"I saw your friends the O'Donoghues last week," said my cousin John with the air of a man beginning a recital.
He was standing behind the counter in his pharmacy where I had called to purchase elixirs of youth and whatnot.
"O'Donoghues eh? I don't have any friends by that name or indeed any other name," I interjected modestly.
"Gerry O'Donoghue," elaborated the cousin.
"He taught me in third class at Primary School," I admitted, "and many years later starred in one of my plays with Kilcullen Drama Group, albeit unbeknownst to himself or to me, ie he didn't know I wrote it and I didn't the gulpens at the Drama Group were producing it. That hardly makes him a friend. Of course the Drama Group never paid me for the play because it was directed by that great gawdelpus Eilis Philips and she had promised the purported writer of the play she thought she was producing, one Jimmy Kersey, that she would produce his work without any changes, and then went absolutely reliably to the Drama Group archives and accidently and still absolutely reliably retrieved my reworking of the same play which another producer had commissioned me to do months earlier and which had resulted in a completely new play which Jimmy Kersey had expressly refused to allow to be produced under his name, and of course Eilis Philips then went and produced my version word for word, fully convinced she was keeping her promise to Jimmy Kersey not to change a thing in his original drivel. It was exquisite I tells ee. It's the only script of mine that the Drama Group ever even nearly got right. And Jimmy Kersey stood up in the front row after five minutes on opening night and cried: 'This isn't my play,' and stormed out. So I suppose I can claim from the legal point of view it really is my play. I mean we can't leave it an orphan. And Gerry O'Donoghue dancing with the mop and then making out romantically with the mop as a girl comes into the room behind him, with all the vital expressions the actress can do as she drinks in the scene, that was mine of course. And the bit where he does Dirty Harry and Mel Gibson and John Wayne voices in front of the mirror as he tries on a shirt. That was mine. In fact that was me. And the other character introducing himself grandly as Clive Snotley Greene. Mine. And the bit where another guy says you can't use the word blackmail because it's politically incorrect and nowadays you have to say African American mail. All mine. I sometimes wonder did Dunnywhacks suspect he was reciting my lines while he was making a galoot of himself on stage. My only regret is that my late Uncle Scutch who had asked me to do the re writes, wouldn't allow me to have a sequence where a voracious sensual sexual woman karate chops her way through a table to get at the hero a la the 1970s Hi Karate After Shave ad, and in a later scene the same girl is only barely deterred from advancing on him again when he claims to be a Muslim transvestite and goes into a room to prove it to her and emerges dressed in a full length Burka brandishing a knife and chases her round the room shouting 'Allah u Akbar.' It would have been fun to see what Eilis Drilbits would have made of that one while trying not to change a single word.."
"Let me finish what I was telling you," said the cousin, "Stop interrupting me with your interminable reminiscences. I was saying I saw Gerry O'Donoghue in the street. He had the fishwife with him."
"That's not fair," said I. "I haven't called her a fishwife in 37 years, since 1988 to be exact. And back then I was sorely provoked. If I remember rightly I had greeted her in the street at Logstown with: 'Good afternoon Mrs O'Donoghue,' and she had replied without any preamble: 'I didn't like that article you wrote about the Philippines. And I know what you are. You are a lonely, single man, about 32 years old. You never go anywhere. You have no friends. You don't go to discos. And you think you know something about the Philippines.' Apparently she wasn't joking about not liking my article on the Philippines. I ask you. Defending the Marcos regime against Amnesty International, the Soviet Union and the O'Donoghues. What's not to like? But ah, the O'Donoghues always had a weakness for ad homonem attacks. And her greeting was uncanny. It was like a gypsy curse. It all came true. She was right on every point except that I was 22 not 32."
"You're reminiscing again," said the cousin.
"Sorry. Continue your fascinating discourse about Hare Baithers in their natural habitat. I can't wait to see how it turns out. What were the great left wing power couple doing in the public thoroughfare?"
"Well that's just it," said the cousin. "It was very strange. They seemed to be walking up to lamp posts and pulling at them. Then I realised they were tearing down Irish flags which someone has been sticking up around the town."
"Strange," said I, "I always took the O'Donoghues for closet Rahmen. I'd expect them to be waving Irish flags rather than taking them down."
"It is strange," said John. "I wonder what's at the back of it."
Later that week I drove through South Kildare on my rambles. It was an idyllic sun splashed evening.
My feminist cousin Pauline's house is in the neighbourhood.
On impulse I stopped for a visit.
I met her at the door.
"I can't stay," she said. "I'm going to a bake sale."
"In aid of your writer's group?"
"In aid of the Palestinians."
I bid her adieu and drove on.
All around the hinterland of Narraghmore as I drove away, I encountered little groups of rosy cheeked country people scurrying along bearing cakes wrapped in tin foil.
With some measure of spiritual mastery I resisted the urge to wind down the window and roar: 'Let those hostages go you evil Palestinian ****s.'
The last time I engaged in such public polemic was at a picket line of police employees outside Naas Garda Station during their strike action. I had roared: 'Go back to work you lazy ****s. You're bankrupting the country.' Before that it was picket lines of teachers on two separate strike actions with more or less the same appeal to their better natures as I used with the cops, and prefixed by the same honorific. Before that it was Muslims demonstrating in the streets of Dublin. Each time I seem to have favoured the cee word in my discourse. Mrs O'Donoghue doesn't know how lucky she was back in 1988. I was less vulgar then. But I'm reminiscing again.
And I have grown mellow in my middle years.
Not a word of contention did I raise to Pauline. Not a word did I say to the good hearted burghers of South Kildare scurrying like rats to their bake sale.
Back at Aunty Mary's house I fished out a computer and began a typically intense chess game with Mohamed in Teheran.
I was quite engrossed when my cousin Frances who is a retired Secondary School teacher entered the room stage left, chatting with the aforementioned Aunty Mary.
They sat at the table.
I looked up from my international outreach to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Frances had a black eye.
She was in the middle of telling the aunt how it happened.
"There are Irish flags all around the town," she recounted. "It's an anti immigrant thing. Those right wing bastards are hijacking the flag. I went up to a lamp post to pull down a flag and somehow I fell and broke my glasses and gave myself this black eye."
She actually said 'right wing bastards,' with me sitting right there right handedly, mightily rightily righteously playing chess.
Truly I have mellowed gentle readers.
Silent though I remained, my face did betray the ghost of a smile.
So Frances wasn't beaned by the yobs who put up the flags.
She was beaned by a lamp post.
And if the lamp posts are turning on humanity, where will it all end?
With a little luck, maybe they'll get the O'Donoghues next.
John Carpenter could direct the film version.
