BETAMAXNOMATES

This morning was spent at a service in church - except that the church was a school, and the service was basically brunch with some singing and stuff.
Everything about this ‘church’ is so alien to my childhood memories of sporadic masses: seeing the neighbours tarted up, the forced bonhomie outside the church, before everyone was ushered inside to sit, awkward and bored, mumbling along with some tedious stretch of scripture, after which the priest would recite some leaden anecdote about an inspirational GAA hero living life to the full despite a tumour as big as the Ritz.
The only consolation back then would have been that The Parents, lapsed-Catholics and functioning alcoholics, hepped up on the Holy Spirit, might buy you a comic or some teeth-rotting penny sweet bonanza bag in the shop across the road. All silver-foil linings to a wasted youth.

This service however was great - warm, relaxed, and above, all fun. (Also vibrant, ambient, dynamic, and perhaps even a bit European, what with the cheese and everything).
Actually the weird thing was meeting people who knew about my life via this blog.
In many ways it never really occurred to me that people who read this journal would take from it information that could later be presented to me in real time. This is most unsettling and I found myself asking, quite ridiculously, how it was that they came to know these things about me.
Because I wrote about them, obviously, but this would seem to, in some way, to contravene the strict principle of ‘artistic distance’ - a phrase, by the way, cribbed from Nietzsche’s ‘Big Gay Science’ - that I set out to enforce.

This was intended initially to be simply a record of things I find amusing and/or interesting. And by amusing I mean laughable, and by interesting I mean contemptible. This is not me, nor is it about me. It’s not even by me. You are here. I am not.

Yours, taking it all way too serious,
Anonymous Not-Anonymous AKA ‘Anonymous’

So... enough about me. Let’s talk about me.
Yesterday, I met with an old college buddy, C.K., now one of my new colleagues, albeit on a part-time basis. She’s a remarkable woman, and I say ‘woman’ with purpose: she’s one of the oldest people I know, 30 years at last count. Still alive though, and going strong, God bless her. Great though she is, I can’t help but resent her for planting so many bad things in my impressionable mind.
Take the following:

‘You’ll recognise P. [one of the clients] - he’s the one whose jumper’s are all chewed [she demonstrated this by enthusiastically gnawing on the lapel of her jacket]. He doesn’t talk much and mostly keeps to himself. Watch him, though, if he’s chewing - if he’s getting ready to attack, he’ll started chewing his jumper’.

You can probably imagine at which part my mind broke glass and pressed the Emergency Stop button. Getting ready to attack?! Baby Jesus be buggered, this isn’t what I signed up for, was it?

As the honey-voiced, fajita-eating lady off the telly says: ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, if ah’m still alaaaaaaaaahhhve’.