God Grant Me .........................................

Dear People in The Arts Council,
Further to my myriad of phone calls, and your insistance on a CV  -
please find attached the abridged version of a Curriculim Vitae.



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I got my first job in 1984.

Well, the first one I am going to actually call a job, although I had been working for slave wages  in the holidays for years, wrapping  hot greasy  potatoes in white paper saying salt & vinegar hun in a beach chipper,  for starving Dubs burnt to a crisp, buttering white bread and cutting it into 4 triangles to leave on the side of a fry on a blue striped plate for farmers before they went to the pub,  and boiling a piranha to death making a stinking  seafood chowder in the process, when I was in Colman Doyles  petshop.

 

He moved me to the hardware after that where I sold Paraglow heaters, filled 5 gallon tanks of the stinking paraffin for Mrs Hayes, and rooted in filing cabinets of nuts and bolts for self tapping screws while the men in dungarees with pencils behind their ears laughed and called me Sally O Brien.

I was still working sporadically in the hardware shop but had not been rostered to help out with the live animals due to my previous. I was allowed to advise unsuspecting customers about the benefits of eggshell versus silk emulsion even though I had barely a clue myself between them. I was bored with the whole thing anyway and wanted a change.

I wrote a fawning  letter to a Gynaecologist asking him did he need anybody to be his P.A./Receptionist as I could type and answer phones and was good with people and babies.
He wrote a charming letter back explaining that he did not need anybody and wished me well and hoped I would find something suitable in the near future. I wrote him an even more charming letter back , heaping him with praise and thanks, and wishing every seed and breed of him all the best for now and ever more, and calling down blessings on his curly head.

He gave me a job.

It was to be in his new clinic, referred to as rooms, across the road from my home. The most onerous task I had in my new employ was having to brasso the plaque that said MRCOG FRCSI and remembering to put the bin out on Monday nights. He saw patients from all over the South East who drove to see him because of his reputation and his bedside manner. I became the face at the door and the voice on the phone trilling good afternoon and asking women if they were pregnant or not.

Would your appointment be for Ante Natal or Gynae?

“Wha?”

Are you pregnant or not?

I had a legendary memory for names and faces and would greet each patient by their first name and remember which baby they were on or which treatment if they were not.
 I wrote up the bloods and the smears and took the semen samples in pill bottles wrapped in hankies from mortified men who were undergoing fertility checks. 
 I filed like my life depended on it, and knew exactly where to put my hand on anything that was needed and would be on the phone to the labour ward booking a patient in before he opened the door to give me the nod.
We became part of a well oiled double act, him doing all the life or death stuff while I remembered the more mundane things, like his home phone number. 

I got the back story of every person who presented  and spent the mornings dancing around the hallway with the radio blaring, straightening up the magazines in the waiting room while singing at full throat  into the sweeping brush and calling people from the phone which was supposed to be for incoming calls only. One day while I was smoking the butt of a cigar from his ashtray and harmonizing at top volume with Joni Mitchells River, his tiny wife came in and caught me.

This was not to be the first or last time that she would chance upon me doing something not destined to be performed in a work place and I can almost imagine the involuntary shudder as she parked her tiny car outside.
 I was shuddering inside having chanced upon photographs of surgery where a pensioner had cysts the size of a small child removed from her womb. I also read every single chart, and all the letters back and forth between specialists and fellow surgeons, and every note on every file until I felt I was an actual Gynaecologist myself.

 

My duties  did NOT  include  making personal calls, dancing around the hallways singing  full throat into a sweeping brush with Chrissie Hynde on the radio at full blast and smoking the butts of cigars that the aforementioned Gynae left on a saucer in his office, and getting caught every time.

From there I moved to Germany with a London Chef I had become engaged to by accident –
(I was merely trying to finally hear the punchline of a joke he had told me in the Cedars Nightclub in Rosslare the month before. (The busdriver was shouting so I had to leg it ) –

I was in Stuttgart at the same time as Joxer and so had to contend with an influx of demented Paddy’s into the City, all looking for  porter and craic  and tickets to the game in Neckar Stadium - which were scarcer than chickens teeth.
 Between gatching around with them I was gainfully employed as a chamber maid in the Intercity Hotel at the Hauptbahnhof, and when I translated the London Chef’s interview and they realized I could speak German, became the Receptionist in the Park Hotel in Villastrasse.

It all went downhill from there.
Between arguing and drinking with the stranger I was living  with, who spent time picking up the ring from wherever it had been flung on a nightly basis, I got a job as an Au Pair to a 5 month old baby with  a couple of Cameroon Doctors, ( she interviewed me sitting naked on the toilet breastfeeding the aforementioned ) I gave up after Ireland beat England one – nil and flew home leaving your man behind.

Back in Ireland I prevailed upon Fas to put me on a course in the teeth of a biting recession.
It was 1988 and people queued at night to get the papers early to read the Situations Vacant and To Let columns. 
They queued by day down the hill to the  misty quayside to get their dole -  joining one of two lengthy snaking trails that no-one ever knew which was  the right one - the signing on or paying out.

The “Start your Own Business Course” prepared me to surrender to the tearful reconciliation with the London Chef when he rocked up at the door with long hair and a sad face, and following a successful interview in Dublin, flew to Gatwick, and started training to  be pub landlords  under a despotic maniac blonde  in an establishment  named  The Duke of Wellington in East Horsely,  near Guildford. She existed entirely in a procession of pastel  pink silk shirts, carefully tonged curls,  a Dunhill in a holder while she  barked orders at the poor Irish craythur and the Bristolian Brian, a tiny  chef who was so stoned he could barely discern what he was putting in the curry, which was always delicious despite his best attempts at self sabotage.

When we qualified we travelled the length and breadth of England and Wales, running pubs, the largest a 300 seater  carvery in the New Forest at Beaulieu, run by an Ex SAS officer who called everyone pigs and the smallest a tiny lock up in Trowbridge, Wiltshire which had Del Amitri and an Irish Alcoholic  named Declan as its only customers. 

 In every town in the world there is an Irish alcoholic named Declan sitting on a high stool reading a racing paper eating pistachios out of a machine, clogging up the ashtray with shells and talking pure and utter shite.  In  The Greyhound in Neath I was casually carving a dried up hunk of roast beef when Screaming Lord Sutch and his entourage breezed  in, he resplendent in a top hat and tails  and took over the pub for his electioneering, contesting the Neath by Election as the representative of the Monster Raving Looney Party.  They set up their PA by the fireplace while Bonnie Tylers  Da was playing Dominoes with another  welsh speaking pensioner and started belting out what was to be the first of many impromptu fundraising gigs. I put a chalkboard outside saying “Free  beer and naked dancer “ at 10pm and the punters nearly tore the pub asunder when the boys came on.

The cleaner would come trilling in the door at sparrow fart saying let’s put the keckle on and get a few pastys from greggs in a Swansea accent so strong it could have passed for Norwegian,  and It was only a matter of time before the meeja heard about the madman and the madwoman in the pub where the landlady would be asked by the draymen who the gaffer was, and be told you’re looking at her and so I was filmed by S4C news and rang my Da to tell him to turn on the welsh after tea. What in the name of God is she up to now he queried in mortification.

By the time we had done about 40 takes with the meat, it was looking decidedly worse for wear and the crusty heel resembled the sole of a boot, so  I had to resort to listlessly turning it  over and over with a giant fork as it was too small to cut.

I attended the count under the watchful eye of the media and cameras as his common law wife Anna May Sutch in a black cape, wearing a laminate that said as much.

As Such. 

  His actual common law wife Anna May Sutch was present herself, but she went as somebody else.  Peter Hain won. 

 When I couldn’t stick your man any longer, I drove away from our own pub in Wales( without leaving the recipe for ice) to London  with the steward from the Conservative Club  around the corner and moved into the attic of a West End hostelry called The Dolphin Tavern where I had to clean the gaff, dodge the pair of Chocolate Rottweillers who patrolled the stairs as security,  nix in the Sadlers Wells Box Office, as well as cook lunches  in a pub across the road called The Sun, and nightly serve the parade of drag queens and actors like Albert Finney and Rula Lenska , gin and tonics and trays of pie and chips. Dennis Watermann always tried to conveniently forget to pay for the plates of salad sandwiches.

After I moved back to Ireland I worked as a chef, waitress, barmaid, pub manager, tourist information officer, office staff,  medical secretary, school secretary,  and in front of house, hr, pr, event management, music, film production, band management, hotel and hostel manager, stewardess on an Irish Ferries ship,  arts centre staff, holistic therapist, and carer.

My Mother  Siobhan, was diagnosed with  Alzheimers when I was 40, and the last 10 years have  been some of the  most  formative  and traumatic of my life. But it is absolutely and implicitly why I have been harnessed into writing now, captured at the keyboard,   documenting memories, events, and social archive that I feel  duty bound to remember, for her, and for  all our sakes.

It is to this end that I have been writing all I have written, submitting short stories to every competition – Mc Manus, Merriman, Trevor, Keane, Davy Byrnes, why I am writing a play called Brigids Women about her 7 month stay in hospital waiting for a Nursing Home bed when she was passed LTC ( Long Term Care) after a simple admittance for a check up, and why I have not one, but 2 Memoirs sitting on a memory stick, one called “Mothers Day” about her, the other 
“Shellbombelle” about me.

It is  also why I created the Alzheimer Association of Ireland page on facebook about her, narrating the implosion of the dynamic of a family through the ravages of a disease that is vicious and heartbreaking on a daily basis, as incrementally it steals the soul of your loved one and makes you witness it,   which drew followers and friends and thousands of views , until they made me the voice of carers in Ireland at a special meeting in the Aisling Hotel on Parkgate Street at Christmas, and then I started performing.  They started reading the blog  and then  I got an unpaid job as the features editor on the Slaney News and wrote 4 colour pieces each issue, and did my own photography, and got the train to Dalkey to interview Edna O Brien and hear her speak. The Arts Centre went nuts when I did “The Haemorraging Humourist” at the Culture Night, and then Fusion Soiree, and then a Writers Roast. I perform a One Woman Show now, the first called “Before I Forget” which played in The Sky & The Ground to a crowd that queued up the stairs, while I sat on the balcony, having a final nervous cigarette like a condemned man.  The next show was called Shellshock in Riverbank on Easter Saturday and they had to wheel out the emergency chairs.

 

In the middle of the event management  of that gig  and inflating 200 balloons , I missed a load of calls from a Swedish Number which was the director of the Kultiviera Centre in Tranas, Sweden trying to offer me the Dylan Thomas residency there and begging me to confirm by email asap.

Which is where I came in………………………………..

 

 I am applying for funding so that as the only Irish recipient of this award I don’t disgrace myself and my homeplace .  A man I barely know is trying to get me a decent laptop that is not 11 years old and does not have the battery hanging out the back ( the only way it will work ) so that it can safely store the warchest of ideas I have for books, plays, scripts, screenplays, and radio pieces that I have not yet submitted to  the producer at the digital radio company that broadcasts across the time zones, who  has been waiting 2 and a half years. I hope you can see your way clear to send me a few bob and let me buy a pair of sandals and let me get my roots done so I can take off my hat and  not look like the poor relation with all the lovely Swedish people in their grey and white clothes, so I can make friends with the reclusive Agnetha from Abba, who  I am surely bound to meet on my travels.

In a spirit of research I have watched the box set of Wallander which has allowed me enough Swedish to order a round, and detect murderers.

Yours in Christ………………

 

 

 

Michelle Dooley Mahon June 2014