A couple of times I even had to get up at the ungodly hour of ten.  Can you imagine?  Ten o’clock in the morning?  There should be a law against that.

Last night I went to bed early, with no alarms set and relishing a good decent night’s sleep with the full intention of getting up at a respectable hour.  Like two.  Or three?

By ten, I was in the middle of a really good dream where myself and Sharon were doing things that frankly shocked even me, when I was woken up.

Sandy wanted a piss.

I told her to go into the kitchen and have one there, and I rolled over and tried to get back to Sharon.

Sandy was having none of it.  She wanted to go out, and that was final.  I told her to fuck off and let herself out if things were that urgent.  She pointed out that the back door was locked.

Fuck!

I said my fond farewells to Sharon, dragged myself out of bed and let Sandy out.  She managed to make it to the grass.  Just.

I wouldn’t mind too much but it is a fucking miserable day.  There is a storm trying its best to demolish all my trees and it’s cold.  It’s also pissing rain.  In short, it is the kind of day that should be spent under the blankets.

I would have gone back to bed, but there would have been no point.  I was awake and awake I was going to stay.  Of course Sandy is now fast asleep on the couch without a glimmer of remorse.  Bitch!

An afternoon nap is out of the question too as I have to brave the elements and go out later.

There are times when life really boils my piss.

Actually, it wasn’t so much rain as a deluge. It was like a herd of incontinent elephants all letting rip incessantly.

And when it wasn’t pissing down in buckets, it was just raining normally.

You may have gathered by now that it was quite wet yesterday?

I wanted to go down for the paper, but I put it off until very late in the afternoon when the deluge had subsided a bit.

I went out the front door, and then I remembered.

On Friday, the car battery was showing signs of lacking that vital spark. You know what I mean? You turn the ignition key and the engine sounds like a dog who is about to throw up? Not a pleasant sound at all, at all. Undeterred, I hooked up the battery charger, and plugged everything in. I left it on slow charge, and reminded myself to remind myself to unhook it before going to bed.

I forgot.

So there was the car in front of me, sitting in a puddle and all gleaming wet and the bonnet wide open. Fuck!!

I unhooked it all, and drove down for the paper.

The battery is singing along and I have a nice clean engine.

Having a bad memory isn’t all bad.

What the fuck is good about it?

This is a day when Christians commemorate the day that their founder was tortured and executed, and they decide to call the day ‘good’?  That is weird.  Surely from their point of view, it would make more sense to call it Bad Friday or Sad Friday?

I always hated Good Friday.  I don’t know why.  In fact I always hated the word ‘good’ because, as a kid it meant not having fun.  Any time I was really enjoying myself, my mother would pop out from nowhere and tell me to stop.  “Put those matches away and be good,” she’d say, or “Stop playing with that carving knife and be good”.  Good just became synonymous with boring.

Then there was the church bit.  I used to be dragged off to church on a regular basis, and the sermons were always full of creepy stuff about nails through flesh, torture, suffering and blood everywhere.  It’s enough to twist any kid’s mind.  Then to cap it all, all the statues in the churches would be covered in cloth and wrapped up which used to really freak me out.

My mother was a very strict Catholic [my father had more sense but knew when to keep quiet] so Good Friday meant we got nothing to eat which was a pain in the arse.  I discovered years later that my father used to sneak off to less observant neighbours and scrounge a meal there. Cute bastard!  Apart from the lack of food, I wasn’t allowed to enjoy myself in any way.  Good Friday was a day for prayer and that was it.  It was the most boring dreary day in the calendar.

Then of course there is the shit about the pubs.

What the fuck is it with this country that pubs have to close on Good Friday?  I have heard excuses that it provides a day of rest for serious drinkers, which is a load of bollix because any serious drinker worth his salt is going to stock up on the hard tack the day before.  Or is the Catholic Church so unsure of itself that it’s afraid that if pubs are open that no one will attend church?  Why does the Catholic Church have any say in the matter at all?  I know the law stems back to the time when that bastard McQuaid ruled the roost here, but surely times are supposed to have changed?

It’s freezing cold and pissing rain outside.  The spring flowers have enough sense to stay well wrapped up in their buds.  It looks and feels like winter.  Good Friday, my hole.

At least Pullit has the sense to open the pub when he feels like it.

I think it’s a day for the High Stool.

Actually, that’s not true.  I wish it were.  It would be handy to have someone or something to drive me home again from the pub when I have had a skin full.

I will rephrase it.  That fucking guinea pig is driving me demented.

For some unknown reason Minnie has decided that her sole reason for existence is to eat her way through the bars of her cage.  The noise of the twanging is very very fucking irritating.

So far, I have tried the following:

Electrifying the bars:  This was the least successful as Minnie seemed to like the sparks.  I had to unplug from the mains when I ran out of fuses.

Smearing Marmite on the bars:  This worked for a while, but the little sod soon worked out that if she rubbed her paws on the bars, that the Marmite would wear off.  The Marmite stuck to her paws, and the straw and sawdust stuck to the Marmite, so the little fucker now has massive straw/sawdust boots on and I have run out of Marmite.

Removing the cage altogether:  This seems like a logical move, but pea-brain Minnie just lunges at the now non-existent bars and goes flying out of her box.  Seeing as it is perched on a high table, this means a long drop before there is a satisfying ‘splodge’ sound, whereupon Minnie disappears under the couch and spends the next hour or so squeaking, pissing and pooing and refusing to come out.  The house is beginning to smell.

Training:  This was the most satisfying of the treatments, from my point of view.  I would stand beside the cage, and whenever the chewing started, I would thwack her on the nose with a newspaper.  She would retreat for about five seconds, obviously wondering what the fuck had happened before launching herself at the bars again.  The only learning that resulted was that I learned that guinea pigs cannot be trained.  They are fucking stupid.

I am running out of ideas.

I have led a long and interesting life, and I want that life to end in a suitable manner.  I do not want my gravestone marked with the words “Here lies Grandad who died of a heart attack induced by a guinea pig”.  Somehow it isn’t befitting someone of my stature.

I don’t know what the normal lifespan of a guinea pig is.

But at this rate, it’s about five seconds.

It is less than five weeks to the great day when I can escape from this miserable fucked up land.

I first started scouting for somewhere to stay last October.   You may think that is a little early to be looking for holidays, but it beats the hell out of staring at the rain pissing down on an autumn day. 

I found a little place and wrote to the owner.  He sounds like a nice bloke, and even offered me free broadband.  Yes.  All mod cons – running water, electricity and broadband.  Shame about the lack of toilet and washing facilities, but fuckit it’s a holiday?  If any of you are interested, I took a photograph of it just now. 

Sorry it’s so fuzzy, but the camera was several thousand miles away.

Now that you know what it looks like, you can easily find where it is, and can drop in anytime. You are all welcome.

I have a few things to do in the next less-than-five weeks -

Put a deposit on the house.  [He should be expecting this, what with the lack of toilets?]

Book the ferry.

Passport must need renewing by now?

Get the car overhauled.

Learn French.

I have a nagging feeling that I have forgotten something but I can’t think what it is.

Thank God I don’t believe in putting off things until the last moment.

I connected up to the Interweb to see what was going on.  Nothing.

I browsed the newspapers.  Nothing apart from the government fucking up things again, but there is nothing new about that.

I went into my blog feed reader to see what the rest of you were saying. There was a remarkable lack of activity, so obviously you lot are experiencing nothing as well.

I had just come to the conclusion that God had forgotten to put sixpence in the meter, and that nothing at all was going to happen today when the door bell sounded.

I armed myself to the teeth in case it was some political yokels, but it was the bloke from Eircom.  I slipped him a fifty note so that he wouldn’t complain about all the extra wiring, and then shut him out on the roof where it was raining heavily.

He fixed the fault in record time.  It was a broken wire or something highly technical like that.  He asked to be let in off the roof, as it was really pissing down at this stage, and he had forgotten his coat.  I let him in again, but it cost him a fifty note and a promise to say nothing about the job.

He’s gone now, and the phone is working again.

Herself is catching up on all the gossip.

I’m waiting for something to happen.

Is there anything happening anywhere?

When I am talking to someone, I like to be able to look them in the eye and, if necessary, to be within thumping distance.

They are a necessary evil though, especially if you have Herself to contend with.

She likes the phone, and will happily spend hours yakking away to her pals, so I have to have one to keep her happy.

It does have other uses though, and is quite handy if I want to blast someone because my Interweb is disconnected or if I want to order five tons of fresh manure to be delivered outside someone’s gate.

Herself also insisted that I get in one of those satellite dish things so she can watch utter shite on television.  For reasons best known to God and some technician in Outer Mongolia, the satellite box has to be connected to a telephone line.  I now have a few extra satellite boxes, which I acquired off Spanner, and they all have to be connected.

There isn’t much point in having all my satellite boxes in one place, so I have one in the front room, one in the back room, one in each bedroom and one in the shed.  This means that I have to have a lot of telephone wires running all over the place.  Not wanting to bother those nice people in Eircom, I ran all the wires myself.  It’s a very simple job, and all has been running smoothly for quite a while; up to a couple of days ago, that is.

Herself started complaining that she couldn’t gossip to her pals because there was a crackling noise on the phone.  I checked it, and there was.  I didn’t bother fixing it though, as it was pissing rain outside and I didn’t feel like getting wet.  I told her to suffer it, and left it at that.  But then our K8 phoned from Thailand.  I couldn’t hear a word she was saying.  It sounded like she was thousands of miles away, for fuck’s sake.  I decided something had to be done.

Yesterday, I rewired the place.  I put more sticky tape on the places where I had twisted the wires together, and I removed one of the junction boxes from the bottom of the pond.  I don’t know how that got there.

When I had finished, I tested the lines.  Nothing.  There was a quiet hiss, but nothing else, so I disconnected.  Immediately, the phone rang.  There was no one there, just another hiss.  I tried phoning myself using my mobile.  The mobile told me it was ringing, but the telephone remained mute.  Herself is not pleased.

In the end, I phoned Eircom, using my mobile and told them some wanker has been messing with my phone, and that it’s not working.  I’m not having some snotty trainee telling me off, and criticising my work.

I’m still waiting for the trainee.  Life is nice and quiet.  I haven’t had a cold call since.

I would call up and cancel the trainee, but I hate my mobile too. 

They pretended they were doing work, but I knew better.  They were just fucking with my head again.  Why else would the lights always turn red just as I approached?

On Thursday last, they stepped up their campaign against me, and shifted those lights so that I couldn’t get out of the house at all.  I didn’t care as I had no plans on going anywhere anyway.

I was up early on Friday.  I was surprised to see machinery trundling past my place as it was only seven in the morning.   They drove up and down, mostly backwards judging by all the beeping that emanated.  I left them to it.  If they were trying to piss me off, they were going to fail.

They are a determined lot though.  They worked right through Friday, creating a hell of a racket, because at this stage they had started to remove the road.  They were drilling and banging and thumping all day.  They still didn’t annoy me though as it was pissing rain all day, so they were getting soaked and I wasn’t.  Guess who was having the last laugh?

To my amazement, when it started to get dark on Friday, they erected massive floodlights and carried on removing the road.

During the night, I got up for a piss bit of exercise, and they were still banging away and driving around backwards.  This was at around four in the morning.  I have never experienced such a concerted effort by my council to annoy me.  I just shrugged and went back to sleep.

Saturday morning, they were still there.  The road was completely gone at this stage.  They were still driving around backwards at the bottom of the hole, and were still making an unholy racket.  I left them to it as it was still lashing down.

Later in the day, I realised that all was quiet.  After about thirty hours on non-stop noise, the silence was deafening.

The rain had eased a bit so I went out to survey the damage.

They had put the road back again.

I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking that they were just rebuilding the road.  But you’re wrong.

They had put the road back exactly as it was before.

With great care and precision, they had replaced each bump and pothole precisely in their original locations.  It was a masterful job.

I would say I dreamed the whole thing, but there was a lot of mud around still, and I had my photographs.

I don’t know why they have it in for me, but I admire not only their determination but the extent to which they will go.

But it’s no wonder the country is broke.

When I emailed them I asked them where they were located.  They mailed me back and said they were opposite the cemetery.

I mailed them in turn and asked it they had many deaths among their contributors but they said they didn’t have that many.

They asked me if I knew where the cemetery was.

I asked them if they meant the one opposite the radio studios, but they didn’t reply to that.

Anyway, this morning I went up there.  It was a very pleasant morning for a drive through the county for a change, as most mornings lately it has either been snowing or pissing rain.

I was right.  It was the cemetery opposite the studios, so having found that, I found the studios. 

In my previous incarnation, when I worked in RTE, I used to see people waiting to go on the radio.  I used to feel sorry for them because they all looked like they were waiting on death row.

Then I would get annoyed with them because they were always treated like royalty while the rest of us were treated like shit.

Today I was the royalty, so I dutifully looked down on the staff as I was whisked into the studio.

It was great craic in there.  We had a laugh for a while and the next thing I was thrown out the door.  It way have been the pipe smoke that annoyed them; I don’t know.

I didn’t hear the programme.

It was live so I couldn’t be at home to listen to it.

I will say one thing…

It was all so fucking easy.

Watch out Rick O’Shea.

I’m on the way up.

Sandy: Humph!

Me: Why the long face?

Sandy: Don’t try to be fucking funny.  You know I was born this way, you bearded freak.

Me: What the hell is wrong with you?

Sandy: I’m bursting for a piss.

Me: Well, go out and have one.

Sandy: Yeah?  And how would you fancy going out in the rain and sticking your fanny into the cold wet grass?

Me: It would only be for a minute?

Sandy: Like last Friday, when you put me out in the pissing rain and forgot about me?

Me: I apologised for that.  Anyway you got your own back by destroying the carpet after.

Sandy: Heh! I did. 

Me: When were you last out for a piss, anyway?

Sandy: Last Friday!

Me: Jayzus.  You must be bursting?

Sandy: I sneaked a quick one in the bath last night.

Me: Ya dirty thing!  We have to wash in that.

Sandy: Tough.  A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

Me: Are you sure you don’t want to go out?

Sandy: What?  And have you lock me out again?  No fucking way. 

Me: Suit yourself.

…….

Sandy: Have you got any decent weed?

Me: You know where it’s kept.

Sandy: A big doobie is the only thing in fucking weather like this.

Me: You’re right there.  Roll me one while you’re at it.

Sandy: Will do.  I’ll just have a dump in the bath first.

Me: *Sigh*

It’s a dog’s life.