outwait outrun outwit





TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


07.26.22

I'm so behind on correspondence, and the damn phone keeps pinging with more messages and emails, and the husband keeps issuing more office tasks, and I just feel like shutting myself up in a room on the highest floor of this house with a vertiginous pile of books and never coming out for the rest of my life. Oh well.

Anyways yesterday I walked Sam around the town, wondering if everyone was hungover or just me. On Saturday was Show Day, the biggest day in the town's social calendar. Families queued around the block to get into the Bee Park where farmers showed off livestock and sheared sheep, and amateur bakers and gardeners vied for prizes, and stalls peddled ostrich burgers, farm equipment, and all kinds of tat. The dog show and the fowl beauty contests were obvious big hits. There was music on Main Street, right in front of our pub, so the six of us served drink from 6 pm to 2 am, with nary a break among us until the end of night, eating takeaway pizza glumly while the last of the punters tarried on their wobbly legs. The bloody glasswasher was broken, so my hands were all cut up and wrinkled by the end of the shift. On Sunday M and I got mozzie toasties and coffee in the castle cafe, stopped for drinks at Des's, and ended up twirling to country music in the community centre and getting spice bags from the Chinese takeaway at 3 am.

During my walk I met three teenagers wearing swishy evening gowns, looking like exotic flowers in the car park. "Hi Phil! We're on our way to our debs!!" (American friends, this is the Irish analogue for high school senior prom.) Me: "Have a good dream!" Gah!

Later we went to a wake in Co. Tyrone, for the sister-in-law's uncle. He went into hospital last week with a pain in his side, but by then his liver was gone, and sepsis had set in. In the cramped sitting room, his daughter stood watch over his coffin, once in a while caressing the dead man's forehead.




<<

hosted by DiaryLand.com

real time web analytics