mdm

She would have lived her life in Nonchalance, and Insouciance, apart from making her living, which was a Nuisciance - Ogden Nash.  Edna O'Brien, Enchanting at Eighty Three The Town Hall in Dalkey is chock-a-block. There is a palpable air of expectation in the warm room and I skid to a halt having sprinted from a moving car. The Dalkey Book Festival is in full swing and round every corner strolls someone that could be someone – if you get my drift. The seating is of the kind where you establish elbow room similar to flying. The lights go out, the coughing stops, and Sean Rocks comes out to applause.  He is here to introduce and attempt to interview an Irish Woman, an Irish Writer, and an Irish Legend. Edna O’Brien takes to the stage. My first thought is that she has aged. This is only mildly surprising as at 83 she looks unbelievably fantastic. There is the smallest twinge of vulnerability about her as she sits slowl...

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 been chafing 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...

We meet in a sun dappled garden with an olive tree above our table. Laura comes in with her long hair shining, looking like she just stepped out of a shampoo commercial - which is apt as she has been involved in drama since she was a tiny child.  She has tread the boards and served her time in her own family’s drama & theatre workshops, dressed up in outrageous costumes, painted sets, and generally cut her teeth in all things artistic.   She didn’t lick it off a stone as we “Yella Bellies” like to remark.  Her parents are Michael Way and Irene Wright and they are as well known in drama and theatre circles as a begging ass. Michael is at present hard at work directing “The Tempest” for a Wells House Production, and Irene is finally ready for her close-up as she graces a number of films at present.  More of which anon. Laura studied Art in W.I.T. and was then a broadcaster with South East Radio for a number of years. She has been a professional film actres...

The appointment was made before I wrenched the lower discs in my lumbar spine which are fused, and prone to aching after sudden knock or twists. It made the journey hellish to say the least. The clinic I am going to comes highly recommended and I am most anxious to be treated . After a number of preliminary stops we head off en masse in the car to Kildare, my sister, my nephew and I. He has taken up a position on the back seat with his gangly teenage legs and feet stretched out - the better to sleep.  Limping along behind them , I realize with a start that he is now taller than his Mother. Everyone is taller than me. Pauric Gibbons is not your average kind of Homeopath or TCM practitioner. He is not sitting behind a desk with an array of charts and  books. There is not a reception area or a girl with a phone checking your name off against a heavily underlined book.  We walk across the tree dappled drive, ring the bell and walk in.  Th...

It had been a long shift.  On nights, there are no visitors but the same amount of nursing gets done, tablets are administered, people are checked and turned, reports are written, a presence is needed in a room where a tiny woman is making the lonely crossing to the other side.  On the night when I had been listening to the radio interview, with Siobhan curled in the corner of a chair that resemb les a giant pram, and while my sister lying silently on the airbed , contemplated the flickering candle on the sill, we all listened to my husky voice saying words, a resident was hovering in the blue space between here and there. M and I had many conversations. Readers may remember she made me the hand knit patchwork quilt that spurred and re-kindled my interest in a hobby I did not know I loved. (It was in this vein that I rocked up to meet friends last week in a jumper I had knit for a "Man" but which I was now sporting. The sleeves touching the ground. ) On one fine ...

Siobhan always knew when I was up to mischief. Even as a small child my absence was noted, primarily due to the cessation of constant chatter  and/or hysteria. The silence would have drawn comment and she would put down whatever was in her hands and stand at the bottom of the 3 flights of stairs with her ear cocked. “That little lady is up to no good” she would think and call up the stairs…… “Sheee eeelll, are you rooting up there?” I would almost fall into the press where I WAS rooting and caught in the act shout back down “NOOOOO, I’m just playing” and leg it. When she would have negotiated the very top of the stairs I would be sitting blithely and nonchalantly reading a book on my bed. She knew well enough I was a consummate actress and feigning unconcern she would walk across to straighten the curtains and peep out the small windows into the square. “Well, whatever you’re at you may come down now, it’s teatime.” It was from rooting that I found everything. I had ...

It may be because I live alone that I engage like someone on speed, then race home to the controlled madness that is my house, where I slump in a corner like a deflating, softening balloon the morning after a party. Cherrypicking multiple and various topics simultaneously,getting distracted by someone on the path who looks weird, forgetting what I am twittering about, wandering from story to sto ry, like a child playing hopscotch, breathlessly trotting out the punchline to an audience, that the more ornery I get the funnier they find me. "You should sell tickets" they say. "You should do Stand-Up" they say. And the truth shall set you free. This is how my drives to Siobhan are. When I walk in the door I am still smiling from leaving the driver alternately amused and aghast. The grin is wiped off my puss when I open the door. Siobhan looks tiny tonight. Her hair - fading from her natural blonde into silver - is flopping across one eye, and she is slumped sideways ...