On the day of the party, the sons of Erin hung our black, crushed-velvet frocks on the back of the office door, rolled up our sleeves and repaired to a disused studio to make a literal mountain of coleslaw. All around the building others were making vats of trifle, slicing miles of bread, washing fields of lettuce, mixing gallons of thousand-island dressing. But, even while we catered like the clappers, things had to be kept ticking over in the offices too. I kept having to desist from chopping cabbages to attend to petty-cash duties. The best was when someone rushed in and gasped, ‘Ahmed has arrived with the sheep. He needs money to pay for the taxi.’
Even though the sheep were long dead, I couldn’t banish a mental image of Ahmed in a black London cab, squashed up beside two fat, fluffy sheep, like busty, old women buttoned up against the cold. As I went back to the office to get money, I half-expected to find the two sheep running amok through the hallowed corridors, as if they were cavorting along boreens in County Clare.
Next, the other paddies and I had to go to the nearby Tesco to buy up their entire stock of spuds. You need a lot of spuds to go around a hundred and fifty people. An awful lot. An entire shopping trolley of them. To get the spuds back to our offices required stealing the shopping trolley and wheeling it down Tottenham Court Road. The problem was that Tottenham Court Road was crammed to capacity with crazed, wild-eyed people frenziedly doing their Christmas shopping. Standing room only. We could barely force our way through. Coupled with that, the trolley kept making bids for freedom, veering madly out of control and threatening to upend itself into the gutter.
At about six o’clock, everyone was decked out in their party frocks and high heels (even some of the women) and everything was ready.
Except the sheep.
The weather in London wasn’t quite as clement as in the foothills of the Atlas mountains. It had started to snow lightly down on top of the sheep so Ahmed’s fire kept going out. Also it seemed that he wasn’t as au fait with the roasting of entire sheep as he’d let on, and had miscalculated the amount of time needed to cook them. By about twelve hours.
All one hundred and fifty staff repaired to the upstairs bar, where a combination of hunger, exhaustion, anticipation and a free bar for an hour meant that, in a commendably short time, everyone was twisted. Later that evening, the shout went up that dinner was served. But as everyone else stampeded down the stairs for their bit of raw sheep, I remained in the bar, slumped on the sofa with my friend Louise. I was too wrecked from my day of peeling carrots and wrestling with shopping trollies to go anywhere. There were only two other people left in the bar. A woman and a mad old academic with a floppy, polka-dotted bow-tie and a great fondness for the sauce. They were both scuttered. At the best of times me laddo wasn’t too steady on his pins and needed a walking stick to get around. But he was so jarred he could hardly stand as he left to make his way down the stairs, assisted by his woman-friend who was nearly as bad as him. Lurching and leaning on each other, they made it to the door of the bar, then disappeared round the doorway to descend the stairs. Louise and I were poised for it. We stopped our conversation and held our breath. And sure enough, within seconds, we heard it. The rhythmic bumpity, bumpity, bumpity bump of a pissed academic with arthritic knees falling down the stairs, ricocheting between wall and bannister as he went. There followed a short, expectant pause, a kind of pregnant silence, and we concluded that he had arrived at the little landing halfway down. Again we held our breath, then exhaled with relief as the bumpity, bumpity, bumpity bump began again, as he tumbled down the second half of the stairs, concluding with a satisfying crack as he obviously hit his head on the slate floor at the bottom.
I’m sorry, but we laughed. We laughed till we cried. We clutched each other and nearly puked from laughing. It had been a long, exhausting day, but all the same that’s no excuse. When the spasms of merriment eventually passed and we could walk, we went and had a look over the bannisters. The academic was sprawled on the floor at the bottom, being revived – the way you should with extremely drunk people – by a glass of white wine administered by his bollocksed lady-friend. He was surrounded by a ring of people only marginally less jarred than himself, who were offering all kinds of conflicting advice. Stand him up. Don’t move him. Ask him who the Prime Minister is. Don’t be bothering him. Give him brandy. Get his stomach pumped. There was talk of calling an ambulance.
‘He might have brain damage,’ someone said.
‘Would anyone notice?’ one wag asked.
Eventually, they managed to agree that an ambulance wasn’t necessary, that he was good and mad already. A taxi was called for instead, and he, his walking stick and his glass of wine were carried as far as the car. While he was helped in, someone placed his glass of wine on the roof of the cab. Then, as the disgruntled taxi-driver screeched away from the kerb with his scuttered cargo, the glass of wine was sent flying off the roof, spattering the well-wishers with sweet, sticky Liebfraumilch.
God, those were the days…
First published in Irish Tatler, December 1998.
Happy Christmas! Form an Orderly Queue
Christmas. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Allegedly the season of goodwill to all men, anyone with a bit of sense knows that it’s anything but.
Christmas is about waking up seventeen mornings in a row swearing that tonight really will be the night that you go to bed before two a.m. It’s about battling through brightly lit, overheated department stores, sweating in your coat, scarf and gloves. It’s about breaking the mini-sausage-roll of peace with your boss at the office party, drinking vast quantities of Piat d’Or from white plastic cups, then a couple of hours later pushing people out of the way in your haste to photocopy your bottom.
It’s about hordes of Irish people coming home from abroad, being welcomed by their overjoyed parents at Dublin airport, then saying awkwardly, ‘Thanks for coming, but… ah, listen… I said I’d go straight into town to meet Malachy and Annie and the others, so sorry about that. Er, but as you’ve come all this way, no point in you having a wasted journey, any chance you’d drop me into town and take my bags home with you?’
It’s about queueing for several days to get a taxi, it’s about watching the fisticuffs break out at Midnight Mass, it’s about drunkenly wrapping your presents late on Christmas Eve, then being mortified when you see what a hames you made of it, in the cold, sober light of Christmas morning.
But above all, Christmas is about rows. Terrible rows. Shocking, unexpected rows. Caused partly by the huge gap between the expectations of Christmas and what it actually delivers. And partly by there being too many self-governing, autonomous adults crammed into one house, having to obey someone else’s rules and follow someone else’s routine. (I also blame the central heating being up too high.)
I used to think I was the only person who had big scraps over the festive period, but now that I’ve opened up about my secret shame, I find it’s going on everywhere.
But there are some good things about Christmas, of course. Presents!
Since time immemorial, every Christmas morning my four siblings and I had to queue up outside the locked door of the front room. Waiting for the glorious moment when our mother would turn the key and we would be propelled as one into the room, to fall with glad cries on the Scalextric, Tiny Tears, Polly Pockets and other delights within.
Mam is a real showman and would drag the unlocking out as long as possible. Meanwhile, we squirmed in an agony of anticipation, until the five of us were concertinaed into the space that one person normally filled. The idea was to have the oldest in front one year and the youngest the following, which was fair to everyone except the child in the middle.
This practice continued well into our adult lives. But of course, once alcohol was introduced into the equation, the landscape of Christmas morning altered irrevocably. Inconceivable though it would once have seemed, it suddenly became more important for some family members to lie in bed roaring for a basin than to be queueing outside
the front room shouting ‘No pushing at the back!’
And no matter how pitifully the younger members pleaded to be admitted without their hungover siblings, my mother was firm. All or nothing. Until every single one of the five of us was present the door wouldn’t be opened.
Desperate measures were called for. A couple of them went outside in their bare feet and pyjamas and tried to look past the impenetrable barrier of the lace curtains of the front room to see if they could catch a glimpse of something within that looked like a My Little Pony.
‘Can you see anything moving in there?’ asked Tadhg anxiously, who spent his entire childhood vainly hoping to be given a dog. (When he dies, the inscription on his tombstone will read ‘Can we get a dog, Mam? Can we Mam? Can we?’) Back into the house to search frantically for an electric cattle prod all the better to hasten the rising of the lie-a-bed offenders. None to be found. Nothing doing but to burst into the hungover person’s room, brutally turn on the light, stand at the foot of their bed and shriek, ‘Get up, you selfish pig!’
‘Carry on without me, men,’ groaned the bedbound lush. ‘I’ll only slow you down.’
‘Just get up for five minutes,’ someone else reasoned. ‘Then when we’ve been let in you can go straight back to bed.’
That usually worked. But instead of entering the room like a bullet out of a gun, as we used to, it was a small army of walking wounded that shuffled forward lacklustrely to open their packets of gift-wrapped pot pourri.
Ah, pot pourri! Where would we be without it? It says so much. It says, I don’t know you very well, but am obliged because of circumstances to give you something. It’s the kind of thing sisters-in-law give each other. The perfect present for your father’s girlfriend or your colleagues. At Christmas, I don’t think of the star in the east leading the three wise men or of the little baby being born in a stable. Instead I bow my head and am humbled by the thought of so many gift-wrapped parcels of pot pourri changing hands.
But of course, Christmas isn’t just about presents and materialistic things. Christmas is about so much more than that. Christmas is about food.
Lots and lots and lots of food.
I devote myself to it with almost mystic zeal, trying to barricade myself into my bedroom with tins of Chocolate Kimberleys. I am truly disgusting and I get so caught up in the terrible gluttony of it all that I’m not able to do anything else. Every Stephen’s Day for the past ten years, my sister Caitríona, my friend Eileen and I have made noises about going to the races. I have yet to achieve it.
‘Are you coming to the races?’ Caitríona demands, while I lie in bed.
‘I can’t,’ I mumble, my mouth full of Crunchies. ‘I’ve set myself a challenge. I’m going for a personal best on the selection-box eating.’
‘Fair enough,’ she says. ‘Well, the best of luck, do you want me to time you?’
For a moment a cold hand of fear clutches my heart as I think of all the starving and exercise I’ll have to do in January. But that bleak, hairshirt month seems a long way away. I’ll deal with it when it happens.
‘Get the stopwatch!’ I command. ‘I feel lucky.’
First published in Irish Tatler, December 1997.
A Quiet Millennium Night In
Few events in the past decade have generated as much discussion as the question of what you’d be doing on the night that the new millennium dawned. This is a piece I wrote for Irish Tatler about what I’d planned for it.
The world is divided in two. Not along the lines of people who have inny and people who have outy belly buttons, but between those (like myself) who abhor New Year’s Eve and those who love it. If you’re one of those people who think New Year’s Eve is ‘Great fun!’ then please stop reading now. You’ll only think I’m a whingy misery guts. But if you’re the kind of person who, even as you screech ‘Happy New Year!’ with eighty other revellers, feels a black hole of bleakness corroding within you, then read on.
New Year’s Eve tips me into the worst pit of depression of the entire year. I inadvertently stray into a negative twilight zone where I take stock of my life and find it very, very lacking. No matter how happy I am the other 364 days of the year, I suddenly feel like a horrible, lonely failure the night before the New Year arrives. The rest of the year I know I’m not that bad, but all positive thought is washed away by whatever bad energy is abroad on New Year’s Eve.
Not only that, but whatever I plan for the night never really works out. As the clock strikes midnight, heralding the arrival of the New Year, I’m either:
a) being refused entry to a party;
b) traipsing around a housing estate looking for a party which doesn’t exist;
c) part of the mass exodus of over-refreshed zombies streaming out of town, night-of-the-living-dead style, looking for a taxi;
d) nose to nose in a shockingly unexpected shouting match with my nearest and dearest;
e) in bed, feigning ’flu.
So as I’ve never made any secret of my dislike of the regular New Year’s Eve, can you imagine how much more of a loser I’m going to feel this year when the whole song and dance will be magnified to the power of… well… two thousand?
For the last eighteen months there’s been no escape. The question of where you’re going to be when the third millennium dawns has been passionately discussed in pubs and around dinner tables and at bus stops everywhere. In fact, it’s overtaken ‘will Tom and Nicole’s marriage last?’ as that handy conversation filler when you end up sitting next to the world’s most boring man at a work thing.
But while the rest of the world has been talking about seeing in the new millennium by flying to Fiji or getting a house in Bundoran or paying two hundred and fifty quid for steak and chips and a thousand quid for a babysitter, I’ve been Mrs Killjoy. Though I’ve tried to keep a lid on my curmudgeonliness, sometimes I just can’t stop myself from offering a choice of five responses. Which are as follows. ‘So we’re celebrating the 2,000 years since the birth of Christ? Well:
a) He didn’t exist.
b) Or if he did exist he was born 2,004 years ago.
c) Even if he was born 2,000 years ago, I thought the 25th of December was his birthday.
d) We haven’t reached 2,000 years until the end of the 2,000 years, i.e. next New Year’s Eve.
e) It’s only because we have ten fingers that we think this is significant. If, for example, we had nine fingers we’d count in base nine and the year 2,000 would have been in 1458.’
That usually puts paid to any discussion, I always find.
But I’ve recently discovered that I’m not the only person in the world who finds New Year’s Eve a trial. There are others like me. Oh yes! And we’ve decided to stop suffering in silence. My friend Aoife says she’s hardly ever had a nice New Year’s Eve, that something horrible usually happened, like going to a party and seeing the fella she fancied get off with someone else. To which my friend Suzanne chipped in and said that Aoife was lucky, that at least she’d managed to find the party.
Anyway, to make a long story slightly not so long, what I decided to do was provide a safe house. A safe haven for those with New Year’s fear and especially for those with New Millennium’s fear. Anyone who wanted could come to my house for an Alternative Newer. Himself and myself decided we’d hide all the clocks, so no one would know when it was twelve o’clock. For the same reason, we wouldn’t have the telly on. Instead we decided to show Audrey Hepburn movies – Roman Holiday, Funny Face, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We’d keep all the curtains firmly drawn so as not to be bothered by bloody fireworks, and if the local church bells started pealing like mad, we’d pretend it was just an extended version of the Angelus.
Naturally, we’d get in a ton of food and drink, but instead of having to sip your champagne and balance a small plate of cocktail sausages and mini-pizzas while making polite conversation, we decreed that you could consume your food and drink any way you liked at our party – sullenly thrown on the couch,
swigging straight from the bottle, cramming Pringle after Pringle into one’s mouth if so desired. As people arrived they’d be frisked at the door and relieved of any silly hats, whistles, sprigs of mistletoe and other wacky New Year’s Eve paraphernalia, and anyone bursting into a spontaneous chorus of ‘TEN! NINE! EIGHT! SEVEN! –’ would be gently but firmly ejected. And the same thing would happen to anyone who went around upsetting the other guests by asking them what they were giving up for the new millennium.
When I mentioned the idea of the safe house to others, the response I got was incredible. Some people looked at me as if I was insane and called me a miserable cow, but others loved it and even added some wonderful contributions of their own. One friend suggested having a roomful of duvets, so when the existential angst became too much, we could wrap ourselves up, curl into a foetal ball, rock back and forth and make gentle keening noises. And I have to say that of all the facilities on offer that evening, this proved one of the most popular.
Anyway, the whole lovely thing has gone pear-shaped. My sister in New York got wind of it and rang me with the ominous words, ‘What about this open house you’re having on New Year’s Eve?’
‘Not an open house,’ I gently corrected her. ‘It’s a safe house.’
There followed a horrible pause and I had a hair-standing-on-the-back-of-my-neck presentiment of disaster. ‘Safe house?’ she said cheerfully. ‘Not any more.’