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Success as Shell scores Cider  On Good Friday, the town closed up tighter than a gnats chuff. You couldn't get a sweet, or a cigarette, or a packet of Butterscotch Angel Delight for love nor money. And if you did, you couldn't be caught with them. "What are you rustling there" said my Mother as I ran up the stairs with contraband in gold foil. The town was a wasteland with every shop battened down,only tumbleweed rolling through main street, the sound of bells pealing ominously  from the 3 churches, Twins and a Friary as the day wore interminably on. One could be forgiven for thinking Gary Cooper would walk out from behind a store front with a pistol on his hip at High Noon.  Because we were told we couldn't have it, even people who wore gold Pioneer Pins had the thirst of death on them.. In a countrywide epidemic of reverse psychology, we would have walked through walls to get at a pint. Myself and my comrades in arms were on the hunt f

People be mental. I don't know about you, but if I felt a weakness or a bit of a turn coming on,  I would try to faint somewhere safe -  preferably onto a bed - but if none presented in the immediate vicinity,  I would.........  oh you know  -  totter my way  queasily to a seat,  - feel my way to a wall and slide down it,  - stagger through traffic to lie down on the path, -  sit on an escalator and lie prone on my back at the top, -  my fringe plastered to my forehead in a flop sweat. I would not collapse onto a painting. Especially and preferably not one worth a few bob. Like about €10,000,000. Yep, Ten Million bucks. How do you even collapse onto a wall? Surely, by the very nature of the fact that it was a painting, AND  the only one of it's kind in the country by the celebrated artist Monet , AND  mounted on a wall, presumably at eye level, (maybe it is on the skirting board and is an installation piece for The Borrowers ) then it is a super-human pi

I slept in my dress. It was way too cold to do the stripping thing. Having been up half the night watching shite and knitting what appears to be a Doctor Who style scarf, I slept late and pulled the patchwork quilt around me in the morning and turned over. "Brrr and Bollocks" I thought when the phone rang. Little Thomasina is parked across the road with the chihuahua in his arms, his tiny paws no bigger than my little finger, balanced on the wheel. The two of them are staring at my front door and I shuffle down the stairs with my hair standing on end.  Looking  like a baby that has been left  too long in a cot , a ring of  fuzz  at the back,  I extricate the tiny dog through the open window. Dad gives me the hairy eyeball. He thinks I have been carousing and cavorting around the streets with a motley crew of unsavoury young men. He also thinks I am about 13. Alas, those were the days. The truth is that I have set a precedent on Friday nights that started whe

The water draws me back again, and again. The first time I was 17 and living in a caravan beside the petrol pumps - working shifts in a chipper called The Pirates Den and battling my way through a fog of Impulse  and Harmony hairspray daily.  There were 3 girls living in the caravan,  Paulette and I sharing the twin couches at the front and a madwoman called Cassandra living in a madder room at the back, filled from pillar to post with burger boxes and empty cans. It was permanently locked, as was she. There was no lock on the caravan door though, and we lay at night listening to the keys rapping on the windows as the boys left the pub, shrieking up and down the roads on motorbikes, praying toChrist that they would not try the door handle and come in on top of us.     The most exciting thing that ever happened in the Den was someone left their duty free behind one night in a gale and we divvied up the fags and brandy between the alcoholics and the smokers. Some of  us were bo

Wearing a headscarf in the house An d so the transformation is complete. I have morphed from Wildchild/Enfant terrible into a middle aged d owager/spinster  - (who owns a tiny dog in a coat) - and who  is wearing a headscarf in the house while sprinkling " Lily of The Valley" Shake n' Vac on the stairs.  My neck is perished since I got the bob. The stairs is in tatters since I got the dog. There was a time  when a barman would vault across the counter to close the door and pull down the blinds so I couldn't get in. Oh Jasus, not  Michelle Mahon   - he would say. She is a tour de force -  he would say. She will come in with an entourage, laughing and shouting and then she will drink bottles of beer like Mothers Milk, and change her mind, her drinks, her dress in the jacks and the company about 7 times in one night - She will sing and dance on tables and refuse to leave without take outs and then try to buy another 2 rounds, and get cash back on a laser - She

I am at a production meeting with an editor - Al fresco.  That's not his name, we were outside -  He has taken a photo as I sat down, which flummoxed me a tad.  He laid an arm protectively around the giant Canon with the zoom lens and conducted the interview looking at his notes, and at me, over the brim of his cup and spectacles. In the middle of ranting about something or nothing ,I spotted the  guy at the other table. Tall, long hair, waistcoat, bannoffi. He had eyes like those weird blue crystals and I was giving him the bambi's AND loads. Every throw away remark was for his benefit. I saw him laugh into the cream a few times, and once he blew the froth off his cappuccino with a snort, which he turned into a cough. By the time the editor had looked at his watch 7 or 8 times, I had him hooked. The editor legs it in a flurry of brief cases, camera straps, and apologies. "Well. that went well, eh?" I said to the man with the Lapis Lazuli  eyes. He alm

Shellshock in the pineapple chunk by M.D.M.   Tonight, despite being so exhausted that I could lie down and sleep on the tiles, I am shaking cream in the carton to whip for an Irish Coffee and staring out at the sunset over the purple hills.  I am beginning to feel like Randall P. McMurphy after the big Nurse had her way and won the day. I am immune to the calling from the hall. Tonight I am not Bridie , or Pat , or the Nurse. I am just a tired Michelle. I have set a tiny tray with a schooner and spoon on a napkin, on a saucer, as if it was about to be proffered in The Horseshoe Bar, by a Dublin barman with a spotless linen towel and the gift of the gab for the Yanks. " Did yee ever hear how they came to be made" he would ask as he polished the already sparkling slim jims.  " A buddy of mine ou at the airport was seeing all a dem gettin' off a da planes, FREEZIN' dey were " he would begin. Someone has recently boiled the kettle and i

On the Doctors couch she buttoned her sleeve and swung her legs over the side. He stood with his back to her as he quickly soaped and dried his hands.  The tang of the freeze spray hung in the air as he pressed the slides together and wrote her name. A neighbour in the same Square, he stood at her door in his shirtsleeves two days later when the results came back marked Priority. It was her Father who mentioned The Deacon .  He had a vague memory of his address from when he had a skin tag removed from his neck, where it had chafed under the shirt and tie he wore daily to work. There is a trinity of them at the farm gate as they wonder whereabouts The Deacon is.   On a sweltering Sunday afternoon, as the hedges filled with furze, they drove to the isolated farmhouse.  His wife, wiping her floury hands on a floral house-coat, informs them that he is in the far field cutting sceachs .  The nimble figure belies his age as he brings the curved tool down again and again,

The Soprano was screeching her way to the ear splitting higher notes in Lucia De Lammermoor by Donizetti the night I was born. There had been thunder and lightning earlier in the day but the fireworks lit by Casey Whelans Grand-da went off into a frosty starlit sky.  Thomasina was peppering, pacing the halls  in Dr Haddens Nursing Home awaiting the imminent arrival of his first baby -  he had been reduced to putting a sign on the 4 th floor window  -  “ No Stir Yet ” to spare his, and the querants legs.   The other opera was Much ado about Nothing which Siobhan would have been at pains to refute as she panted her way to my heads arrival on the planet.  “It’s not so much fun now, is it” enquired the spinster midwife with grim delight as she soaped her elbows and grasped me by the shoulders.  I opened my tiny mouth and screamed an impromptu duet with the singer. Picking my way gingerly through the trail of scutter down Gibsons lane, I paused  long enough at fat Angie M