I am two. I was really two two weeks ago but didn’t notice until today. Last year I missed being one completely. The 1st anniversary is paper though, and paper is of no use to a blogger so that was all right. This year it’s cotton and I’ve just done a big knicker shop so we’re all right there for a while. What therefore can you send me? Money obviously – there’s always money.

But I don’t want your money. What I want is an an ending for a story. This one, in fact:

A Tale.

An empty crisp packet blew down Cromwell Street. The crowd on the pavements was silent except for a lone eerie whistler, and his mother. Up in heaven God shouted at the angels to turn Inspector Morse down so He could watch the scene unfold undisturbed. He’d forgotten how He’d predetermined this one to work out.

Tormod the Tormentor, the Bully Boyle of Ballantrushal stood at one end of the street. One hand moved slightly towards a silver Colt Peacemaker in a sheepskin halter on his not un-snake like hip.

At the other end of the street a pair of clear-blue eyes narrowed menacingly as their owner planted two determined feet firmly on the municipal crazy-paving and wished his Ys weren’t riding up his bum. All eyes were on him – it would look wrong and uncool to start grabbing up there at this moment. He scanned the crowd briefly, his chiselled jaw tensing with the sort of impossible gorgeousness not seen on Stornoway’s streets since the days of Flinty MacFlynt, a fine figure of a man, aye and handy with his tairsgeir; much admired by the townswomen and – almost literally – an original Town Father. Two lady librarians and Joan from the butcher’s fainted clear away.

Ah, but this was his moment. How long he’d waited! It had been ten years since he left Lewis vowing never to return, ten years of demons haunting him, ghosts of the past taunting him, urging him on and on, never letting him rest for a moment, chasing him all the way to, as chance and Southbound roadworks would have it, Aberdeen, that great granite city of the North. There, still a pale, skinny stripling, he’d been baffled and not understood a blessed word the natives said to him. But the Aberdonians had treated him kindly, if incomprehensibly, and being baffled was better than being beaten by bully-boy Boyle.

In the intervening years he had become a highly successful ornamental hedge-trimmer which had given him broad and powerful shoulders; and lately he had joined a gym, which had given him other powerful parts. He’d saved judiciously, bought a little house and, yes, had even known love for a short while before she ran off with the rep from the Union of Topiary Workers. In the main though, he had thrived in these fertile eastern soils and was grown tall and devilish handsome, all the ladies agreed. Not unlike a taller Al Pacino.

And now was his moment! Now he would teach that low-down pustulent Boyle of a human being what it was like to know fear. His finger curled delicately round his Derringer as the wind flapped his long black leather coat cinemaesquely. He sized up Boyle. It was true, his once-famed hips were still snake-like, if the snake had just eaten a moose; his little arms barely reached them on account of the enormous gut that draped around like some monstrous skirt of beef.

He was suddenly reminded of a witticism he’d heard on the ferry on the way over: Some men were sitting around in the bar, one of them a great lump of a man, and the talk had turned to marital relations as it usually does in the choppy waters where Loch Broom meets the Minch. Apparantly the big man was himself married to a big girl, and the others were gently teasing him about how they got the business done. Big Man says “Ah, that’s what all my short-peckered friends ask.”

But this was coarse thinking and he hadn’t become such a renowned hedge-artiste by such coarseness of thought – apart from that one cash-in-hand job for the nuns on their poplars behind the tall, grey walls of the convent on The Black Isle. He blushed in recollection of how he’d fashioned their azaleas. The sisters hadn’t even mentioned azaleas but he’d got carried away.

And anyway this strange turn of thought was by the by, because all the island knew Tormod only had a very wee one. They knew this on account of his mammy, Honest Margey, taking a turn out at the fank one year and never being the same again, her peculiarity being marked by a disconcerting habit of always, always telling the truth. Tormod’s willy, incidentally (and really, it was only a very incidental willy) wasn’t the only one to pass into notoriety by way of Margey. The minister, she declared on the bus one unforgettable Monday, had a very big one indeed, not as big as Simple George from the grocery van’s, but certainly by her reckoning, bigger than average. There was quite the kerfuffle after that, alright. The disgraced minister was posted to a youth outreach program in the Gorbals within the week, and in the emergency the congregation had had to accept a young man from the South, with all the threatening new ideas these people from the South bring. Cushioned pews, indeed! Where were Christ’s cushions as he hung bleeding for our sins on the cross?

But I digress. Which isn’t like me.

Our hero shook his head. Concentrate, man! Any minute now he was going to blast two holes right above and below Tormod Boyle’s sweaty unibrow, like a divided-by sign. He’d read somewhere that to divide-by was to conquer and he was always a chap to go by the book.

Somewhere a seagull screamed, briefly. Again the whistler whistled, now low, now high and tremulously, as if the accounts of all men’s souls were to be settled that day on Cromwell Street. Again the whistler’s mother told him to shut his gob, he was putting people off. Up above, God made a mental note to smite her with a wart as soon as this was all over and she was back sitting for her portrait. God is nothing if not an avid cinema-buff, although He couldn’t see why Citizen Kane was all that special. A tumble-peat blew by.

The town-hall clock struck the hour – high-noon. According to the ancient rule for duelling crofters, on the twelfth stroke the foes were to fire.

Nine…
Ten…
Eleven…
Twelve…

BANG! BANG-BANG!

The smoke clears. The crowd gasps…

What happens next?

(I’ve been tagged by Foots to do a meme but I’m not in the memey mood right now. I’m in a bunny mood having watched a host of them courting on the lawn as I sipped my coffee this morning. So I’ll do the meme on Monday which is alliterative so it must be meant to be. I’m also mumming on Monday – Troilus and Cressida, in the evening – as well as my usual mammy duties. I tell you this not because it is important, but merely because it is not very often that I am meming, mumming and mamming all on a Monday and I want to tell somebody.)

Anyway.

It’s spring! The time when a young buck’s fancy turns to love and there are loved-up bunnies all over our garden at the moment. They are near demented with it and more than once I’ve seen the white of a lusty bunny eye. In the evening they will rear up in majestic rabbit rampant sillhouette causing you to remember good, brave Hazel from Watership Down and weep.

We are very lucky here at Rancho Problemo and have a full orchestra ready and waiting to provide heightened emotion to our everyday activities – things like The Luvin’ Spoonful hits on shuffle at breakfast time, “O Fortuna!” when we prepare fish steaks and, unexpectedly, “I’m Going To Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair” when I’m doing the hoovering. But we’ve had “Bright Eyes” on a loop for a week now and, frankly, I’m about ready to reach for a big ole Elmer gun and thort that pethky orchethtwa out.

Rabbits are not like us I observed lazily this morning, the sun shining in the window and bathing my bumble-bee slippers with light. They don’t have our inhibitions and “meta”ness. Their manners in mating matters aren’t like our’s either. They will tear about the garden like lunatic furballs without a care for the circling hawks above, the possibility of a beaky death only adding to the piquancy of their lust. Then a frisky young doe will suddenly turn coquettishly with a shiver of her little bobtail and she and her suitor will crouch face-to-face, ears flat and stock-still for half a minute or more, only their twitching noses to tell us that we aren’t looking at a still-life painting. Their twitching noses and the lack of a frame.

Then, suddenly!, she will leap 3 feet straight up into the air and they’re off again, haring round the lawn and sending little clods of turf flying. Moments later they will disappear into a bush which will tremble and squeak for about twenty seconds before two plumes of lazy curling smoke come out of its top.

Later, you see them pretending they don’t know each other, but she has a new looseness about her hips when she hops, and he’s writing poetry in the mud with his nose. Lovesick and unguarded, he will hop out into the open for a better peek at her as she grazes with her girlfriends, forgetting that he, as a bunny, is one of the most eaten creatures on earth. The sky will darken, a hawk will swoop and a bobcat will pounce and collide with the hawk in a puff of blood and fur and feathers as our hero hops a few hops forward forward, oblivious to the carnage behind him, his only concern whether he should have used the Petrarchan rather than the Shakespearean form for his x-rated sonnet. The end.

Hey, it’s nearly Valentines Day, folks – you didn’t think I was going to kill the bunny, didja? No, he is flattened later by a UPS delivery truck.

Anyways, this is what our pops orchestra played this morning when I threatened to disembowel them with the cymbals if the played one more bar of “Bright Eyes”:

Bunny lovin’ – had me a blast
Bunny lovin’ – happened so fast
Met a doe, crazy for me
Met a buck, cute as can be
Bunny fun, something’s begun
But ooooooh these springy dawns

A well a well a well a…

(Massed Blue-birds and fawns)
Tell me more tell me more does he have an o-er bite?
(Massed gophers and raccoons)
Tell me more tell me more, was her tail fresh and white?

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huhoooaaah

She hopped by me, nibbled some grass
He just sat there right on his ass.
She went skipping, I caught her eye
He ignored me, I don’t know why.
Bunny treat, doe and buck meet
But oooooooooh, these springy dawns

A well a well a well a…

Tell me more, tell me more, did he sing you a song?
Tell me more, tell me more, was she wearing a thong?

It grew warmer as the day broke.
I spiked her dew with ‘hypnol and coke.
I woke up, about mid-day
Oh she was flat out and I had my way
Bunny rape, too doped to escape
oooooh ooooooooooh these spri-ngy daaaaaaaaaaaawns

Oh oh oh

(Sotto voce)
Tell me more, tell me mo-ho-ho-ho-ore!
(And fade…)

I’m going to this here Dublin place soon and I thought I’d do a bit of reading about it so’s I’d get more out of what’ll be just a short visit. It’s a funny old place, is what I’ve been finding out. I’ll tell you what I’ve discovered and, if I have it wrong, please do feel free to correct me, you Irishers and non-Irishers alike.

First of all, it’s a fair city and all the girls are very pretty. And there are streets both broad and narrow. And molluscs are sold.

Now, I knew about the Pale and stuff from that oft-used expression about kicking the bucket (ho!), but what I hadn’t realized is just how isolated and distinct Dublin was, or at least used to be, from the rest of Ireland. From Nuala O’Faolian’s book “Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir Of A Dublin Woman”, Bloom’s Literary Guide To Dublin, Lonely Planet’s Dublin and Maeve Brennan’s short story collection, “The Springs of Affection.” I’ve learnt that Dubliners never spoke Irish, the people were mainly descended from the Anglo-Irish even before Cromwellian times, and that until mid-last century much of Dublin hadn’t emerged from Victorian squalor.

The Maeve Brennan stories are less stories and more little three or four page vignettes from her memory but she makes each one shine like a jewel and they’ve stayed with me this past month since I’ve read them. Nuala O’ Faolian’s memoir is an amazing look at a Dublin woman and journalist bucking convention and as such is a fascinating look at both the old and new Dubliners across a period of immense outward change; and the psychological remove of Dublin from the rest of Ireland, about which she, as a typical Dubliner, knew little. It also examines the Dublin literary scene in the last century, the religious scene, and the many different bar scenes which vary depending on how dependent you had become.

I’ve read the Dublin writers everyone has, Swift, Roddy Doyle etc, but what I was looking for was writing about Dublin itself, or how Dublin relates to the rest of Ireland, hence the non-fiction and memoirs above. I’m really looking for fiction though because it can often tell you more about reality than merely relating real things can.

At the moment I’m nearly finished Dublin Noir, a short story collection from crime-fiction authors both Irish and non-Irish. All the stories are contemporary Celtic Tiger tales. High and low society mix (or don’t) and all the energy around the new Dublin really crackles through. Glasgow is good mix of the cultured and affluent with and the terrifyingly violent underclass, the hard-boiled characters and hard-as-nails police, and is a terrific city for noir. Even in broad day-light Glasgow thrums with something between commerce and menace, and I reckon Dublin might have that same vibe, or more so. Is that right, Irishers?

Some stories are streets better than others but mostly it’s been a good, frequently disturbing, and sometimes funny read and I feel I’m getting a good sense of modern Dublin: what’s not settling easily; what is; what’s roaring ahead; what’s not able to keep up. In caricature to a degree obviously – it is noir – but the ear for language seems dead on and a lot of the modern city is meticulously described. I’m going to be interested to see how much of it I recognise. Of course you can feel you’re getting a good sense of something all you want, but nothing beats the seeing for yourself and its all really whetted my appetite to try the city on and see how it feels.

Some stories in this collection really bludgeon you with the noir or the Tiger which is OK but I think the couple that combine the two the best also happen to work the best though for more than just that reason. One is “Taking On PJ”. I can’t remember the name of the other just at the moment.

There are lots of heavy footsteps on stairs; a lot of mini-bar drinks consumed in luxurious modern hotel rooms; a lot of socket-poppingly creative violence; stock Dublin characters are both lionised and debunked; there is even a black cat in an alleyway in one story; the whole book is swollen and soggy with Jamesons, Guinness, blood, rain and poitin; old IRA alliances are hinted at; there’s plenty of banking fraud; plenty of high heels on cobblestones; plenty of either unpleasant or gullible Americans; a lot of beauty and ugliness rubbing up against each other; luxury and seediness. Gangland Dublin is well represented as are the non-Dublin Irish; Eastern Europeans figure; it all feels like it was written yesterday; and everyone, everyone is on the make.

Next up after Dublin Noir will be The Dubliners which I read in my teens, and then Ulysses, which I skimmed in my teens too. Loosely. Very. I was too young and not equal to it. I was wasting my time, out of my depth, and felt like I was trying to read through some mystifying mist with smashed, googly glasses on. But I knew Joyce was “important” so, in my early twenties, I had a stab at Finnegans Wake – I mean the song was straightforward enough, right? It scared the beJoyceus out of me and I haven’t been near him since.

I don’t know if any of you Irishers who come by these parts have read any of those books and can say if they give any kind of an accurate picture at all. Are there other books I shouldn’t miss before visiting?

Anyway, my spanking new passport arrived today and all my travel arrangements are set so it’s all a go-go. I can’t wait to see the place for myself.

I got nominated for an Irish Blog Award! Best Personal Blog!

Ah, but wait-wait-wait…waity here a wee minute…

Thing is see, I’m not Irish. It’s true I’m a diasporic* Celt who writes about sheep a lot and hangs out on a lot of Irish sites but I’m a Scottisher living in California so no shiny gongs for me. Howly waily. The sweet and lovely Devin nominated me and stone me stone deceased if I wasn’t more chuffed than a chuffy-chuffy steam trainfull of asthmatics going up a foggy hill; it fair made my day. But I’d feel like an imposter as my Irish credentials are generations gone, nor do I live there, so I’m removing myself from the list.

I will be at the awards though, on the way to pick up my mammy – a nervous flier – and bring her back here for her holidays. Providing, that is, the British embassy gets it’s wrinkly old arse in gear and renews my passport. They said 10 days. It’s been more than 10 days. I’ve bought my ticket now too so it blinkin’ well better get here on time.

I’m really excited about getting to meet some of my favourite bloggers, folks like fatmammycat, Primal Sneeze, Bock The Robber, Eolai, Sniffly, The Hangar Queen, Medbh, Gimme, Manuel, John Mc, CapnP, Conan, Sweary, if she shows up, and perhappens a whole bunch of other great people I don’t know quite so well yet like K8 and Flirty and Gingerpixel and Annie and oooh loadsa people. Maybe do a little Twenty spotting too. ‘k, I can’t be bothered making links any more.

As it happens, most, if not all, of these people are nominated and you will not be wasting your time if you visit any one of them. These are gems of blogs, every one. It was lovely to have been included in their number for a wee while, and generous of Dev indeed but I’m more than happy with just getting to come and rah on all me Irisher pals. In one swell foop I’m getting to meet half my blogroll. I wish there was a way of meeting the other half sometime.

* This means I reproduce asexually in a forest far, far away. Like a mushroom.