Making It Up As I Go Along (39 page)

Yes, it finally happened, on 11 Nov the little
sister got married. Lovely so it was, yes, lovely. And by then of course the worst was over, as
I had survived the hen night – they made me go to a nightclub, at my age! I ask you! It
was Lillie’s Bordello and they were extremely nice to us, so very nice, and it made
Rita-Anne very happy.

Then everyone went on to a casino as Rita-Anne is
lucky at that sort of thing (cards, winning money) but I scarpered.

I should also mention the cat cake. Or The Cat
Cake, to give it its proper title. Rita-Anne had been insistent that she didn’t want
anything vulgar for her hen night – no policemen getting their lad out, no chocolate
mickeys, etc. – so, because she loves cats, I got a special cake for her, made in the
shape of a cat. It was a chocolate biscuit cake. Remember this because it becomes important
later.

So yes, hen night survived, the last week was
counting down, family members were arriving from far-flung parts, then a) Seán Ferguson got
a bout of bad sinuses; b) Rita-Anne complained of feeling ‘fluey’; c) Caitríona
got an ear infection necessitating a trip to Dr Murphy for antibiotics; d) the minute Luka set
foot from Prague into my parents’ house, he too started bellyaching with a terrible sore
ear; e) Ljiljana puked the night before the wedding; and f) Heather, the mother of the groom,
got so sick at
the actual wedding that a doctor had to be called (sadly not
Dr Murphy as the wedding was in Wicklow and Dr Murphy lives many miles away in Blackrock).

(At the wedding I was sitting beside poor Heather
and we bonded very strongly over bad health. I commiserated on her bad stomach and she said
sadly that she often became ill on big occasions and I, sensing a kindred spirit, cried out,
‘So do I!’

‘Do you?’ she asked hopefully, also
(I’d say) sensing a kindred spirit.

‘And I bet you feel really guilty?’ I
said.

‘Yes!’

‘And you feel that no one
understands!’

‘Yes!’

‘And you suspect that half the time they
think you’re faking it!’

‘Yes! And I’m not!’

‘I know you’re not! It’s
exactly the same for me.’

Beautiful, so it was.)

So yes, rehearsals, dinners, airport trips,
purchase of fizzy vitamin C, the week went by in a blur. And at one stage I found myself in my
parents’ dining room, where the remains of the cat cake had been deposited and all of a
sudden,
mes amies
, it was like being possessed. Before I knew what I was doing, I was
‘at’ the cat cake, shovelling it into my clob, a chocolate biscuit frenzy, with
pieces of cake flying around the room and on my face and in my hair and on the walls and me
supposed to be off the sugar, but obviously the high emotion of the week was getting to me and
it was better to eat cat cake than to drink.

I ate LOADS. I am very ashamed, also frightened.
I have tentatively, with trembling limbs, climbed back up on to the sugar-free horse and hope I
manage to stay there, but Christ almighty, I am such an addict.

Then the morning of the
actual wedding arrived and it was weird because we’ve talked about it and prepared for it
for so long and there it was – upon us! It was a very girly morning. Rita-Anne,
Caitríona, Ema and Mam came to my house to have their hair and make-up done, then Rita-Anne
got into her dress and she looked so beautiful, and her dress was utterly amazing, then we had
pink champagne, except for me and Ema, who shared a modest bottle of raspberry smoothie (pink
– oh, but of
course
– in fact the pink champagne was her idea. Himself had
gone out fully intending to buy
non
-pink champagne, but Ema rang him and gently talked
him round. Please bear in mind she is six).

Then we went to the church, and Himself was the
chauffeur for Rita-Anne and Dad, and he’d bought a special chauffeur’s hat off eBay
which made him look disconcertingly like a male stripper.

All went well in the church, Luka (the
ring-bearer) didn’t drop the rings, and him and Ema walked very slowly up the aisle,
just like they were told to
, they are such good children. Me and Caitríona,
walking behind them, weren’t half as slow and were nearly passing them out by the time we
got to the altar.

Meanwhile, Dad, who has been a nervous wreck for
the past month and who had been pacing,
actually pacing
, like a caged lion for the week
before the wedding, nearly trampled us all into the ground, racing up the aisle, dragging
Rita-Anne with him. (Sad but true story about Dad. He was so nervous about who he had to collect
from the airport and when he had to do it and when he had to deposit them back there that he
woke in the middle of the night shouting, ‘What time do I have to be at the airport
at?’ It would take a heart of stone not to laugh … The Airport Bus was an
alternative to Dad providing a taxi service – but the Airport Bus is only handy if
you’ve about a week to spare. Very long route, the 746. Very, very long, but it’ll
get you there in the end.
However, bring sandwiches. Also water, it
wouldn’t do to get dehydrated. Also perhaps one of those neck-cushion yokes. And a book of
crosswords. And, to be on safe side, malaria tablets – probably no need really, it’s
just that the route does enter hyperspace for a while and God knows what you might pick up in
there. Hyperspace is
riddled
with germs.)

Then vows, kiss the bride, clapping, communion,
register signing, organ, back down the aisle, porch, coldness, shaking hands, photos, cheery
comments about coldness of day, car, drive to Wicklow, more photos, more photos, more coldness,
more cold photos, extra coldness, just one more cold photo, in you go, just this one last one,
yes, know you’re cold, just this last shot, dinner, speeches, book opened on how long
speeches would last, a fiver a bet, I bet twenty-three minutes, only out by four minutes, but
the winner was Ema (six –yes, only six), who put her winnings behind the bar for everyone
to have a drink on her. Very generous spirit.

Much dancing, which I sadly missed as I had
sneaked up to the room to check who had been evicted in
Strictly Come Dancing
, then
discovered that I was vay tired and that everyone else was vay drunk, so decided to go to bed.
Plan foiled when Caitríona, Suzanne, Seán Ferguson and Himself knocked on door, also
wanting to know who had been evicted. Alas, I could not tell them as the results show had
(perplexingly) been on an hour earlier than usual. However, my friend Judy saved the day by
texting the result. Then they left to spread the news.

On Friday 24th I went to London to report on
Behind the Scenes for self-same
Strictly Come Dancing
!

Other news this month – have been watching
I’m a Celebrity
. Gas. I’m not boasting but they asked me to be on it.
Christ alive, I’ve never been so glad that I said no. Kangaroo’s bits. God, no.

Also, I am a judge on the
Orange Prize. I’ve known for ages but have been sworn to secrecy but announcement was made
on Weds night. Dragged my rotting carcass to meeting, awash with Lemsip. Am thrilled, thrilled,
thrilled to be a judge, very, very honoured. Also will get many free books. Naturally, my joy
will be corrupted by snobby types complaining that if a chick-lit author is judging the Orange
Prize, then the barbarians are at the gate, my dears. But my response will be a mature and
dignified one. Yes. TOUGH SHITE, SNOBBY AMIGOS! THEY ASKED ME AND THEY DIDN’T ASK
YOU!!!!!!

Now, Baxter. Baxter is a small pink toy dog which
Caitríona bought for me in New York. However, Caitríona does not trust the post and
the only time we ever get anything from her is when either she or a good friend is coming to
Ireland. About two months ago Danielle came, bringing my birthday present from Cait (lovely
things from Bliss), also Baxter. However, I didn’t know that Baxter was called Baxter.
Danielle said he looked like her mother’s dog Dessie, and I thought, ‘What a fine
name. I shall call you Dessie, little pink dog.’

I immediately became very fond of Dessie and
foresaw a long happy life with him.

THEN! A message from New York. Caitríona
said she had heard rumours that I had been hitting ‘Baxter’ with a big stick and
that she was very concerned. She and Seán had apparently employed quite a different method
of discipline with ‘Baxter’. She admitted that she was sorely missing
‘Baxter’, that although she had taken the decision to send him overseas to a wealthy
family in order to give him opportunities that he wouldn’t have got had he stayed
‘Stateside’ she was regretting her altruism. Between the Big Stick rumours and the
‘name change’, she was considering reapplying for custody.

Naturally I wasn’t
hitting Dessie with a big stick. It was quite a small stick, more of a ruler than a stick, and
it wasn’t so much to cause him pain as to remind him of things like erect posture, etc.

When Cait and Seán arrived from New York for
the wedding, I was concerned that they might try to kidnap Dessie and smuggle him back to New
York on a false passport. Himself and myself didn’t want this to happen. We have become
quite fond of little Dessie and regard him as an exceptional dog. As I explained to Seán
and Cait, we have invested a lot in Dessie, both financially and emotionally. We have high hopes
for him. We have given that little dog everything.

She asked if she could see him and we had to say,
‘Sorry, no, he is with his Mandarin tutor, Mr Lee, we want him to be fluent in Mandarin by
the end of the year. So that he can start learning Arabic.’ She asked if she could see him
that evening, when he had finished his language class, and we had to tell her, ‘Sorry, no,
he does his callisthenics every evening from six until ten.’

How about
after
10 p.m., she asked and
we had to say, ‘Sorry, no, that is little Dessie’s “playtime” in which
we structure “spontaneous creativity”. This evening we are teaching him to make
pancakes, then he is doing his tapestry, he is recreating a life-size copy of the Bayeux
Tapestry and hopes to have it finished by month end.’

‘After playtime?’ she asked and we
had to say, ‘Sorry, no, but after playtime he has his driving lesson.’

Suddenly, in a sharp voice, she asked, ‘How
much sleep does Baxter get?’

‘Dessie,’ I said, emphasizing the
word “Dessie”, ‘gets a full five hours. We find that five hours is the optimum
time. This careful calibration is the result of lengthy experimentation, in which we cut back
his sleeping time in half-hourly increments and monitored the
results. We
even wore white coats and carried clipboards and wore strange visor-type flashlights on our
heads. Initially Dessie did well at three and a half hours, but then he started to hallucinate,
so we increased it little by little to five hours a night.’

Yes, well, anyway, we enjoyed it very much.
Caitríona said to tell you that I made him read
The Brothers Karamazov
in the
original Russian. Also that I plan to send him to Military Academy during the school holidays.
Also that she has a viral throat infection.

Interesting news from Ljiljana. On her return
from Ireland after the wedding, she fell foul of a sore throat, which she parlayed into a nasty
ear infection, necessitating antibiotics. She said she has never felt so much like a Keyes, not
even on her wedding day.

Previously unpublished.

A diligent month – I worked. I wrote, I read
the Orange Prize entries (which hardly counts as work) then I wrote some more.

For Christmas I went to Cambridge to Chris, Caron
and Jude. Also present were Himself’s parents, John and Shirley, and Caron’s mother,
Bobbi. It was a very nice day and I didn’t have a repeat of The Cat-Cake Incident –
see, I was worried about how I’d fare around the orgy of chocolate that constitutes
Christmas, but I’ve come through and am ‘in the clear’. Christ alive, it was
hard though. Funnily enough, I’ve no interest in drink, none at all, but to see a
chocolate truffle going into a mouth that isn’t mine gives me a pain of longing in my
stomach.

Wait till I tell you something funny: a few days
after Christmas, Himself comes up the stairs and says, ‘Do you want to go on
Celebrity
Big Brother
?’ And I said, ‘When? We’ll be in London around the 9th of
Jan, won’t we?’ And he says, ‘NO! You big thick! Not on Dermot, but on
Celebrity Big Brother
. The show! All of it!’

Well,
mes amies
, I was dumbfounded. I am
a GINORMOUS fan of the show, but decided that it might be disastrous to be on it. Just in case I
was getting too big for my boots, Himself said, ‘Someone’s dropped out at the last
minute, they’re desperate,
they’ll take anyone. When I told
them you probably wouldn’t do it, they asked me if
I’d
be
interested.’

Then, a few days later, the front page of the
Star
was all about how ‘a number of A-list stars have pulled out’ of
Celeb BB
and how the bosses ‘are in crisis talks’. So as a result I do not
think I am ‘It’.

So how did I spend New Year’s Eve? Despite
many invitations to glitterin’ events (well, Mam and Dad invited me to a do in the golf
club because the pal that was meant to be going with them was in hospital and the tickets had
been paid for and for one lapse-y, insane moment I actually considered it and then I thought,
‘Christ alive, are things so bad that I would consider going a) to a do in the golf club
where they serve the soup in the same kind of metal bowls that doctors use to put removed
gallstones into; b) with my parents; c) and all their mates (except for the one who was in
hospital, obviously); and d) on New Year’s Eve!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’).

In the end was in bed by 9 p.m. I mean, I hate
New Year’s Eve – I’m famous for it. In my humble opinion, New Year’s Eve
is the worst night of the year, even though many people think it’s the best.

However, if you did go out on that dreadful
night, I hope you had a wonderful time and a) that you didn’t lose one of your shoes; b)
that you didn’t spend the chimes weeping alone in a corner; c) that you didn’t try
to get off with your friend’s boyfriend; d) that you didn’t have your phone stolen;
e) that as you wandered the streets in search of a non-existent party, you didn’t fall and
cut your knee; f) that you didn’t pay more than a hundred euro for your taxi home; and g)
that you didn’t wake up this morning in a strange bed, in a strange part of the city, with
your coat
MIA. (These have been some of the ways I have
‘celebrated’ NYE in the past, so you will see why I prefer to go to bed at 9 p.m. on
the evening in question and park myself out of harm’s way until the whole wretched
business is over.)

And I’ll tell you something else – no
resolutions! No, not one! I never make them because life is hard enough and I genuinely believe
we all do our best all of the time. We are HUGELY imperfect and we always will be and the last
thing we should be doing is making our already hard lives even harder by trying to achieve a
load of things that we are SIMPLY NOT CAPABLE OF.

We will inevitably fail (because we over-aspire)
and then we feel like wretched failures and
even worse
than before we began trying to
run six miles a day, or live on a tenner a week in order to clear the credit cards, or imbibe
only spinach juice.

No resolutions. Repeat it with me. No
resolutions! No resolutions! NO RESOLUTIONS! (Unless you are trying to stop smoking, and the
only reason I will support you is because life is made hell for smokers, you are practically
stoned in the streets, you poor things, and I suppose things would be marginally more pleasant
for you if you were free of it.)

So repeat after me: ‘There is no need for
me to make New Year’s resolutions because every day I try my best. I may live a messy,
lapse-ridden, imperfect life but it’s the best life I can live. If I fail in some small
way (chocolate, wine, over-spending, laziness – pick your poison), it’s not because
I’m a bad person, it’s because it was all I was able to do on that particular day.
I’m a human being and that means it’s a waste of time, striving to be
perfect.’

Even those people with shiny, happy, perfect
Facebook posts aren’t shiny and happy and perfect all of the time – they’re
just
showing us the parts they want us to see and we shouldn’t
lacerate ourselves with self-hatred for not being as thin and tanned and going on as many
holidays as them. You might find it hard to believe, but they too get strange nameless fears and
pangs of bleakness and bouts of peculiar sadness – despite having spent New Year’s
Eve in Mauritius wearing a Missoni bikini with their photogenic spouse and children.

Come on, let’s say it together:

‘Just for today I will go easy on myself,
I’ll let up on the constant demands I make of myself and I’ll allow myself to be
mediocre.

‘Just for today, the world won’t end
if I don’t achieve anything – if I even regress.

‘Just for today, I’ll forgive myself
for all the pain I cause myself by virtue of being human.

‘Just for today, I won’t speak
harshly to myself.

‘Just for today, I’ll treat myself
with all the compassion that I deserve.’

And off we go, living our lives.

Previously unpublished.