Jeremiah’s Journal
30th April 2017
Today I have decided…I am logging in to Facebook to unfollow family and fall out in quite deliberate fashion with those with whom I have quite accidentally become Facebook friends, those whose faces I no longer recognize from my school days, I would hardly recognize my own if I was not stuck with it, it’s true I am only too well aware of the fact that I have gotten old too and that that is a crime for which time should be doing the time and not us but…but…but…I am blowing you out if you like what I like but won’t say hello when you see me on the other side of the street or meet me in the flesh. When did you all get so fucking brave, so fucking philosophical, so fucking passionate, so fucking interested in what is happening in the world. Being possessed of a personality only on paper doesn’t count. I am a writer and none too successful I might add, so I should know…
1 st May 2017
There is no 31st of April, I just found out, it is May, May the month of finals and Barca are not in any except for the Copa Del Rey. We…when I say we…I mean me and all of the other fans of Barca…doesn’t matter when you joined you are more than welcome…whether it was when the real Ronaldo, Ronaldo Fenomeno ran the length of the field for Bobby Robson against Compostela to score or when the buck toothed Ronaldinho put the smile back on our faces and inspired a million caricatured likenesses on La Ramblas and went on to take the young Lionel Messi under his wing…see below…His first day at La Masia.
Don’t get me started on this guy, this guy is the best ever…I was ten when I saw Pele at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City from behind pulled curtains with the sun splitting the stones out on the street and the rest of the family gone across to the Ferrypoint in the car. I was fourteen when Cruyff in spite of his best efforts failed to lift the World Cup, no reflection on him…
I was still drinking when Maradonna almost sobered me up with his goals, both goals, against England, my Hand of God was yet to come but come it did…
I am twenty seven years sober now, contentedly so, delighted to have the gift of sight and the income level to be able to subscribe to Sky Sports on a regular basis and to get across once every couple of years to the native of Rosario’s own backyard in Barcelona to see him perform his miracles in the flesh.
There was murder at the front of the house, I don’t know when but I do know why, why because it is kill or be killed in the wild and that is all there is to it. This morning on my way to work, I found the blood smeared, decapitated body of a starling, starlings have nested under the eaves for a couple of years now and whether this is the body of one of the first brood of this spring or of one of the hard working parents distracted by the recurring nightmare of having to try to pay the mortgage and raise their children straight and true I cannot tell but what I can say is that a banker jackdaw in a double breasted suit with a Turkish barber’s short back and sides or a robber baron magpie was responsible to judge by the mayhem this evening on my way in from the car, all of the starlings in the world had gathered with the revenge of the just in their hearts to torment a magpie in their midst. The magpie mobbed and harried and horrified by the righteous indignation on show agreed to let them keep their house and to take payments of interest only on their loan for the foreseeable future.
The Hibiscus with its back to the wall, struggling behind the magnificent Hebe has made it back again this spring, planted in the wrong place and yet…there will be flowers…
I am back on the sweets, Tubs Sweets, tubs of clove rocks and six packs of bottles of chilled Sparkling Irish Natural Mineral Water from M & S in Douglas but actually “uniquely sourced from the deepest well in the Golden Vale of Ireland”.
I am between projects right now and a little lost. I need all the props I can secure from the out of work theatre practitioners in my head. I have just finished Christmas Conundrum, a long story poem for precocious children and peculiar childlike adults. Finishing a Christmas book in summer is funny and reminds me of Byron’s assertion that the soul of the poet is divorced from the soul of the man. You can be writing comedy in tears and laugh while writing tragedy. Some would say that all my attempts at writing tragedy are laughable.
I made the book with the Bookwright App provided at a price by Blurb.co.uk. I have to say I am well pleased with the results and am planning to continue to publish this way in order to cut out the middleman, my new motto for life “Cut out the middleman”.
And so Isco called his dog after Messi, well if that is not a compliment I don’t know what is, it is almost impossible to dispossess a dog, a dog like my dog, with a low centre of gravity especially, everybody who knows football knows that and anybody who loves dogs.
By the way I have changed my mind about Facebook and family because I want to see what they have all been up to while I was writing Jeremiah’s Journal.
