this year's girl

She walked into the Costa Cafe like she was walking into a yacht.
I felt her before I saw her.
A ripple went through the cafe.
Heads turned.
Most girls can't wear hot pants.
My counsel to any that ask me is: Don't wear hot pants.
Hot pants leave your legs with nowhere to go.
They upset other females, discombobulate the males, and frighten children.
They'll bring you the sort of attention you don't want or need.
This is the first time I've ever seen a girl wearing hot pants who didn't look like she wanted or needed to hide.
There was an aura about her.
The rest of us could hide if we wanted to.
It was some entrance.
I mean it was an entrance that worked as more than just walking through a door.
Outside of the film world, I've never seen anything like it.
This was the sort of scene beloved of Hollywood.
It was like an Audrey Hepburn film.
Only this girl is better looking than Audrey Hepburn.
So she walked in.
Like in a movie.
The arrival of a new phenomenon into the lives of the jaded Dublin pseudo intelligentsia.
She walked in to the Costa Cafe on Dawson Street during a bright September mid afternoon, and everyone stopped drinking, and everyone looked, and everyone wondered.
Her blonde waist length hair was tied back giving her as near a demure appearance as she will ever achieve.
Her gentle clear eyed face shone with an improbable innocence.
Gentle and clear eyed.
The most beautiful face imaginable.
The soul shows on it.
She is this year's girl.
Evgenia Tarasova.
Luminously pretty.
Hopelessly sought after.
Multifariously envied.
Creating a splash of colour, energy, spirit and sedition in the modish self contained youth worshipping world that passes for Dublin society.
Every year Dublin has a new this year's girl.
Someone who briefly becomes a source of dreams, speculation, and obsession among the wealthy urbanites, the rugby players, and the College students who make up the passing social scene.
This year it's her.
This year's girl.
The title doesn't necessarily connote happiness or accomplishment or a great life to come.
It just means that for a brief hour as the old year ends, she will be the story.
Her story will touch other stories.
The story of cold old Dublin will be about her.
It doesn't happen to many.
Just one person every year.
She will be talked of in hallowed hallways she never suspects.
Loved by fools whose name she never knows.
Yes.
Her fame is still relatively restricted at this stage.
Perhaps it will always be so.
Destiny will decide.
For now she is a shining phenomenon, a jewel that dazzles, but remains paradoxically unknown outside of the select echelons in which she walks.
College kids downing pints in city pubs, speak longingly and fantasistically of her.
Young rugby playing Blackrock yobs who are wont to beat teenagers to death outside night clubs, covet her like gold, stalking her through the dance halls, dreaming of securing an introduction.
The spoilt brattish children of foreign ambassadors invite her to their parties and hope desperately she might accept.
Euro trash royalty, sons and daughters of meaningless Counts and Countessas, seek her companionship and advice.
The occasional poet with an eye for beauty, such as myself, I know her.
This year's girl.
She is in her shining days.
Still there is an innocence to her.
Truly.
She is a treasure, but a relatively secret treasure, famous but possessed of a comparatively local fame, much talked about but only really known among a quite narrow group of Dubliners.
The spoilt rich snob urbanites.
The louche feckless rugby players.
The lovers.
The dreamers.
And me.

i have no name for this

Evening at the Chateau.

"Your brother left a nappy on the window sill," the Mammy informed me.

She let the statement hang in the air.

Ireland's greatest living poet showed no interest, choosing instead to remain buried in his disapproval of Southpark.

In truth I was aware that any wrong move at this stage would see me dispatched on a nappy removing mission.

It's not my favourite task.

"Do you not care?" said the Mammy after a decent interval.

"No, I don't care," sez I.

"But what will Mags think?" wondered the Mammy.

Her concern for Mags Masefield the cleaning lady was touching indeed.

"Lil old pal," sez I with great care. "Last week I found a soiled nappy on my pillow. You were aware of its presence there and yet had no compunction about allowing it to remain in situ till I returned home after a hard day's lechery vis a vis the Russians. As I remember, you waited for me in the hall and laughed fit to burst a gasket when I discovered the offending item. You will understand that from my point of view, Doctor Barn leaving his children's nappies on the window is a substantial improvement on his previous practice."

"Are you going to move the nappy?" sez she.

"Alright, alright," sez I rising to my feet.

I glanced back at the television.

It was one of the good episodes.

The one with the Hardy Boys in it.

"Tell me how it ends," sez I exiting.

"Okay," sez the Mammy.

She didn't even wait for the door to close before changing to World's Greatest Millionaire.

different world views

Last Thursday I emerged from my bedroom groggy and unkempt after a long night of perturbed dreaming about Russian girls.
I stood on the landing at the top of the stairs.
It was midday.
Below I could hear the Mammy at the front door greeting Rowena Hampton, a neighbour from up the road.
Rowena is a bird like woman in her sixties with a voice that always seems to me to be artificially controlled to the point of lunaception.
You know those voices.
Every word pronounced as though it was carved from glass.
Artificially sweet.
Artificially calm.
Artificially artificial.
Genuinely scary.
Her and the Mammy are heading out to a book club.
I listen in on their conversation.
"Oh you've lots of posters and pictures on the walls," remarks Rowena referring to some of my art treasures hanging in the hall.
"Yes, the place is full of shit," shoots back the Mammy, also referring to my art treasures.
"Every house is," replies Rowena without hesitation.
I found this response most surrealistic and not a little discomfitting.
Instead of saying: "Oh no, not at all," this bird like woman who never puts a foot wrong in social situations, appeared to instantly affirm my mother's scathing estimation of the value of my art collection.
Outrageous behaviour.
A few days later I again emerged from my bedroom in similar circumstances.
Long night.
Russki Dux.
To what serves etc etc.
This time I could hear the Mammy welcoming Brian Wallmer the painter at the front door.
I groaned briefly at the realisation that there would now be a painter banging around the place for the next few months.
"The place is full of shit," sez the Mammy brightly.
This appears to be her main conversation gambit when welcoming newcomers to the Chateau De Healy.
The painter was having none of it.
"Those aren't shit," he told her firmly. "Those are memories. You wouldn't believe how many houses I go to, and all there is, is a picture of a girl in a negligee. That's it. That's their lives."
His words seemed to carry wisdom beyond their immediate import.
I returned to my bedroom muttering savagely: "What I wouldn't give for a girl in a negligee."

the monica leech laugh in

The devil arrives in a small town in the deep south of the United States.
The townspeople scatter and cower behind their doors.
All except one.
One old geezer stays right where he is.
Sitting in a rocking chair on his front porch.
The devil screams: "Who dares to defy me by not running away? Are you not terrified by my powers?"
The old guy shakes his head.
"I ain't afraid of you," he says. "I've been married to your sister for forty years."

the snurds must die

Horror film on the box.
Watching with Serafina.
The film is called The Beast Must Die.
It's a 1970's blaxploitation thing with Richard Roundtree playing a thinly disguised version of me.
Richard is a multi millionaire with a passion for big game hunting.
All his life he's dreamed of the ultimate pursuit.
He wants to hunt and kill a werewolf.
He's invited a group of guests to stay at his palatial estate for the weekend.
The guests are unaware that Richard has reviewed their files and knows that there is a high probability that at least one of them is a werewolf.
The guests are also unaware that for the purposes of this weekend they will be prisoners on the estate which is ringed with electric fences.
It is of course the night of the full moon.
Over dinner Richard tells his guests somewhat apologetically why they're here.
They look suitably chagrined.
They are a chagrin awful looking crew to begin with anyway.
There's Tony O'Reilly of Independent Newspapers, plush bottomed and self satisfied, indolently lounging at the table, perpetually lost in eternal reveries of self worship.
Beside him sits his lickspittle Paedophile Ian O'Doherty, known as Paedophile or Paedophile Coward since he falsely, maliciously and malignly wrote in the Irish Independent that the Catholic Church is a paedophile ring.
Next to him sits the only nearly female person at the table, a certain Brenda Power of The Daily Mail. She is an odious fervourless clype who wrote in the Daily Mail on Tuesday this week some sort of sneer about what she called "holy Catholic Ireland," implying that children were generally abused in the Ireland of fifty years ago, and deliberately omitting to mention that abuse levels have gone off the scale in the Ireland of today, ignoring totally the children being murdered in Health Board Care, the children committing suicide in unprecedented numbers across the country, the children being compelled to live with drug addict parents who violate them with impunity because Judge Liberal doesn't want to be judgemental about such things, and the children having sex with other children at the age of nine, I kid you not, and then being forced to murder their unborn children through abortion or abortificiants, and all this has happened in the Ireland of today, the Ireland whose culture has been vitiated by the atheistic liberals of today, by Brenda Power, the Daily Mail and all the other scruff, I mean I'm not their judge, but come on, the emperor's naked and there's an outsize mole on his penis, and it looks like Brenda Power, I'm just saying is all, the truth still has some currency, doesn't it, it must have.
Then there's Conor O'Clery or Conor Brady of the Irish Times. I'm not sure which. I'm always mixing them up. Whichever of them who said straight after Nine Eleven that he was afraid of what the Americans would do next. That's the bastaad. Yeah him.
Beside him sits John Fry Chief Executive Officer of the Johnston Press famous for his "cor blimey" catch cry and near cosmic inability to manage a newspaper group. Hey Fry. You cor blimey c---s owe me money.
They're all spluttering about how outrageous the behaviour of their host is in keeping them captive for the weekend against their will.
Richard Roundtree silences them with a wave of his hair.
"Tonight is the night of the full moon," he tells them dramatically. "And tonight... the beast must die."

you wot guv

Heelers encounters an art installation by Aneesh Kapoor at the Royal Academy London.

special guest blogger thomas hardy

When I set out for Lyonesse
A hundred miles away
The rime was on the spray
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonesse
A hundred miles away

What would bechance at Lyonesse
While I should sojourn there
No prophet durst declare
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonesse
While I should sojourn there

When I came back from Lyonesse
With magic in my eyes
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless
When I came back from Lyonesse
With magic in my eyes

the publishing sensation of the decade

The publishing sensation of the decade is that Dan Brown's new anti Catholic book The Secret Douchebag features the Free Masons as cartoon villains, and somehow Dan Brown has managed to write about the Free Masons but has omitted to mention that the name of the Free Masons' secret word for the being they worship is Jahbulon, and that the word Jahbulon is an invocation to Satan.

the monica leech laugh in

A man dies and goes to the gates of heaven.
Saint Peter is standing waiting for him.
Saint Peter flicks through the book of life.
"Hmmm," says Saint Peter, "I'm not sure you can come in. You've never done a really courageous thing in your whole life."
"What!" says the man. "I intervened when six Pakistani skin heads were beating a girl to death on Grafton Street with baseball bats."
"It's not in my book," says Saint Peter.
"It only happened thirty seconds ago," says the man.

irish supreme court chortles

The Irish Supreme Court was in session.
Three bewigged Judges sat in regal splendour amid the wood panelling and parvenus.
They were on an elevated platform facing down onto the courtroom.
Judge Liberal Number One read out their verdict.
"On charges of being disrespectful to Ireland's greatest living poet and on charges of being scruff with no clue how to run a newspaper we find the Johnston Press... guilty."
A feverish murmur of surprise electrified the courtroom.
John Fry, Chief Executive Officer of the Johnston Press, leapt to his feet.
"Cor blimey," he shouted. "But we thought you guys hated Heelers as much as we do. Cor blimey."
His attorney restrained him.
Judge Liberal Number One spoke again.
"The sentence of this court is that John Fry be compelled to pay James Healy the sum of one pound."
Another murmur through the courtroom.
Judge Liberal Number Two piped up:
"And John Fry is also sentenced to one hour in prison."
Murmur, murmur, murmur.
Judge Liberal Number Three chimed in:
"And John Fry will also be taken from this place to an appropriate location where we will remove one of his testicles."
Terrific murmurs.
Fry was on his feet again.
"Only one?" he roared defiantly.
The Judge Liberals banged their gavels for order.
Judge Liberal Number One leaned forward.
"We haven't said what we're going to do with the other one yet sonny," he grinned.

flights of fancy

My hotel room.

I am standing at the window.

The lights of Dublin airport glittering below.

Hulking iron caravelles line the runways.

What hath God wrought?

Tomorrow I fly to London to meet an Arab girl for a cup of coffee.

It is a temperamental journey.

Flying in.

Meeting her.

Flying home.

Truly God made an artist in me.

Well you know.

I turn from the window.

The ghosts of Sigmund Freud and Thomas Hardy are standing watching me.

Freud is smoking a penis.

Hardy is pensively stroking his beard. (Freud's beard. Not his own.)

"What are you two doing here?" I demand.

They shrug sheepishly like schoolboys.

"I wish you wouldn't keep showing up like this," I tell them. "People are starting to talk."

Freud decides to get to the point.

"Heelers," he murmurs, "is it possible you have fallen in love with the chase? That you can never be really happy with any conclusion to it?"

I weigh his words.

"Well," I answer in measured tones, "why don't you get lost you beardy dead bastard."

Thomas Hardy coughs politely.

"To what serves mortal beauty?" he asks me.

The noble Heelers grins sagely.

"Well for a start it's nice to look at," I answer.

Hardy nods but does not smile.

He may have heard it before once or twice.

Suddenly he draws himself to his full height and begins to declaim poetry with almost savage passion.

"When I set out for Lyonesse," he intones with great feeling, "a thousand miles away, the rime was on the spray, and starlight lit my lonesomeness, when I set out for Lyonesse a thousand miles away."

I have no idea what the hell he was talking about.