Butterface

The first thing they gave me in Sweden was a wooden butter knife.

I thought it was a spoon for eating tubs of HB which in our house has always been known as   “Heavy Belly” due to an unfortunate incident when I wore a free promotional t shirt as a child. 

A Butter Knife?

As a welcome gift in the welcome pack which ominously had a map of the second hand shops inserted into it?

Could they read my mind? 

A butter knife for Butterface? 

“Oh she’s lovely from the back, Butterface” ...............  

 

The only way to explain how some people dress for the airport is they think no one else will be there. I suspect that Dublin Airport is an elaborate hoax and Swords has a real airport nearby that only Dubs know about.

I had spent the evening carefully folding things into a gigantic case and when I finally sat on the lid couldn’t lead nor drive it. Use mine says Hewhomustnotbenamed and we threw everything around the room and tried again. It became patently obvious to me after the first 40 minutes or so that only a third of the stuff would go in so we refilled the original in a heap and ran for the bus. 

Dublin airport at 3.47 am is beautiful - the pink fingers of dawn gently tickling the grey clouds, the crescent of a golden daybreak peeping over the horizon. 

Inside it is Bedlam.

"Move along there, yeah move along, pass the crates back, yeah, take off your shoes, yeah, they have zips in, yeah, yeah, no, NO , yeah, an anyway  leave the silver bracelet on, be grand

I was outraged at the price of a cup of slop masquerading as coffee I purchased from a Chinese man asleep on his feet, and positively distraught that no one had booked my bag in. 

At least I was heading for the right gates this time as last time I was in this airport 11 years ago  I queued at the Aer Arann desk for Alicante.

 I know. 

Imagine arriving on Inis Meain  with factor 50 , a  GHD , and a  Tankini. 

Onboard  I am mesmerised at the tininess of the plane and hurl my laptop into the overhead lockers.  My elbow is in the lap of the man beside me and I watch the woman in front read the on board Bia menu, licking her lips before we take off. 

I am already calling her Cankles in my head as she has a spectacular pair, no doubt from flying around the skies eating cheese and crackers and white bread sandwiches. I wanted to smash her face in after 20 minutes. 

“Yawn” she shouted at her children who were sitting across the aisle. Yawn, and then showed them how to do it a number of times as if they were unfamiliar with the process. 

I marvel that people strap themselves into miniscule seats and hurtle around the skies and get off somewhere else. 

Sweden is somewhere else, and aside from knowing a band called Big In Sweden and 2 brothers who went over there and never came back, I don’t know much about the gaff except for Abba, Saunas and Ikea. 

In winter the biting snow arrives early, heralding interminable darkness filled months, that the residents respond to by changing their tyres and wearing layers, using the barks of birthing birches for their kindling, and stocking up on Jagermeister.    

In summertime wild flowers in clusters of lilac and white clutter the roadside  hedging,  the un-sprayed chemical free train tracks,  the meadows at the banks of iridescent skyblue lakes

I wondered idly why I could not make it aisy on myself and travel light as I dragged the  case the size of a small apartment into and out of taxi boots, bus hatches, escalators, elevators, airport carousels, and murderously vicious slamming doors on high speed trains

I stood on a station platform in the sweltering 34 degree heat,  feeling that my earlier self -congratulatory cigarette on having made it thus far may have been a tad hasty, as I realised I would have to run the length of a football field through polite Scandinavians dragging a bag with 2 bockety wheels. 

.In Stockholm everything is cool and calm and collected. 

There is gentle incidental music being piped out of the ceiling and a smell of fresh coffee and black and white prints of famous Swedes on the wall - 

Bjorn Bjorg, 

A  formula 1 driver, 

Greta Garbo,

Abba,

and that guy from Wallander.  

Irish people are mad.

You know what I mean.

We shout and sing and swear and would burst out laughing in your face at the drop of a hat and inform you that you are talking shite as quick as look at you. 

We heckle and harass each other and say give over and go way and ya  liar all in the one breath.

Swedish people are reserved and polite and don't do sarcasm. 

In the baking heat and with the aforementioned zips nearly combusting I look around the deserted platform to ask  yet another stranger how to get where I am going. 

Alan is 61, blonde and perma-tanned with a gold chain and a pink shirt, and smells of beer and aftershave and lucky strikes. 

Oh, IRISH he says . 

All my life I have wanted to go to Ireland, you need a husband maybe? 

He slaps his washboard stomach to indicate his fitness and his ability to be marraige material but despite the whiteness of his teeth, the goldiness of his rings and his similarity to a pint size  Paul Newman, I realise my train is leaving and I am on the wrong platform.

Again. 

Goodbye Alan, Hey Do, I shout as I run across the tracks with the giant case. It may have been remiss of me to be wearing a Betty Boop T Shirt, a ra ra skirt and a pair of  green wrestling boots donated by Maria Pepper , as I was a startling sight for the monochromatic women casually reading  Kindles on the train. 

I am met at the station by the director and his assistant, and take all 6 keys for all 6 rooms to see which is the nicest. I wore myself out, shouting this one, No this one, NO this one until I  lay down in a hot mess on the ground. 

The next train brings more bodies. 

A white haired man, an Indian man and an Irish man are dragging cases up the gravel drive. There seemed to be more cases than people, and I would soon learn that one was filled with books of poetry, beer, and syncopated musical instruments. 

I put out my hand to shake his and he responds “Hug me, Mee shell.” Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Bengt Bjorklund is in the house. 20 minutes after we meet we are lying in the grass smoking a pipe and drinking warm bottles of strong beer, it would have been quicker but he had to negotiate 4 flights of stairs. 

Twice. 

He forgot his drums.

And he is 65.  

Anisur was in his room pocketing the key to the front door and examining his laminate. 

Writers are tortured souls, who inhabit a strange nether world, out at the edges, lost in thought or anger, frustration, ennui, guilt  self analysis and sabotage. They are prone to stress related illness, alcoholism, mental health issues, and depression. They are always broke and wrecked and living on their nerves wondering where the next shilling will come from. 

We however, were having a ball. 

I haven’t even begun to process Sweden yet, this land of contrasts, the high skies that someone saw me stare at incredulously. 

“We are so far north we are not under any flight path “ says a Swede eating a bowl of Bearnnaise sauce for his breakfast and buttering a seeded roll with a wooden spoon. 

I told anyone who would listen that I would write a letter to the King and tell him what was going on in a state of the nation kind of way. 

They laughed and carried on eating  Bearnnaise  and listening to the Sex Pistols. 

They love a bit of Punk, God help them. 

They only got it last year. 

________________________________________________________________________

His Majesty Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus,

Drottningholm Palace,

Lovon Island,

Stockholm County,

Sweden.

2, Letsbee Avenue,

Wexford,

Ireland.

Your ref HRH/KCGFH/PA/BA/MA/PHD/ETC

Our ref MDM/GAA/AA/HARPERVALLEYPTA

JULY 2014

Dear King,

How are you?

I hope you and Sylvia are well and enjoying the beautiful summer weather.

Some people in one of your tiny towns called Tranás  asked me to come and sent me a ticket. 

In an attempt to foster creativity they have created a residency in a giant house beside the train tracks that used to be a fur factory. 

Apart from hallucinating on the first night that my bed was surrounded by small mammals with liquid eyes and flashing teeth, I have not seen any furs, unless one counts the coat I found in the second hand shop beside the   6 - 23 , where I bought the apron off the pensioner for 35 kroner. 

“Will you leave it a bit lower” says I making the motions with my hand to the 87 year old woman with no English

Oh Auntie, says the stunning Tishani from the door, give her the 3 euro. 

Tishani is the most beautiful broad I ever had the misfortune to be photographed with, a woman you could look at for 23 hours a day and not be done. 

 Also I spyed  a dark  furry shape flashing through a forest from the back window of a speeding car, driven by a deaf man, on the way to Ikea in Linnkoping. I have never been to Ikea before so it is fitting that I should have to go to Sweden to buy a paper lamp, cushion covers, and a mat.

I also ate the world’s largest portion of meatballs and mash with lingenberry jam  there as I had a head like Holyhead from getting blotto with Otto, who agreed to pretend the cocktails were meals on a receipt.

I also pretended we were a film crew to get into a closed nightclub where a young blonde Swedish girl with a lot of tits and teeth threw herself across a table to kiss an old man. 

I was so distraught and jealous that I demonstrated the story of the man who leaned into the hedge which collapsed by leaning into a hedge -  which collapsed.  

 I was pawed by a poodle named Ralph for so long on a speeding train - as I stared at the red barns flashing by- that I jumped off at the wrong stop and was proposed to by a small man named Alan in Norrkoping.

Alan is a chain smoker who is 61 years old, and bears a striking resemblance to Paul Newman, if he was tiny, 61, or alive. 

In Tranas, there are so many Cadillacs, Corvettes, and Chevrolets cruising up and down the tree lined main street, driven by men with mullets, that I felt like an extra in Fargo and expected to meet Marge Gunnderson around every corner. 

All of your subjects there say   a – HAW , a –HAW, while nodding, with the pitch and intonation altered slightly to register surprise, agreement, amusement, or sorrow.  

Ones subjects that are traumatised or outraged or shellshocked say a HOE a HOE through their nose.

I heard this many times.

The first person I met in the house was a man sporting a t-shirt with a picture of Frank Zappa on the toilet on it. His name translates as Blessed Birch Grove, and he has the distinction of missing Woodstock by getting hurled into a Turkish prison for having a little nodge of hash on him. 

It wasn’t all bad though, as he has been immortalised as the Scandinavian  guy in a small film called Midnight Express. 

You might like to rent it sometime between Scout Jamborees and flying around the world meeting people. 

His most notable moment of the residency was almost choking to death on a piece of chicken outside a Thai restaurant, and being driven off in an ambulance to have a procedure done in Eksjo hospital after his pleas for help or a Heimlich went unheeded by a small Irish woman who had a big camera and a bigger thirst. 

In fact she had a thirst you could photograph..  

It wasn’t all bad though as she wrote a hilarious poem about his misfortune called “The Styckling Kyckling”.

He wrote a book called “I missed Woodstock”

On my first diary entry I described the town as being full of Labra-doodles, home perms, and check shirts.

This may have been the heat and the fact that the Swedish sky was so high and so blue.

A man took me to a barbecue at a lake in a Jaguar, where I was served the first of 72 meals with Bearnnaise sauce on it. 

Even if you get an ice-cream it comes with a side of Bearnnaise.

A restaurant had a framed certificate on the wall having been awarded the accolade of best Bearnnaise in the whole country

You could just TRY pepper is all I’m saying.

It may have been a mistake to ask the broad in the curry house to make it as hot as she could when it was 35 degrees and I had to go to someone’s flat to watch Germany scoring 8 goals.

I came over all unnecessary in a flop sweat and spent the night smoking camels on the balcony. 

After swimming in a freezing lake, a Welsh girl, an Indian girl, and an Irish girl stopped for lunch at a Greek restaurant run by a Syrian man serving Italian food in Sweden.

 

I had to have a lie down on the bed that is only 4 inches off the ground, with the tissue thin duvet, and listen to the Punk bands tuning up. 

There were a couple of the members of one of the aforementioned bands living in a black camper in the carpark next door.

Smoke was coming out of the chimney a lot.

Also the Ginger drummer wore only one shoe and no shirt.

Ever.

And he smelled like a skunk that had been lying in a skip on a hot summers day covered with old nappies and a bag of sick. 

I sourced a tin of snus  from a  man with a head like a cue ball, and a massive beard,  and made myself ill trying it.

I didn’t know you could just buy it in a shop. 

I wrote a poem about that too.

It’s called -  “Oh don’t give me any more of that Snus”

 I met a  fly in Téater Jarmo  that evening running in an hour late from the wrong airport and thinking the blackout curtains were a wall and announcing the first thing I would be doing would be having a slash. The audience laughed out loud  and I pulled back the curtains and said Howya Sweden. 

Hey Hey Michelle says Freda who I met when I was photographing a crow eating a Panini. She knew one of my colleagues. I married his brother and buried his mother says she and tells me she is a Lutheran Minister when my eyebrows rise up into my fringe. 

. 

I tore the ligaments in my knee on a beautiful Swedish bike and had to be dragged up the 4 flights by 3 men to bed.

I had to be dragged back down again in the morning to attend the action man Doctor in the stone washed drainpipes who gave me a pair of crutches The Borrowers could have used.

When my colleague stopped laughing he extended them by 6 notches. 

Also it is just not fair that a Swedish mile is in fact TEN Kilometers.

Which may explain my injury. 

My other colleague was pictured waving sadly on the steps of the plane to Amsterdam and then turned around, fell up the steps and cut the 2 hands off himself. 

At dawn on my last day as I was pulling the duvet cover off the tissue, I heard a noise like someone throwing a drum kit down a stairs, and realised we were being burgled, but they were legging it, leaving the stuff behind in their panic. 

A beautiful blonde boychild weighed down like a pack mule took me to the airport on the 4 trains as the crutches made dragging the case impossible and I was wheeled through customs and check in like an obese celebrity waving my passport at the glass with the tips of my fingers. 

So, I was just wondering.......................

Being as you are the King and all,

Is there the tiniest chance you will ever let me come back? 

Yours sincerely, 

Butterface.

 Ps I use the butter knife every day