So much nostalgia, but not in the good way.
All we ever wanted was to go home, watch Home and Away, eat a couple of Chomps and maybe some beans on toast, and pretend to do our homework.
Unfortunately, life wasn’t always that easy…
Sports day at school
Ah, that special moment. You’re lying on the ground, egg long divorced from spoon, blood seeping from a grazed knee and your classmates getting smaller, and smaller, like a Craggy Island cow, in the distance.
What fresh hell was the annual sports day? I was that child getting a head start and still coming last, glasses smashed, just wanting to get home to some pasta shapes on toast and Home and Away.
Don’t cry for me.
The end of Glenroe every Sunday
9pm. Sunday night. A shadow still descends. Thirty-somethings across the country feel that gut wrenching pang of sheer, brutal panic.
That theme music. It haunts us. All we hear is this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esndC98aNG8&feature=youtu.be
Relations coming to stay
Sleeping on two (much farted upon) couch cushions on a floor between two bunk beds. Great craic. Not to mention the mother making you clean out the attic and paint the front railings. “They’re coming all the way from Australia, get up those stairs you little s**t!”
Always loved the salty language, my mother, but she’d be nice as pie when the ‘visitors’ showed up, drinking tea with her pinkie finger pointing daintily upwards and showing off the fine china.
The sham of a woman.
The school report coming in
“You… didn’t… open… a book?!”
Difficult scenes replayed up and down the country as the words ‘great potential’ and ‘lazy’ and ‘needs to seriously apply himself lest the dole queue awaits’ came tumbling through the letterbox on a twice yearly basis.
Every last one of us on the JOE desk admits to being bag of nerves whenever the threat of the school report was upon us. None of us are pharmacists, solicitors, investment bankers or anything that required more than 250 400 points in the Leaving Cert.
We knew how to doss and stare out the window a lot though, a skill we still use to this day.
‘Uncle Bob’
He was the uncle who wouldn’t bring sweets, who chain-smoked during dinner, who would send you to the shop and refuse to let you keep the change, whose farts have been turning back funerals since 1977, who never so much as filled a kettle and who believed that children should neither be seen nor heard.
Frankly, Father Stone would have been a better houseguest.
Getting locked in the park after it closed
I grew up close to a park on the north side of Dublin, a park that was home to the notorious ‘Drummer’ gang.
They only came out at night and the last thing you wanted was to be stuck in there after the bell was rung and the gate was closed. Climbing through or over the railings was no craic with rocks raining down close to your head and 47 bomber jackets closing in.
Getting caught pulling a sickie
Hell hath no fury like an Irish Mammy scorned.
“Stick out your tongue!” Nothing.
“Let me feel your forehead.” Nothing.
“Do you think I came down in the last shower? Get up those stairs, put on that uniform, and don’t say another word to me.”
Valentine’s Day
Also known as ‘another year when that cheeky game of kiss chasing failed to pay off,’ or ‘another year when your mam/sister failed to adequately disguise their handwriting.’
Again, don’t cry for me.
Your mam chatting to strangers in the supermarket
There you are, pulling down packets of Purple Snacks and Jammie Dodgers before your mam throws them straight back out of the trolly, doing that dance.
All of a sudden she starts chatting to some woman she’s never met about the price of ham and how fresh the coleslaw is while you go eyeball to eyeball with your eight-year-old counterpart right beside the Kellogg’s Variety Packs.
You’d start pulling her jacket and mouthing “come on come on come on come on…” until the will to live is lost on every side.
Having to talk to your granny on the phone
She sent you a fiver in a card for your birthday, which she was SUPPOSED to do because she’s your GRANNY, but now you have to call her up and say thanks and listen to her sh*te on about how she has a sore foot and the doctor gave her the wrong tablets and she’ll see “you soon if God spares me but I mightn’t see Christmas” and this and that and uggghhh…
Missing Home and Away for two weeks to go on holidays
It’s hard to believe there was a time when Home and Away played a pivotal role in my day, but I’m not ashamed to admit that the only episodes I missed between 1988 and 1996 were when I went on holiday.
I came back from France one fateful summer to discover Ailsa with a new haircut and Bobby’s Frank gone missing.
I was never the same again.
Getting a kiss from one of your elderly relatives
Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Always repeat.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
