So that was April. You know where you stand with an April, don't you? I was almost entirely isolated for the duration: no newspapers, no television, no phone calls, not one single sighting of another human being - except for my girlfriend, occasionally - no real sense of the world at large, no real sense of anything. Silence.
Glorious.
Glorie zij aan de Vader en aan de Zoon en aan de Heilige Geest. Especially aan de Heilige Geest, in fact, although I’m not sure that de Heilige tooled-up in any meaningful way. Geest, then. (Is it possible to geest-write your own fiction? I think it probably is.)
Anyway, this is May - no, please, I insist - and I can already hear June getting out of bed, trying hard not to disturb an exhausted July. (I have a feeling July heads to Spain for the rest of the year and gets whacked on drugs; sunnily strutting all brazen and bold, hitting on people young enough to be his and her December. Tsk. This gaudy braggart only comes back to Ireland to sleep it off, you know, collapsing into a mid-May bed next to June. Poor June. And I bet July hits the snooze button repeatedly - just two more minutes already. Jesus – before getting up and acting all sheepish and ashamed in, well, July. This is why July is so apologetic in Ireland. I said this was a feeling, okay? Nobody's talking hard facts here.)
But that’s not the point - and you’d be a fool, anyway, to get involved in the domestic arrangements of months. You just have to trust that they’ll sort it all out and present a unified front to us humans. We scare easily. (If you don’t believe me, try insisting to your butcher that this is November and that next month - any month - is Green.) We need order, we need the months to behave themselves and we need words to mean what everyone has agreed they will mean.
To rail against this feels hopeless. Like punching the rain (sore arm) or biting the wind (leave this to dogs) or dragging a child into a field and bashing him repeatedly over the head with his disgusting little rucksack and stomping on his shins and making him say “sorry” over and over again…..well, it only ever leaves you tired and disconsolate.
A friend, who very clearly despises me, emailed this clip the other day. Watch and weep. And for the deaf, a transcription:
Boy: Mum, I want to do a poooooo.
Mum: Come on then…
Boy: But I want to do a poo in Paul’s bathroom.
Mum: Don’t be silly, come on.
Boy (adamant): I’m Going. To Do. A Poo At Paul’s.
Voiceover: "Paul’s bathroom has Glade Touch ‘n Fresh. More discreet than an aerosol, it’s no more bad smells - just a pleasant fragrance. Touch ‘n Fresh.....from Glade."
No, please, did you ever hate a child so much? Did you? I refuse to believe that anyone could find this anything other than utterly revolting. Merciful Vader, in the name of everything heilige, do something. Send your zoon if you're busy. Do you not see what we're up to down here? Please, stop us.
And who is this Paul? Do other children go there to poo? And why oh why does the mum not slam her son against a wall and batter him? (Yes, yes, I know, I know - I just mean in the advert, though, not in real life.) How can anyone find this cute? And can that really be the mum and son smiling together in the loo, inhaling? Did that actually just happen? And how come.....oh, it's all too much. Too much. Lovely April is out for the count and Green feels horribly distant.
