Memoirs of a Wayward Schoolgirl

When I was in fifth year in school, our art teacher, Miss Driver, set our class a project making large papier mache masks to hang in the corridors during Arts Week. Arts Week was an annual occasion to piss off class and muck about, concluding in a half day Friday and a school concert and prize giving in the hall. I am proud to say that over the years I managed to amass for myself three arts prizes, one art book for crafts and two books of quotations for poetry. Oh, I can hear you say; you were one of those people. Those horrible teenagers who wrote bad poetry. And I say to you, show me one teenager who does not write bad poetry and I will show you a sober Irishman. Anyway, for this project we had to fashion our masks with chicken wire, that staple of school art classes, and heave huge, paste-sodden lumps of newspaper about it until it took on the shape of our intended mask. Everyone else did African tribal things or Venetian carnival masks: Lucy, being the visionary soul and off-the-wall fucking genius that she is made one of a Japanese geisha. Yes. I know geisha don’t wear masks. I don’t know what I was thinking except that I had just finished that Arthur Golden book and was enamoured with it all. And due to my horrific lack of any discernable artistic skill Miss Driver had adopted a policy of letting me off. ‘That’s grand, Lucy’, she would say as I explained how I would not be doing a painting for my end of year exam but instead a big collage of crisp packets. ‘You do your thing’ and off she went to the people who actually could draw. So I made my geisha ‘mask’ and we were all happy.

My geisha mask stayed on the corridor wall for a couple of months, mainly because I couldn’t be arsed taking it down. It was so fucking big. I had no place to put it. Instead I started taking it off the wall and running up and down the corridor wearing it at break time. My group of associates at the time thought it was hilarious, naturally. Teenagers! They’ll laugh at anything, even one of their friends running through the school wearing a three foot geisha mask on their head. Tools. Our head, a nun, caught me once and asked me in that psychotically calm way all nuns have what did I think I was doing. Like all previously hilarious teenagers I went dumb. She told me to take it off and hang it back up. Here’s where my genius kicked back in: ‘This is my art, Sister. You are inhibiting my creative freedom’ I know. I was a knob back then.

This is all incidental drivel of course. It’s just that the film of Memoirs is in the cinema now and I am nothing if not current. I'm working on a post about gay cowboys in my free time. Harder t dig up vaugely related stuff of my own experience on that one. Also my mother took the geisha mask out of the attic last week and left it at the bottom of my bed.
‘Take that piece of crap out of my house’ she said as she chugged vino from a bottle.
‘Mother, that is my art, you are inhib… Never mind.’

And there it still sits. It’s a fucking freaky lump of shit to see first thing in the morning, let me tell you.

Qwerty, quickly

You know about typing, right? It's when you put writing and stuff on your computer. Occasionally, when you lose your senses and apply for a job in an office you may get tested at how good you are at doing this. You will be hungover because, lets face it, you usually are and the mean invigilator lady will yell at you to stop talking, and to write your name at the top of the page, and you will scrabble around desperately looking for a pen and Becky and Sarah, the people who are supposed to be your stinking friends for Christ's sake, will snigger because apparently she meant for you to type your name on to the computer screen. Then a man will yell 'start' and everyone will start banging their keyboards so loud that you have to take a moment to collect yourself and by the time you have collected yourself everyone else is turning their pages over and by the time you are turning your page over the woman who brought her own little typing stand thing is finished and is leaving. And you'll throw the dirty swot a look and think about smart things you should have said to the yelling invigilator lady.

Then suddenly you're out in the open and you're walking along the road wondering what just happened and why you're up so fucking early on a Saturday morning.

Paltry Excuses

I got a haircut yesterday. It was hugely stressful. As always I was left franticly pawing through magazines right up until I was called, like I was cramming for some test. And then I ended up choking out the hairdresser’s most despised word, ‘trim’. Holy fuck. You may think I overreact. You do, yeah? Well take a look at this, dicks:


I know what you’re going to say. ‘Lucy, did your parents, like, force the female gender on you?' Pish, I say to that. My hair was kept mulleted until age seven. Not everyone is a good-looking child. At least I got smarts. Stop laughing, you at the back. I know your mother. Hence extreme grief and anxiety at all haircutting events.

Swansea was lovely by the way, thank you for asking. I would have photos to show but I left my camera on the top of the fag machine in a nightclub called Jumping Jacks or something while the bouncer was yelling at us to get out and we had lost Marie and it was 3am. Fun and games. And I was temping all last week in Jenny's office answering phones and generally fucking things up. When one is busy losing people's messages and misfiling things and breaking photocopiers, there is simply no time for blogging. Priorities, friends.

Lucy goes to Welshland (visual guide inlcuded)

I don't know if I mentioned it but it was young Mags O'Neill's birthday last week. Hurrah! And it was young Mairead Flanagans also. Hurrah the sequel! Anyway, it has been decided that we are going over to visit Mags in her college in Wales and whoop madly about her person until she feels the birthday love. When we become tired we will ask polite questions about the Welsh life and then we will drink alcohol and go to Welsh pubs and abuse the Welsh people riotiously. Ah, the fun.

We are travelling there by ferry mainly because I feel my current lifestyle does not afford enough opportunities for public vomiting. Stupidly enough the booking of the tickets was left up to me and I'm not sure but we may be going to Cardiff instead of Swansea. No biggee! Wales can't be that big can it? And my Welsh accent is excellent thanks to all my productive Sunday morning sessions studying Steve Jones off T4. His accent, naturally.

Portrait of the blogger as a tent-dwelling chiddler

When we were young my aunt Mercy took me and my cousin Brendan camping for a week every summer holiday. In this way I experienced for the first time Kerry, Cork, camp sites, swimming in stony inlets without a lifeguard, eating cold beans for tea and sour milk and corn flakes for breakfast and the utter, inexplicable joy of not washing for a week. Golden memories, folks. In the above picture Brendan has just told a filthy joke. Note my prudish response, even then.

In the picture below we attempt impressions: Brendan does a mean Calvin sans Hobbes while I struggle to pull off Violet Beauregarde without blue body paint. Not pictured is Mercy doing a David Bailey.


Yes, yes: I know that's not very funny but the photos are cracking, aren't they? Notice especially our perverseness in failing to pose in any traditional manner. We were rebels even at age eight. At least I still am a rebel. Brendan now works in IT.

I need say no more, I think.