I got some energy for 2010…
There must be something fundamentally wrong with me; as a human being and I put on this planet for just a flicker of a moment and I behave like this…
There was I, all alone on the top deck of a double decker bus, on new years eve afternoon. I sat in the very front seat when all of a sudden a friendly girl, just a few years older than me, with an accent hard to define, sat in the other front seat opposite me.
She smiled at me as she took her seat and I half smiled back. When she settled into her seat, she kinda leaned over and said “this is beautiful isn’t it?” she could hardly contain her excitement… It kinda took me by surprise.
I looked out and saw grey buildings towering over me, traffic everywhere, people zig-zaging on the pavement. I tried to see the beauty, I replied “its a nice view from up here”, she agreed and her whole persona was poised for a fully fledged conversation. It was at that point, I reached in to my bag and pulled out my Ipod…
I could feel her watching me and I continued to plug my ears despite this innate feeling that it was the most ignorant, ugly thing any human could do in a moment like that.
With my ipod clogging up my ears, I couldn’t shake off this feeling of self disgust, so i put my ipod away and angled for a chin wag.
By that time she had a magazine open on her lap; I noticed it was called “voyage”.
I broke the ice and we had a loose, on & off chat for the duration of the journey across London. She was so excited to be here and had only just arrived from Paris. I told her that I too felt like that when I first came here, but now I’m sort of like a horse with blinders;
She said she feels that way about Paris. We agreed that things always look better when you’re just passing through… and I said “Yep, a rolling stone gathers no moss…”
I then thought to myself how cool it would be to be a rolling stone again, a wanderer, just roaming around from place to place and settling for a while, then moving off when the time felt right.
Imagine if we just followed our every whim and we never settled down… Like if I just went home now, packed my bags and walked out on all that’s familiar and just headed off, just headed off and just went where ever the wind blew me…
Anyway, she got off the bus when we got down south of the river and I said, “Happy new year to you”. She said it to me too. I said I hope its a good one and I really did mean it. She told me that it has already got off to a great start as she has just received the best news ever. She was beaming. I said I hope some of that energy passes over onto me, she raised her two hands over me in jest and said, “I’ll give you some of that energy now!”…
We both laughed and that was the end of our encounter.
I am kind of excited about 2010 now and waiting for my good news…
The Irish Coffees that bombed…
Irish coffees have always been my forte. I make them so well that when people see me coming, they start seeing visual images of Irish coffees and begin to salivate.
At Christmas time, I usually make a batch after dinner for all the clan to enjoy. It had become a bit of a ritual by 2006, but unfortunately that year there was a little eh, ‘mishap’ that jeopardised my position as Champion Irish Coffee Maker and since then… well, I haven’t been asked to make them again. That year there was no cream you see and I had to improvise…
I found some whipped white stuff in a bowl in the fridge that looked just like whipped cream and looking back, I suppose I just wanted to believe it was cream…
I went so far as sticking the tip of my index finger into the mixture for the purposes of taking a sample. It tasted ok, it was mild enough to do the trick and looking back, I suppose I just wanted to believe it was cream.
Functionally, it worked a charm. It sat in beautiful dollops on the dark coffee underneath and when I came around the corner with the tray of Irish coffees, it was like the climax of the evening… there were ‘ooooohs’ and ‘aaaaahs’ and ‘mmmms’ and enormous smiles – My mother nearly ruined the moment by asking me where I got the cream. I think I must have convinced myself she didn’t ask me that and proceeded to hand everyone their drinks.
Everyone started sipping and supping and gulping… then there was a sort of silence that grew… I don’t know, the atmosphere just started to change and my imaginary bubble began to sag. People started to spit and cough and make faces and push the coffees away.
My mother then started to home in on the ‘cream’ side of things. I felt like I was in a courthouse. She was badgering me on what I used for the cream especially when she didn’t buy any. I finally confessed that I had used the ‘mixture in the fridge’ and they jeered at me when my mother revealed that it was marscapone cheese.
I drank all mine as they laughed and pointed. I thought it tasted lovely…
I don’t know…Looking back, I suppose I just wanted to believe it was cream.
A building gets dressed…
Think about your life in the last twelve months.
Now look at the first twelve months in the life of this building.
What a difference a year makes…
(I won’t bore you with the other 361 photos!)
London’s skyline is ever changing…
Adventure at Sainsbury’s and mean Irish man…
Went grocery shopping last night, walked down to Sainsbury’s with the trolley, it was a lovely evening for it. The trolley fits really nicely under the Sainsbury’s Shopping trolley too. See the trolley’s there on the right hand side?
They’re the ‘half measure’ trolley’s. Well those are the ones that our shopping trolley fits under. It stores it out of the way so you don’ t have to be carrying it around while you are shopping. Not many people know of this. People watched me store it under there too and you could see that they were well impressed with my finding such a storage space for it.
I went over to the stack of trolley’s anyway, I had a pound coin in my hand.
There was a man putting his back and he was kinda loitering there for longer than it takes.
He turned to me in a gentlemanly manner and said something along the lines of “Here you go… here is a trolley for you” I was feeling a bit dozy and said ”Oh right, so how does this work, I give you the pound and you give me the trolley” and he said “you can give it to me for 50 pence if you like as it’s second hand” I laughed then and he smiled at me, I felt a connection with the man, as he too was Irish.
I looked at him as he walked away across the zebra crossing and out of my life.
I just kind of studied him for a split second, the way you do when you have an interaction with someone for the first time, you kinda take them in, don’t ya? You kinda make a judgement about them based on the way the hold themselves in their skin, their clothes, their walk and their shoes… you can tell a whole lot by someone’s choice of shoes.
I snapped out of that anyway and got on with my grocery shopping. I bought this lot with my money:
What you don’t see clearly in the above picture is my little chocolate collection for the week:
I have turned into a terrible chocolate snob altogether. I spent £9.00 on the chocolate bars in the photograph above. I never tasted any of them before and wanted to try them out.
I finished my shopping anyway and paid for what i bought.
When i tried to return the trolley to the stack I discovered that the pound coin was jammed in there and it wouldn’t let me take it out. I swear to God, i was cursing that man. What a sneak…
When I looked back in hindsight, I remembered that he was attempting to take his coin out of the slot before i came along. Way down deep inside the bowels of my psyche, there was a part of me that twigged it too, but I never kind of allowed that feeling to surface. I guess it was an instinct.
He had a sneaky way about him too and he palmed it off on me, that gammy trolley. He ripped me off… So out of principal, I decided to queue up at Customer Services to get my pound back. I was waiting in line for about twenty minutes. For all of those twenty minutes I was seething. I was thinking evil thoughts about that man and was also thinking how strange it was that i walked into that situation all knowing. There was a part of me that knew exactly what was happening… and that intrigued me.
There was a Greek lady with a moustache in the queue in front of me.
She turned around and we had a brief two way conversation about city life and she said she has been living next door to the same neighbours for twenty five years and she doesn’t know them and in Greece it isn’t like that. The conversation then went into a one-way conversation and I just kept saying “yeah… yeah…. yeah….” but couldn’t tell you what she was saying, she was kinda hard to understand anyway.
I wasn’t in the mood for chit chat. I just wanted my pound back…
I’m gunna run a Marathon!
Jeekers, It’s been a while since I wrote a blog!
Well as if my life isn’t hectic enough, I thought I’d add something more to the mix… A marathon!
Yip, I am now in training to run the Dublin City Marathon on the 26th of October 2009. I am doing it because I have always wanted to run a marathon.
I specifically wanted to run the Dublin City Marathon cuz Dad ran that one and we have a photograph of him just finishing the race and the clock behind him declaring “3 hours and 5 minutes”. I remember when he was training for it too, I was quite young at the time and I remember coming in from school and asking my mother where he was.
She said he was running over to Garrettstown and back again. I remember thinking that was very strange altogether and I asked her if his car was broken or something (there were no local taxi’s then – ha!).
Well there’s no way I will beat the Walsh record… Who knows what’ll happen in the future, but for now I just want to complete the floggin’ thing.
So I am midway through ‘Week Two’ of my 21 week intensive training programme. At the moment it’s easy as I am just kind of doing what I normally would do, but every week it increases 10% .
In about 6 weeks time I will be foaming at the mouth I’d say and the ol’ joints will be giving me gyp, especially my knees. I’m obsessed with my knees, I am afraid of getting a knee injury. I might use some of them knee improving machines at the gym.
As it is, I cycle 83 miles a week in my commute to work. This combined with 50 hours work and 20+ miles of running actually kinda makes me laugh in a kind of mental way. I have given up the drink too as i know what I am like. If I drink I will lose focus.
My summer is therefore a social write off.
Oh, I am raising money for the Donkeys at the Donkey Sanctuary in Mallow:
http://www.thedonkeysanctuary.ie/
Can ye sponsor me?
Will be buggin’ ye all closer the time anyway…
Future Projects…
Myself and my acting buddies keep ourselves busy in between acting jobs by getting together and shooting some little sketches. It’s all very casual and we do it for the craic…
As well as acting, I love messing around with editing software and use this as an opportunity to learn about the software and gain more experience about that aspect of film making. I think it helps as an actor too, to know what is involved behind the scenes, if ya pardon the pun.
I have also started doing a bit of directing which I am definitely keen on doing again.
At the moment, I am penning a little sit-com (episodes only like about three minutes long) which is going to be set in my flat! It is about three flat mates living in London. I haven’t written any scripts previously so it’s all new to me and i don’t know how it will turn out.
I am planning to shoot the first episode soon! I will be playing the part of one of the flatmates, I don’t know yet who will shoot it as I really want to shoot it myself but I want to be in it too, so it may be a joint venture. When it is completed, I am going to post it on here and create an online mini soap opera for your viewing pleasure, so please check back and tell me what you think. Your input will be taken on board… (if it’s constructive!)
Here is a sketch that I shot at one of our little gatherings recently. Tanya Mackenzie & myself directed it. The Actors are Kim Falconer & Tom Shepherd. I edited it with Adobe Premiere software.
Let me know what you think anyway…
And don’t forget to check back to see my mini soap!!
Toodle pip for now!
The Lift Sketch from Shirker on Vimeo.
Fierce high jinx altogether…
Had a nice cycle in to work this morning. I was doing my usual rubber necking. I saw a really old sign that read “G Wallin & Co. Tin Box Makers”
I thought it was really cool and started to think about how jobs have changed over time… I was so lost in thought that I didn’t see the barricade in front of me…
I saw it as I was just about to hit it, so I managed to pull my brakes but I still did some involuntary somersaults & high jinks & circus tricks & my phalanges got crushed too.
I was kinda embarrassed peeling myself off the barricade and I looked up at the windows of all the flats lining the street but no one was looking out…
