seated he was completely out of her sightline.
He bristled and told me I was impertinent when I later suggested that this seating arrangement served no other purpose than to enable him to eyeball her breastensteiners surreptitiously throughout the treatment sessions.
The rest of the treatment was also, as I've said, unorthodox.
Once X had given a brief account of her recurrent symptoms, Frood would lean forward and shout in her ear: "Don't be such a stupid bitchenstein."
Her condition worsened considerably under a steady regimen of this type of treatment.
Soon she left Berlin, married a Nazi, and went to work for the Johnston Press.
To the end of his days, Frood did not consider her one of his successes.
He was undaunted by this early failure however.
Another of his clients at the time was a young radical philosopher called Nietzche who had been caught writing "God Is Dead" on a wall.
The Viennese were indifferent to such behaviour but Nietzche got into trouble because we were in Berlin not Vienna.
Frood treated him for a number of weeks during which time the great scientist of the mind abandoned the practice of asking his client to sit on a couch while he Frood sat in an armchair just out of sight.
Frood bristled again when I suggested he had dispensed with his former treatment methods simply because Nietzche was (a) not a beautiful woman, and (b) did not have splendidly appointed breastensteiners.
We were in the cafe Schnoob on the Gitner Kreuzung when we spoke about these matters.
His response was so strong that I realised our friendship was now definitively threatened by my refusal to take his methods seriously.
His exact words if I remember correctly were: "Get stuffed you schweinhund. Everyone uses what they've got."
I have no idea what he meant by this.
Although I think scweinhund means pig dog.
Outside in the street he demanded I retract any implied criticism of his work.
I answered that I wasn't criticising his work per se, and that a man is entitled to stare at Breastensteiners if he wants to, but why not call it Staring At Breastensteiners, instead of labeling it Psychotherapy.
This was in the days before the end of Weimar you see.
Cultural mores about breastensteiners, and the staring thereat or thereon or thereto, were in continuous flux, and at this stage, a laissez faire attitude prevailed in Berlin which was positively louche.
We were all going around the place with our eyes out on stalks.
I don't know why Frood even bothered to pretend he was looking at anything else.
But he was furious with me and I knew it.
He strode away up the Testicler Strasse muttering to himself in Hoch Deutsch.
This is a form of German that, like all other forms of German, involves a lot of spitting.
He looked oddly heroic as he strode into the night.
Angry though he was, he walked with a purposeful tread, as if heading towards a future only he could see and the rest of us remained unaware of.
Touched by destiny alright.
I doubted I would see him again.
However after a few days he appeared to have calmed down.
The aspersions I had cast on his methods were either forgiven or forgotten.
He met me at the Zorglevootzal opera a few nights later and soon we were chatting like old friends. It was as though nothing had happened. That was Frood you see.
Quick to anger.
Quick to forgive.
The foibleousness of the great I call it.
Yes, the young genius was not entirely unaware of the possibility of a certain stigma beginning to attach itself to his failures.
In any case he knew well that his treatment of Nietzche could hardly be said to have been any more successful than his treatment of X.
Nietzche withdrew further into his fantasy world, published a few utterly nutty books with occasional good one liners, and went to work for the Johnston Press.
He was never seen again.
But in spite of the setbacks, Frood was learning all the time.
This is the key to his character.
Unperturbed by failure he continued to accept patients. He was all the time honing his treatments to meet the incredibly diverse circumstances and predispositions of those who were mentally ill.
Sexy women would still be asked to recline on a couch while Frood occupied his arm chair just slightly behind them.
Men could sit wherever the hell they liked, as long as they didn't get in Frood's way while he ogled passing women with binoculars from his window overlooking the Snuddlebun Schwossensee.
And now at last Frood had his first success.
A young struggling artist called Adolf Hitler who could barely motivate himself to get out of bed in the morning called at the treatment rooms begging for help.
Frood gave him a good talking to, and sent him back out to face the world all fired up.
I'm told Hitler never looked back after that.
This article is rubbish. The mayor will have my ass. Blah, blah, blah. You young detectives, blah, and your shoot first ask questions later ways. Blah, blah. Meths lab on Malavista. Blah. The mayor. Blah. My ass. Blah. Etc etc.

The Photographer's Eye (with Enrica Cecchini)

through restful fields he leadeth me
*********************************

A sunny and quiet corner of the northern Lazio countryside, in central Italy. The hammock beckons. This is one of my favourite places when I need to get away from the stresses and strains of big city life. Enrica

a summer storm at kilcullen

the evening concerto has begun
sweeping through twilight from the fields
a masterwork of music at random
rain drums on window sill and eaves
its off note lyric rhapsody in grey
as squalls gust lustily in sprays
a bullock bells forlorn out of sight
light sound and shadow harmonise
at once a dreary monotone of night
at once a heady gloriole of praise
that says it all about this place
it's torn me in my love and hate for it
village prison earthly paradise
small town insensate to my spirit
oh universe in me and i in it

top ten scandals of irish journalism

1. The Phoenix magazine publishes a picture of the McCartney sisters labelled The Spice Girls. Possibly the singlemost disgusting editorial decision ever made in this country. The sisters had been involved in a high profile campaign to expose the murderers of their brother. A group of Sinn Fein/IRA members had slaughtered the McCartney sisters' brother (himself a Sinn Fein activist) by slashing him open with a knife. It is remarkable that State Sector money, in particular FAS Board advertising, should continue to be placed with the Phoenix magazine. Who exactly makes these decisions? Why do people like me end up supporting the Phoenix magazine through the placing of public moneys with their advertising department?

2. A senior editor at the Irish Times comments after Nine Eleven: "I am terrified of what the Americans will do." Well folks, I thought it was a vomitous thing to say. I always remember it when the Irish Times tries to pose pro American at this time of year around the Fourth Of July.

3. Ian O'Doherty writing in the Irish Independent newspaper, falsely, mendaciously, malignly and coward-lily claims that the Catholic church is a paedophile ring.

4. Ger Colleran, editor of the Daily Star, falsely mendaciously, malignly and coward-lily claims on RTE television that children were screaming for help in every Catholic church presbytery in Ireland.

5. Heather Parsons, editor of a television listings magazine called The RTE Guide, has a Christian conversion at the town of Medjugorje where several people have claimed to be having visions of the Virgin Mary. Heather Parsons herself claims to have seen Jesus Christ in the sun at Medjugorje. When she returns to Ireland, for some reason, her position at RTE becomes untenable. She leaves and initiates legal proceedings against RTE. These proceedings are settled out of court with a large cash payment to Heather Parsons. Meanwhile sales of the RTE Guide collapse. It transpires that Heather Parsons was in fact the most successful editor of any publication in the history of the Republic of Ireland. It transpires that while she was in charge The RTE Guide was selling nearly half a million copies. This in a country with a population of three and a half million people. After she leaves, sales of The RTE Guide plummet to a level of less than one hundred thousand. We might wonder who exactly decided Heather Parsons should no longer work at The RTE Guide. We might wonder did some of the heroes at RTE take a dim view of her Christian conversion. Management at RTE pretend the decline in The RTE Guide's fortunes came about through increased competition and changes in the marketplace. But there has been no precedent in the English speaking world for the collapse in sales at The RTE Guide. Nothing like it in Ireland, Britain, Australia, Canada, or America.

6. The only case whose aftermath I find vaguely likenable to the treatment of Heather Parsons at The RTE Guide, was my own firing by a British company called the Johnston Press from an Irish provincial newspaper called the Leinster Leader three weeks before Christmas of 2007. When the Johnston Press fired me, the company had a share price of £4. A year later the same company was listed on the British stock exchange for a few pennies per share. I've always wondered about the Johnston Press and the Leinster Leader. Is it at all possible that the wrong people were getting fired?

7. Journalist Charlie Bird, long a stalwart of the RTE newsroom, is revealed to have been a member of the Communist Party. When challenged about this Charlie Bird replies: "I was a member of a fairly innocent Communist Party." I often wondered did his membership of this fairly innocent Communist Party affect his objectivity when reporting on the United States of America, the Cold War, the War On Terror, and everything bloody else. History will decide.

8. Carole Coleman of RTE makes a name for herself by barracking President George Bush in an interview. Determinedly putting Ireland on the wrong side of history. I wonder how she'll like Sharia Law. We'll find out soon enough.

9. Metro, a new free sheet newspaper in Dublin, publishes a photograph of a naked woman in bed with a pig. The woman is an artist and the picture part of her exhibition. The photo is presented to the readers as though the newspaper is inviting us to make up our own minds about whether her violation of an animal as depicted in art can ever be justified. But really it is just a salacious piece of sad tasteless pornographic tripe. The saddest piece of sensationalism I have ever seen. It was just mean. To do that to the pig. It was just lousy. It left a very sour taste. I took one look at it and said: "Well, well, well, that's not so clever. I shall never look at Metro again." It has been remarkably easy to stick to that resolution. I would suggest that whoever decided to publish that photo single handedly killed any chance of success for the new free sheet. I wonder how many people felt the same as me when they saw the silly little half witted girl disrespecting the innocent creature. Metro is hemorrhaging cash. Literally, they can't give it away. Always a bad sign for a free sheet. I'm told it's part owned by the Irish Times. The great liberal, fembo, commie, environmentalist, animal rights, free the gay whales from Guantanamo bay, galoots. Hilarious, no? Ah that the Lord the grace would g'ie us, to see ourselves as others see us.

10. All media groups in Ireland continue to turn a blind eye to collusion during the Cold War between Irish Times journalists and the Russian KGB in Moscow. This untold story is the greatest scandal of the last fifty years of Irish journalistic life. Ironically only the opprobrious Phoenix magazine has sought to bring the story into the public domain with some oblique mentions. The Phoenix described how one recently deceased Irish Times journalist had been in Moscow during the Cold War and implied he was taking directions from KGB handlers. It was suggested that he had been drawing up for his Soviet masters a list of non communist Irish journalists to be detained when Russian Communists finally succeeded in taking over Ireland. Are these suggestions by the Pheonix magazine about an Irish Times journalist in cahoots with the KGB, true or false? I think we should be told.

the trouble with uighurs

Watching the rather surrealistic reportage on the news channels of this week's Al Qaeda uprising in north western China. Most of the satelite news channels are in a state of denial about what is going on. We are told the riots involve members of the oppressed Uighur Muslim ethnic minority who our gullible newsmen insist are merely attempting to assert their rights in the face of Chinese repression. I do not agree with this analysis. I am loathe to judge any people harshly who have been compelled to live under a communist dictatorship. But the Uighurs are not an oppressed people. Here is the news. The Uighurs are Al Qaeda. And over the course of the last few days none of the satelite television channels, and almost none of our liberal left decayed obsolete declining ceasing to exist newspapers, almost none of em I say, have deigned to so much as mention Al Qaeda in their coverage of the situation. Most hilariously, Al Jazeera, the Nazi channel managed to report on the Uighur violence tonight without even once mentioning Muslims. The gorgeous Ghida Fakhry Nazi who presents the flagship news programme for Al Jazeera was questioning the station's on the spot China reporter the delectable Melissa Chan. "What has brought these tensions to the fore?" wondered Ghida Fakhry adorably. "I can't hear you," answered Melissa Chan. Seriously though they're doing a wonderful job. You've got to feel sorry for Al Jazeera. They're anxious not to offend the Chinese because many Arab Muslim Nazis regard China as a useful tool for distracting the United States of America and the free world. China is playing a key role in propping up the Arab murderocracy in Sudan at the moment. Without China, that particular Al Qaeda affiliate in Sudan could no longer exist. So Al Jazeera, normally so partisan in favour of Al Qaeda terrorists, whom it still insists on referring to rather quaintly as "fighters," has positively dithered in its coverage of the Uighurs. Poor old Al Jazeera can't make up its mind whether the Nazis can afford yet another superpower enemy. Al Qaeda itself is in no doubt. Al Qaeda has always shown a certain disinclination to play the long game. Truly it is at war with everybody. Even with those idiot countries (Communist China and Putin's Russia) who it uses occasionally as allies to disrupt American interests in various regional conflicts. Thus after Nine Eleven, rather than just playing smart and focussing on riding out the American backlash, the Muslim Al Qaeda psycho Nazis opened up other fronts all over the planet earth, bombing schools and theatres in Russia, murdering policemen in China, launching a wave of intercommunal blood letting in the Philippines and Thailand, and carrying out massive bombings across the Muslim world, particularly in Indonesia and Pakistan. All this while blowing up trains and buses in England and Spain, murdering a Prime Minister and a film director in the Netherlands, attempting to poison the water supply in Rome, slaughtering an Irish teenager on Grafton Street Dublin, and torching French cities nightly for the sheer hell of it. No one has ever accused Al Qaeda of being logical. Yet as long as CNN, Sky News, ABC, CBS, NBC, the BBC, Channel Four, Newsweek, Time Magazine et al (particularly Al, I hate him) as long as these appeasing shites continue to turn a blind eye to what Al Qaeda is doing, as long as the reporters of the free world continue to seek ways to interpret each new terrorist outrage as resulting from localised conditions and nothing to do with the broader Al Qaeda conspiracy against the world, as long as our half witted media group shills play the Demonise-George-Bush-Game, as long as they do so, the human race will live under the shadow of the scythe. Here is the news. The current attempted uprising in China is an Al Qaeda operation. The Uighurs are not like the innocent peaceloving Tibetans whose country was invaded by the Chinese Communist Party in 1959. The Uighurs are not a peaceful people. The Uighurs are an Al Qaeda franchise. They are a Muslim separatist movement operating in a region that is an historic part of China. Among the detainees cheerfully released from Guantanamo Bay last month by President Stylish, were more than a dozen Uighur Al Qaeda terrorist killers who could scarcely believe their luck at being set free to kill again, and immediately went into CNN mode: "I don't know how I got here. The Americans tortured me. George Bush, him heap bad man." Bloody hell. Barack is going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Why don't you nuke swine flu Barack? That's about your speed. Oh yeah, and save the environment. Dreadful incompetent. Dreadful dreadful. Dreadful. Barack's slogan "yes we can" should now be taken up by Al Qaeda. Meaning, yes we can get out of Guantanamo Bay. Yes we can plan new and limitless massacres of citizens of the free world. Yes we can detonate atomic bombs in western cities. They can and they will. Or if not, why not? Bloody hell. But I digress. I would counsel you all to withold your support from this new Muslim secessionist movement composed of Uighur Muslims attempting to detach Xinjiang province from China. In our lifetimes we have seen inmigrating Muslims detach regions from several other countries, most notably Kosovo from Serbia last year, and Northern Cyprus from Cyprus in the 1970's. I would say it is not a good idea to encourage Muslim immigrants to detach provinces from countries that give them a home. It sets a bad precedent. It confuses em. You won't hear it on CNN but the Uighurs are not worth your sympathy. They are a separatist movement working for Al Qaeda. They are nothing else. In fact already, they have become the purveyors of a singularly twisted Al Qaeda miracle. They have put the Communist Party of China in the right.

the poet's dilemma

there is no rhyme for arses
that parses

vignette

Feeling laid low by life.
Uncle Jim dropped in for a visit and my spirits rose.
Somewhere in the midst of the chat he remarked that Aunty Philo had told him an interesting thing on her death bed.
"It was the night she died," he recalled. "She told me that she had been visited every night throughout her sickness. That she had never felt love like it. That it was so much better than human love."
I grinned.
This sort of thing shouldn't come as such a surprise for one who thinks he's believed for years.
But here's the thing.
If you take a step towards Jesus you're going to be surprised.
And you're going to keep on being surprised.
If you take a single step towards Jesus you will discover not only that he is true, but also that his truth is greater than anything you have ever imagined.