Shrnk, or The Unbelievable Shrinking Men

 Shrn_k, or The Unbelievable Shrinking Men

 

Mr Bean was the first to go.

 

It had been said for a long, long time that, while women were frightened that men would kill them, men’s only fear had been that women would laugh at them. This dark quip had summed up the enormous imbalance between the way men and women had to live their lives, the daily walking risk assessments and car-keys in fists and creepy first dates and anxious management of overly familiar males on public transport. However, no one could have had any inkling why women laughing would be anything for men to worry about – until the inklings began to seep in, bringing their horrible new understanding with them.

 

With all the re-runs going on all over the world and Mr Bean’s status as an international icon of hilarity, Rowan Atkinson slipped off the face of the earth in a matter of days. When the story hit the news cycles and his tiny face was shown peeking out from the sheets of his hospital bed, even before he had to be moved to the neo-natal unit, the small minority within the grief-stricken, soberly concerned masses, the few million people who couldn’t help but laugh, only hastened his way into total obscurity.

 

But what did it mean? Why was it happening? How could migrants be blamed or tofu-guzzling lefty lawyers? What were those woke snowflakes doing that caused their honest, hard-working fathers and brothers to melt away? What could men have done to deserve this terrifying cosmic joke? Had they masturbated too often? Was it aliens, preparing the planet for conquest? Was it feminism? Was it Brexit?

 

Ironically, the men who first tried to alert people to what was happening were among the first to disappear completely, as people laughed in their faces, cry-laugh emojis dissolving them to nothing before their shrinking fingers could even delete their social media accounts. Doctors, biologists, psychologists (no one called them shrinks any more), astrologists invited accidentally in all the confusion, astrophysicists, retired astronauts, comic book writers, poets, rabbis, shiny-faced influencers, community leaders in new suits that were still too big for them, pagan witches and cardinals too old to care whether their time was coming – all crowded the newspaper columns and YouTube channels and broadcast media for a few days offering up unconvincing explanations about what might be happening until everyone decided that no one had a clue and that is was too tragi-comic to handle. 

 

It was happening everywhere. No one in public life was safe. Former US President Donald J Trump disappeared from public within a few days of the crisis breaking out, issued a couple of video addresses (with no one stood next to him for scale), then a few angry tweets about how he’d never been bigger than he was right now, then nothing. The already diminutive Sunak had already slipped through his mortal coil by the time rumours thickened the Internet that Putin was now purely an AI construct, taking his place among the legion of bots that he had unleashed on the virtual world. Everyone agreed it was best if Merkel and Ardern and Pelosi took over for a while. (No one thought to ask Truss.) People were urged in helpful tabloid articles and morning TV segments to remember that there was ‘good’ laughter, the laughing-with kind, and ‘bad’ laughter, the laughing-at kind. It felt important that distinction was made.

 

Unfortunately, the more treasured the celebrity, the more laughter and joy he (and it was always he) had brought to the people, the quicker he would wink out of existence. Billy Connolly faded away to nothing in no time. The remaining Pythons too ceased to be in the time it took to quote the Spanish Inquisition. Bill Murray, Steve Coogan, Jim Carrey, the more global and universally loved, the quicker their exit from the stage. Edgier, more obscure and more controversial comics lasted longer – Chris Rock, Frankie Boyle, Bill Burr, Daniel Kitson. True to his craft to the very end, Stewart Lee continued to make the exact same sarcastic remark about how small he was getting over and over in front of a live audience that howled with laughter until he could no longer be heard or seen. When Vic and Bob died, within minutes of each other, there was such emotional turmoil that not one man in the UK shrank for almost 24 hours. Repeats of Morecambe & Wise and Laurel and Hardy and Dad’s Army flooded the TV schedules again. Robin Williams and Richard Pryor were all over Netflix. Commissioning editors even organised some more shows with women comedians! (Historical note: the last show with living male comedians on it to be taken off air was The Last Leg, although it seemed to many watching the last edition that those guys hadn’t shrunk much at all.)

 

For a few days, the hitherto constant moral panic about trans people mutated into attempts to work out why they (pronouns are important) seemed largely unaffected by the issue, no matter which toilets they used. Some offered the opinion that trans folk had already suffered enough ridicule and gender-based violence that they were possibly immune to whatever this was, but then attention turned back to the cis men. Women could laugh at women and men at men seemingly without causing any life-threatening shrinkage. It all seemed so unfair!

 

Some men tried to hide in soundproof sheds, but the problem was that it didn’t matter whether or not they themselves heard the laughter, the tree in the forest dwindled away to nothing all the same. Comments and DMs and opinion pieces in national newspapers were full of women laughing at men. Social media giants and telecoms corporations were begged by newly created Men’s Protection groups (like Just Stop Laughing) to remove any smiley emojis or laughing yellow faces from their apps and products, but the companies were slow to act and millions more men disappeared from the web, either physically or virtually in an attempt to stir up as little mirth at their expense as they could. The activists began to be labelled with darkly funny nicknames like ‘inch-cels’, which only made matters smaller. Revenge bants became a thing, women and girls spreading the funniest possible stories about their exes as far and wide as they could to maximise the suffering and minimise the exes. The more serious the crisis became, the funnier it got.

 

Of course, some men adopted the same time-honoured, patriarchal tactic of murdering as many women as possible before their time was up, but once their ridiculousness became obvious, their time was very short indeed. The angrier and more murderous they got, the funnier they looked, and that was that for them. Others, driven from the internet by mouthy women-trolls and their witty putdowns, tried to comfort themselves with porn mags but could no longer reach the top shelf – and that was so funny to watch. So funny that CCTV footage from newsagents and corner shops would be edited together and uploaded for the amusement of millions of women and girls out there.

 

Many men inviting ridicule thought themselves completely blameless. They weren’t even trying to be funny but just to get on with their daily lives. Women might accidentally erase their husbands as they just couldn’t help themselves from laughing at the very thought of them. Dates at restaurants, before straight men stopped going on dates altogether for safety reasons, would end in disaster as prospective partners would begin to struggle to see over their menus, which would only make it harder to keep things safe. Guys braving going outside for a run would begin to feel their tracky bums sliding towards their ankles as the women, sitting wide-legged and lairy on pavement pub gardens or hanging out of office windows, would giggle, obnoxiously, and bray and guffaw at their latest targets. I mean, if these males didn’t want to be laughed at, why did strut about in such a risible way, comb their hair over like that, dress in such a provocatively amusing way? What else did they expect?

 

After a few weeks, gangs of women would roam the streets, tanked up on nitrous oxide and LSD, and the slightest embarrassment, the glimpse of a white sock with sandals maybe, could be a death sentence for an unwary man. Men no longer wanted to go out at all. They learned to keep their opinions to themselves. Men in mixed company hesitated before speaking, worrying that they might say something dangerously amusing or attract too much attention from some female just looking for a laugh. They kept out of DMs and out of the comments. They steered clear of bus stops and night clubs. They kept their shrinking mouths shut and, for many, the silence was platinum.

 

Women felt terrible about the whole business, absolutely dreadful, of course. They agreed that something had to be done to protect these tiny, terrified creatures, but what could they do to help, really? If something was funny – and some of these cute little guys were absolutely hilarious, whether they meant to be or not – you couldn’t stop yourself from laughing, could you? It was a natural response, a hard-wired human behaviour. You might as well try to legislate against gravity. Safest thing would be for men to stay at home, keep quiet, and not draw any attention to themselves and their amusingly shaped bodies. There was still the occasional high-pitched whisper about who would take out the bins or clean the sewers, but otherwise things just got along fine.

 

But then they would, wouldn’t they?

The Twelve Pills of Christmas

The first pill was a shiny purple and tasted of mulled wine and bratwurst.

As Nick felt the edges of the lozenge began to fizz slightly on his tongue, he felt the air inside his lungs begin to pull inwards, tightening his chest and sending an adrenal pulse through his body. He couldn’t quite remember how many years that he’d been doing this. He wasn’t so old that he didn’t feel his blood begin to tingle with the idea of another festive season, but he was old enough to feel the Christmases that had gone before layered around him like tissue paper.

 

Each winter, when the nights began to park their dark tanks on his afternoons Nick knew it was time to go inside the room. He told himself it was a comforting place but the sense of reassurance came more from the regularity of his returning there than any quality of the room himself. There was a leather-ish armchair, a dark green plastic Christmas tree with a chaotic sprawl of coloured lights and tinsel and other decorations that he had accrued each year, a cupboard with some booze and foods, and a random collection of other objects and mementoes that he had often forgotten one year to the next, sometimes remembering them with a sudden jolt, other times a tingle, and sometimes a queasy sense of foreboding co-mingled with hindsight.

 

Sitting in his chair he would reach out for his decorated wooden box, a gift from a distant relative so early in Nick’s life he couldn’t remember, and take a pill between his fingers. (Nick never knew where they came from and never questioned why they arrived, honouring the ancient tradition of letting others do all the planning.) The pills weren’t always taken in the same order, not always on the same date, but the purple one was almost always the first and a greater distance in time from the others. It was his Advent herald, sitting in the first snug wooden chamber behind the lid of the box, expectant with a soft glow from somewhere inside itself. Nick would hold the pill between his fingers for a moment, which sometimes felt like hours, before slipping it in between his lips.

 

He wondered if the purple was the first because it drew him in, pulled at his senses, eased him on his way, prickled his curiosity. The first of the familiar hallucinations began to populate the corners of his thoughts. Cold air flooding his sinuses during late-night shopping, mingled with the sweet, stodgy scent of doughnuts and central European sausages. The crush of shoulders and elbows in weatherproof fabrics. Arcs of cigarette smoke and vaping clouds and chatter hanging sharp in the wintry evening atmosphere. The press of people going about their business and spending money, the quickening of the year towards its end, jobs to do, lists to cross, appointments to fret about, toys to pine for. Don’t tell me you forgot cranberries too!

 

These sensations could flash by in moments or Nick could feel cushioned by them for what felt like days, his legs kibbling and swinging as he felt the midwinter momentum pushing him on towards something worthwhile, something to be treasured. He felt enmeshed in the organism that was humanity, moving as a limb within a thousand arms and legs, a face among billions. Then, as long as it took, Nick would find he had reached for the next pill.

 

The gold pill tasted of margaritas and prosecco, frothing with wayward intent and streaked with a sweet, salty, bitter blend of tastes that refused to coalesce into one feeling. His vision became chalky and indistinct with sparkle. Everywhere he looked, his optics were overwhelmed with mirrors, sequins, disco balls and his synapses swam dizzily in the warm, bubbly jacuzzi of party time. The sense of myriad arms and legs began to condense into a few bodies, moving to hidden rhythms and obeying ancient misrules. The air in his mouth was warm now and tasted of other people’s mouths.

 

Hallucinatory mistletoe was everywhere, ripe with the promise of greasy made-up lips and hot boozy breath and giggles and holy transgressions. Office party bawdiness and bad karaoke and risqué outfits and cuddles that glued arm to waist for longer than would normally be allowed, the static cling of year-long crushes allowed to briefly flower. Xmas licences for all and for everything. His gorge engorged and it was gorgeous. Everywhere there were dark eyes and laughing voices and teeth. The same time next year was now, and it would never end.

 

With the next pill, silvery and bullet-shaped, the lights swiftly grew harsher and less forgiving, stabbing Nick’s retinas with horrible accuracy. His tongue shrivelled with the taste of paranoia and regret and sin, while his ears rang with disapproval and shitty takes. Faces seemed to turn inwards and the organism of humanity shrank away from him. His heart grew cold like the tears on his cheeks, and he could feel the cosmos turning under his unsteady feet, indifferent and huge. 

 

Christmas was a joke, humanity a failed design. Love became a long-off star. Ghosts of Christmases that never came to pass mourned their inability to break through, paper hats damp with nightmares, waving mouldy crackers with pain-cramped fists, and keening through misshapen voices for the longing in their hearts for everything to find its end.

 

The next mossy, flint-grey tablet, chalky on the tongue, worked fast to re-establish very old ideas, reworking the pain and chaos into regular patterns. Visions gripped Nick hard and heavy, just as they did every year. He saw each and every year stretching away from him like a map. He felt frost crystallising on his fingers. He heard medieval mystics quietly praying to their gods and bad thoughts muttered behind Victorian beards. Gaudate! Christus est natus! He saw standing stones bearing witness to the circuits of a million tiny, wintry suns. He smelt the fusty smoke of a peat fire. He imagined straw and myrrh and the stuttering breath of awestruck shepherds.

 

This was the pill that enabled Nick to commune with his ancestors, both foreign and domestic, to conjure up half-forgotten bedrooms and four-fifths-forgotten comforts and securities. His parents stood beside him, just out of eyeshot. His old lives were continuing in adjacent rooms without him. Old loves, old gifts, old assumptions, old friends collected in deathlessness. Forgotten presents in forgotten corners of forgotten rooms. A mille-feuille of lives at one remove, time and space overlapping each other like wet tracing paper.

 

He was an altar boy watching his new digital watch turn to 00:00 at Midnight Mass. He was driving a remote control car around the long-sold family home with his brother, listening to NOW 10. He was on the ‘phone to his university girlfriend, making warm promises about what the next year would bring. He was sat with another girlfriend in the middle of a day of glorious nothing, soothed by ‘Christmas Eve’ by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and the twinkling lights in the window and fizzy advocaat. He was sat in an old flat, playing Call of Duty and recording Christmas music with his bandmates. He was basting a turkey and drinking his way through a Xmas store of whiskey and mulled wine and White Russians in his first married home. He was leaving presents for his two-month-old son under the Xmas tree, trying to work out how to sign ‘Dad’. He was warmed and worn-down and now and then and sometime in the future, grief for the past and anxiety for the yet-to-come contained within the impossible pattern of what-always-was.

 

The next pill tasted of mince pies and whiskey and carrots, and it left Nick with a towering sense of kinetic potential at the top of the festive rollercoaster, looking around the room last thing before bed on Christmas night. Presents piled under the tree, lights glowing, plans realised (albeit imperfectly), offerings to Father Christmas nibbled upon, offerings to the gods of social media posed and posted, everything hanging with possibility. The moment the ball of the year was about to roll back down the hill, the bubble was about to break.

 

Nick’s fingers gripped the faux-leather of the chair’s arms with excitement, trying to hold onto the moment, to the expectant buzz for as long as possible. He never felt more like he was in the right place at the right time more than he did right now.

 

The next pill from his box of Russian Revels was wrapped in the most electrically shiny paper that Nick could imagine, Quality Street magnified to the power of ten. The more quickly and furiously he tried to unwrap it, the more difficult it seemed to be get to. His fingers trembled; he felt a child’s scream of excitement rising up his throat. Frustration building, Nick eventually crammed the whole package into mouth and felt a warm trickle of beer and chocolate run down his tongue and into his throat. But he wanted more.

 

More drink, more food, more chocolate, more toys, more presents, more time, more joy, more people, more sex, more fun, more more. He felt himself become a machine driven by consumption, his wiring fusing and shorting with the lust for more, more, more. His chair was old and shitty; he couldn’t bear the sight of it any longer. He needed another phone, another credit card, another stomach, another tail to wag, another box of delights, another line, another holiday, another life, another pill.

 

The jade pill that Nick next stuffed into his face seemed to swell inside his belly, turning his appetites upside down and inside out and leaving him feeling nauseous and bloated. Everything in the room was off. The wallpaper looked greasy and dull. The decorations soured before his very eyes, growing torn and out of date. The music was depressing, but not as much as the jokes in the crackers. He heard racist opinions dropping around the table like turds in the trifle and royalty addressing the nation from gold toilets and Mariah Carey and hypocritical carols and priests advising not to give alms directly to the poor and self-serving charity singles and nightmare-ish Christmas TV specials like Mr Blobby’s Boys and Have I Got Songs of Praise For You. Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

 

The Christmas he had constructed around himself was painfully embarrassing, poisoning his sense of a carefully curated self. He needed to get out and to get it out. The jade pill was the purgative that every Christmas needs. It tasted like salt water and smelt like bleach. Its sacred release could not come quickly enough.

 

He didn’t even remember taking the next pill. He no longer knew what day of the week it was. How was it still Sunday? It had been a month of Sundays, a year of non-days. Had the pill been a foggy, sunless grey colour? Where had that taste of porridge and stuffing come from? Time was a looped piece of paper, hanging in a chain from the ceiling. Nobody had any time or place to go. 

 

At one point, a Wednesday lurked into view. Nick hoped he would be reincarnated as an astrophysicist.

 

A cloying taste of turkey clung to Nick’s teeth as the next pill began to take effect. He felt cosy and immovable as though lying under an illimitable pile of Christmas jumpers. There was a drink of something rosy and warm in his hand. There was a drink of something else milky and welcoming in his other hand. A box of chocolates sat within easy reach. Snatches of the big Christmas movie drifted past. Shakin’ Stevens offered helpful words of encouragement while Morecambe & Wise danced with Angela Rippon. Children squealed and hugged one another, while grown-ups fondly kissed, happy with their life choices.

 

Almost accidentally, with somnolent fingers, Nick missed the chocolate tin and popped another pill into his mouth, and the situation span round in his head.

 

It was black and bitter like tarmac. It tasted like adrenalin and the kind of chemicals a brain might leak after a car crash, burning the back of his throat. Nick felt his skull pressed on all sides by unbearable weights, as the screams and yelps of the children shredded his frontal lobes, blurring his vision and sending lightning across his scalp. His paper hat itched at his temples, sending jolts through his skull like a course of electro-shock therapy.

 

He felt trapped. Trapped by his family, trapped by debt and the insatiable desire for more stuff, trapped by the cruelty of capitalism and uncaring bosses, trapped by the Tories, trapped by his nearest and dearest, trapped by the dark night outside, trapped by everything he had ever done. Anger picked him up and carried him along in its yearly lava flow. He raged against the twinkling of the Christmas lights. He boiled at every imagined sideways glance, at every thwarted Christmas wish, at every absent toffee penny, at every ungrateful grunt. He turned himself inside out with every tiny noise, his ugly innards on show for anyone unlucky enough to be celebrating the festive season in the room with him.

 

He was full fathom five deep. He was Scrooge watching Tiny Tim breathe his last God-fearing breath. He was exactly the kind of person Jesus had come to Earth to save and exactly the kind of person who would have nailed Jesus to the cross. He was the bad penny in the pudding, the poison in the punch, shaping the bad memories that his children would carry on into their own soured Christmasses. He was bending the Yuletide spirit until it cracked and split and couldn’t be fixed again. Every thought was torture, every movement an insult. He reached again for the box.

 

Gradually, the murderous mist cleared and Nick allowed the love back in his system, the warmer hormones trickling into his bloodstream. He watched the blue flame of the brandy-soaked pudding in the middle of the family table spreading across the room, tongues of flame connecting everyone together once more. The paper hat became a crown once again, as Nick sat straight-backed with turkey leg sceptre and orb of brandy butter, the centrepiece of family and friends – glory to re-crowned king! 

 

His spirit was doused with easy laughter and molten affection. Everyone was present (even the dead and distant) and everything was in its best place. He reached out with colourful nylon arms and pulled the world in closer, gathering in all the feels and leaving no one outside in the cold. The windows were slick with condensation from the all the warmth in the room. Somewhere in the near distance a tiny bell rang and someone asked for a turkey wing. Boardgames were broken out but fights did not. Crackers were pulled apart spilling out the terrible jokes that pulled everyone together. Bonds were wrapped around and around until they were thicker than blood, thicker than trifle, thicker than time and space.

 

Nick knew that it was time for the final pill, the Twelfth Pill of Christmas, a pill that was neither sweet nor bitter, neither red nor blue, neither heavy nor light. The post-solstice sun was now throwing its light from a different direction as the year rolled on into another loop through space. He sensed the shift. The calendar was waiting confidently with empty pages and credible plans. 

 

The pill was colourless and tasted like fresh spring water. Nick’s eyes were clear and his breath was even. He had new air in his lungs and fresh blood in his legs. Everything seemed possible and within his grasp. He felt his hand smoothing a giant sheaf of paper, cool to the touch and dense with possibility. In one final vision, a horse’s skull in a huge dark-green cloak spoke to him with a Carmarthenshire accent, reminding him who he was and where he was and what might lie ahead of him and how he could go about navigating the year-or-so lying at his feet, then handed him a brand new biro before mouldering into the shadows behind the wilting plastic tree.

 

Nick got up from his chair and crossed the room to the door. Without a backward look, he set foot into the future, a hot coal of plans and dream smouldering in his pocket. His hand flicked the switch, the lights blinked off, and he firmly closed the door. Sometime in the distance, he would be back to the room again to travel along this curious ceremonial journey once again, and every year, to remind himself who he was and where he was and what might lie ahead of him and to remind himself of the love of others and the grief of absences and the power of their cosy ghosts, until he had no more years to run.

Instant Theatre with the Kids: The Black Man in the Tunnel

The Black Man in the Tunnel

One Friday evening at 20 o’clock, just as Autumn was ending and Summer was beginning, in a big museum in Africa, there were two seven-and-a-half-year-old twins called Daddy and Charlotte No. The museum was surrounded by wet grasslands and growling dinosaurs that were throwing their arms around, and the twins were there to see some dinosaur skulls. They liked big things. Daddy was wearing a blue t-shirt with a gold star in the middle (like Captain America) and Charlotte was wearing a pink t-shirt with a similar gold star; they both wore long, green pants.

It had been raining since 2am that day but at the moment the story begins, there was only an on/off dribble as Daddy and Charlotte No were looking at some triceratops skulls, because they had among the biggest skulls of the dinosaurs. As they looked at the dinosaur skulls, Daddy and Charlotte No noticed a tunnel leading from the floor of the museum behind a large, triangular door made of gate fence with a pink handle. The triangle of the door was pointed towards them. They decided to go through the door into the tunnel because they liked darkness and wanted to play in it.

However, they needed a key, so they ran around the museum until they found a key (a triangle-shaped dark-blue iron key with an orange plastic stripe on it) on the roof. They fetched a ladder to climb up and hooked the key with a fishing rod.

Back inside, the twins turned the key in the lock, the handle popped out and they pulled the door open. They had five seconds to get inside before the door closed,  and as they did so, a whisper come from the door saying . Outside, the weather had changed to hailstones.

Inside, the tunnel was brightly lit with rainbows on the walls, raspberry-flavour candy floss, sweets and a purple-and-green gem. The twins noticed another darker tunnel on the left and wanted to go in to find a friend in the darkness. In the tunnel, it was too dark to see properly, but there was an 87-year-old black man, who wanted to give them both a hug because he was a good guy. However, the twins really liked his elf-like ears and decided to shout ‘Echo! Echo!’ To see if he could hear them in the dark. The man screamed ‘Aaaaaah!’ and clamped his hands over his ears, shouting ‘Postman!’ because he really wanted to give his postman a hug but there were no postmen there. Them, the man got angry and started to fight with the twins, telling them to get out.

The twins left and continued along the rainbow tunnel, jogging for an hour for five miles, until they they came to a huge, purple, plastic, circular door that was three miles in diameter. They realised they needed a key when they saw there was a lock, but they’d left the other key back in the museum.

A note by the door told them that there was a key to the huge, purple door at the top of it, three miles up. Charlotte No decided she had to get out, so she started punching a hole in the three-mile door. After four hours, one minute and 28 seconds, she was able to get through and found herself back in the museum in front of the first, triangular door.

An alarm went off that sounded like barking dogs and Daddy decided to stay inside the rainbow tunnel, saying that alarms would go off if he came out, but his twin sister took the first iron key and opened the triangular door. The old black man came out, carrying special torches that made the whole room darker because he couldn’t stand the light, and started fighting with them again as he wanted them out of the ‘world of Africa’. He kept saying, ‘sorry for nothing’.

The twins decided to go home to South Africa to tell their mum about what had happened, as the sun shone over the museum.    

Eulogy for Mum - Daphne Bernadette Egan (nee Hickey) - 30 March 1934 to 18 December 2019

It’s tricky for me to write something about my Mum as a person, as someone who lived their own life with their own dreams and plans, their own youthful scrapes and grown-up mistakes, long before I was a remote possibility. In some ways, Cath, John and I knew Mum in a way that nobody else in the world could, but it’s also true that we knew very little about her life pre-us. Everything that happens before our parents are born is a bit of legend, a mythical time when the world was in black and white and you could buy a house with change from a thrupenny bit. So, trying to sum things up is a challenge. Mum went by many names: Mum to a trio of forty-somethings, and Nana to a select group of six grandchildren; Mrs Egan to some, Sister Daphne Hickey to many, but Daphne to most.

Right up until the end of her life – 85 years and nine months packed with quiet-ish determination, care for everyone around her, and a robust cheerfulness –  Mum quickly left an impression with everyone who met her as someone who was highly independent in spirit but also kind and friendly, someone who was ready with a joyful song on her lips and equally ready with a playful fist under the chin to dish out ‘a puck in the puss’ to anyone that she felt needed a corrective nudge. She was someone who was strong and stoic, almost to a fault, who firmly believed that we were all people muddling our ways through life, essentially the same, even when our differences seemed the most challenging. But as far as my brother, sister and I are concerned, we only know Mum from a time when she was a fortysomething like we are today. We’re a bit late to the party.

The whole process of learning what made Mum tick was that little bit more difficult because she was so much more interested in helping other people get what they needed during their lives; her own wishes and schemes were often absorbed into the greater good. We never met and would struggle to recognise the young woman who returned to Ireland in the early 60s from the US with over 100 pairs of shoes in her luggage. However, it is clear that she spent her entire adult life caring for others – working as a nurse in Dublin, in the States and in the County Hospital at Ennis. Her plan was to go back to Dublin after a summer staying with her parents in Kincora Park but her love of the life there kept her in her beloved County Clare for another 10 years - until Dad’s arrival and subsequent return to Cheshire finally pulled her away from Ireland in 1972. Mum was rightfully proud of her work as a nurse and considered it a privilege to be able to look after others that needed her care. Everything else came second to her duty as a carer. She gave up smoking and her car when she and Dad got married, and she gave up work when I arrived in order to focus all her attentions and considerable professional skills on me. I was, as my Dad sometimes joked, Matron Hickey’s final patient. 

Once the three of us kids were a little more manageable, Mum began a part-time job delivering gift bags to new mothers in the local hospital, enjoying being in the hospital environment once again. Later, she threw herself into helping Dad with his new textile small business, which he was forced to start in the late 80s at the beginning of a long recession, after having cared for her own mother while was dying of pancreatic cancer at home in Ennis. Moving back to Ireland for a few years in 2004, after living in our family home for a while after her old darling, our Dad, had died, Mum volunteered in the local day centre, helping to look after the ‘old dears’, many of them younger than she was. Her sense of the importance of looking after others never left her and she was still asking the nurses, doctors and staff that visited her in Ysbyty Gwynedd how they were, greeting them with a smile or a wink, until she was no longer able to speak. The smile that she would greet John, Cath and I each morning in the Glyder ward when we went to visit her was absolutely gorgeous and joyful, like the smile of a six-month old. It will stay with me for the rest of my days.

Despite our lack of knowledge of her when we were kids, though, it was possible to gather a bit of information about her earlier life. She was always happy to talk about her family holidays in County Kerry with her Dad’s family in Anaskirtane, near Rathmore. She told us how her Dad, Sergeant Denis Hickey of the Garda Siochana, the Irish republic’s brand new ‘guardians of the peace’, a role that he and she were both immensely proud of, would despair at her taste in gangster movies. She warned us how her love of butterscotch ended in dental disaster. She said how much she loved dancing at Bofey Quinn’s in Corofin and that she would be out until all hours – fully exercising her privileges as the baby of the family to get away with everything – once again, much to the concern of her poor old Dad.

Seeing as she and her brothers and big sister grew up in a house where a portrait of the hero of the Irish War of Independence Michael Collins was put up on the wall before the picture of the Sacred Heart, it was probably inevitable that she was would be an Irish patriot. But Mum took nationalist sentiment to a new level of Irish chauvinism, where if anything was Irish it was immediately the most interesting thing in the world. One Christmas visit in Manchester, a few years after the Alzheimer’s had crept in – although it wasn’t diagnosed at the time – she came up to John and asked him, ‘What’s wrong with your atlas? Ireland is much too small in it’. Mum loved speaking and writing in Irish when she was at school and excelled in both, learning trigonometry and writing poetry in the same tongue. It was a personal tragedy that the part of her she felt she could only communicate in the Gaelic language was gradually lost to her as she lost the knowledge of it. 

It was some recompense that she eventually settled with her young family in North Wales, as the scenery and rocks of Anglesey reminded her so much of the Atlantic coast of Ireland, and I think that she found living in the North of England, in Macclesfield, so soon after the death of her own Dad, with one new-born baby and then a second three years later, desperately hard, even though I’m sure she would never have complained. Her only previous trip to the North of England had been on a trip to Sheffield to visit her aunt Molly and the vision from her train window of the blackened, smoggy industrial towns and cities in the 1950s left such a mark on her mind she promised herself she’d never come back. That plan didn’t quite work out. However, at my christening, when her Dad jokingly complained that his first Irish grandchild was the son of an Englishman, Mum said that Dad was ‘the only Englishman allowed to do it’, which put just about everyone in their place. Mum has also left us a rich legacy of words – banjaxed, skew-ways, nyuck, fizzing fluteplayer - some of which might be Irish, some of which I suspect are pure Daphne.

Even when the Alzheimer’s clouded Mum’s brain with darkness and confused irritability, the strength and kindness in her heart was there for everyone to see. Mum was a devout Catholic all her life, as I expect everyone here will know very well. As a family, this meant that we got to go to church here in Menai Bridge on both Saturday and Sunday mornings, for every service of the Easter and Christmas festivals, on every other Holy Day of Obligation and during the week in the school holidays too. (‘Hooray!’) Mum was still powering her way up the stairs here as recently as November when John (or sometimes Cath or I) would take her to Saturday evening Mass, which remained one of the most important things in her life. Mum was a great advert for Christianity (kind and caring to others and drawing great strength from her beliefs) and loved being part of this Catholic community. John said recently that he felt it was a great privilege to be able to spend that couple of hours with her in the car every week, bringing her the gift of her precious Mass. What we didn’t know was that Mum had also been receiving Holy Communion on the sly from Father Adrian at the Catholic church in Bangor, so the Alzheimer’s meant that she was getting double helpings.

Those car journeys between Caernarfon and Anglesey would often involve the same few topics in rotations of five minutes or so: ‘Where is it you live now?’; ‘I’m damned lucky!’; ‘We’re all just people’; ‘It does my heart good to look at these gorgeous green fields’ and a quick rendition of ‘Que sera sera’. The Alzheimer’s, in some ways, left Mum with a mantra of the same few key sentences that cut through the fog in her head. This started as tragic, became a little comic – as John said, you could predict what Mum would say on each bend of the road – before the core wisdom underneath them shined through. Mum felt privileged that she’d been able to have a career before starting a family, but the fact that she had been what she called, with professional precision, a ‘mature primer partum’ (an older first-time mum) meant perhaps that by the time we three kids became parents ourselves, much of Mum’s parenting experience, especially the emotions of parenting which often come as a shock the first time round, had been locked away in a dementia-ravaged corner of her memory banks. Just as we lost Dad at a relatively early age, Mum had already partly faded into legend, while she was still alive, by the time we’d all become full-scale adults. Joseph, her eldest grandson and only a couple months away now from being a grown-up himself, has said he felt as though he is the only one of Mum’s grandkids that saw the real her, the Nana that walked him to church and bought him sweets on the way home – though she probably avoided butterscotch.

Another thing most people that knew Mum would agree on is she was strong – not just physically strong, but mentally strong too. In her hospital bed, as she was fighting for breath, her heart was beating as soundly as ever, her forearm muscles still felt powerful and ready for action. Her iron-finger tickling approach was like something out of a kung-fu movie, but she had an iron will to match and a determination to continue on her course. She did such a good job of looking after herself and disguising her Alzheimer’s – keeping herself organised with notes on scraps of paper and in the TV section of the paper, calling everyone ‘dear’ whether she remembered them or not – that by the time she was admitted into the Bryn Seiont residential care home, after Cath and John had moved her back to stay with him on the Llyn Peninsula, Mum’s was the most advanced case of dementia the specialist had ever seen in a newly-diagnosed patient. Her independent streak and her strategic skills were very strong, often expressed as a desire not to make any fuss. However, Cath was also ‘as cute as a country fox’ to use Mum’s vernacular, and she wasn’t fooled, telling us that she thought Mum might be suffering from a form of dementia. Cath followed Mum’s footsteps into nursing, but I think she always been especially tuned into Mum, as maybe they worry about the same kind of things.

If there is one thing, though, that might best sum Mum up, it would be her singing voice. It was strong, it was clear but warm, and it was joyful. She was singing right up to the end of her life, within 24 hours of her last breath, and her singing at Bryn Seiont was often featured in the local press – with or without the Welsh Elvis. Mum was often like her old self during the musical therapy: it would always lift her spirits, bring the light back into her eyes, and her voice will certainly be missed by everyone there. Singing brought Mum her lovely old darling, our Dad Denis. They were introduced by a mutual friend who was involved in the local musical society, Nigel Bridge, during a production of Show Boat. Not only was this a fitting way for them to meet (as Dad was also a keen singer) but it also gifted them with a party piece, as they would perform their duet ‘Ah Still Suits Me’ from the show. The song is a bit problematic now, maybe, but the love for each other that they conveyed while they sang was gorgeous and always brought a smile to whoever heard them. It was equally problematic that they performed together in Aida (I think) with Dad playing a luxuriously bearded Agamemnon and Mum playing a Vestal Virgin despite carrying me ‘in utero’ – to use her medical Latin again.

It brings a smile again to my face to think that Mum believed that Dad was waiting for her and that, once her bodily remains were in the ground beside his at Menai Cemetery, they’d have the rest of eternity together. Mum often said she felt as though a part of her died along with him died 23 years ago, and she could hardly wait to see him again. It is a testament to Mum’s strength, her desire to

look after others and the joy she still got from life that she waited for 23 years. It was Dad’s 89^th birthday five days after Mum died and Christmas Day a couple of days later again – as a child, he always got one shilling for both his birthday and Xmas together, instead of one for each like his big sister, Mary, did; he would make a joke about this great injustice every year. This festive season, perhaps he would agree that being reunited with Mum was certainly a worthwhile combined birthday and Christmas present.

Just one more thing to say. Each night when our family went to bed – when we were kids and when we were visiting grown-ups – we would go through a little linguistic ritual of wishing each other a good night. Mum and Dad would get a kiss on the cheek and then the litany would begin, running through English, Welsh, German and Irish. Good night. Nos da. Oíche mháith. Sleep well. Schlafen Sie gut. Codladh samh.

Codladh sámh, Mum. Codladh sámh.

Mommeh-Sheh-Mommeh

FOLK TALE
Witch - Blacksmith - Giant

The Coach House, University of Leeds
22 November 2017

This is the story of a witch, aged about 22 to 30, called Medicor. She's a witch that doubts herself like Gollum; she doubts whether she has a good or bad character. She has two voices - a good voice and a bad voice.

The story begins one Sunday afternoon in Autumn at three in the afternoon, as Medicor is making potions in her cottage, a small, one-room cottage in the middle of a forest-jungle.

The weather is gloomy, rainy and stormy.

Medicor is making love potions, using the incantation 'Mommeh-Sheh-Mommeh'. She is making them out of jealousy and greed, and because she hasn't found love yet. She is jealous because someone took her centuries-old book of magic, and she is greedy for love.

As the story begins, there is a big flash from the cauldron she has been making the potions in, using frogs. Medicor gives an evil cackle, as something grim, spooky and ugly appears from the cauldron. It is grim and spooky because it is looming from the cauldron - a small creature that could be her spy. It is the shape of a round frog, green in colour with pink spots.

Medicor feels relieved and joyous, as she lifts up the frog creature from the cauldron. The magic frog says 'Mommeh-Sheh-Mommeh', and the witch replies, 'Mommeh-Sheh-Mommeh. My love, you will do my bidding.'

*Meanwhile, our blacksmith is a 17-year-old teenager called Jack, who is learning about being a blacksmith from his father. He is walking down the street called Brookland Avenue in a town called Old Birmingham, a dusty place just outside the forest-jungle in which Medicor lives.

Someone left a book on his doorstep a week ago, unaware that it is the magic book that was stolen from Medicor.

The magic frog creature uses its swivelling eyes to see everything in and around the forest-jungle, and sees that Jack has the magic book in his bag. Medicor can see what the frog creature sees through her cauldron.

When Medicor sees the book, she screams and she wants to know where he is going. He is on the way to work at the family smithy. Medicor gets the frog to summon up the book: they chant 'Mommeh-Sheh-Mommeh' together and the book starts shaking. Jack realises that something is following him - it is the frog creature, which was transported from the cottage - and begins to run towards the family smithy.

The book jumps out of the bag and Jack catches it. The frog creature then jumps on Jack, who then smacks it off his shoulder while trying to hide the book under his cap. The frog creature is injured, all of its legs are broken, so it says 'Mommeh-Sheh-Mommeh' and is returned to the cottage.

The weather is brightening a little.

**At the same time, in another city near the forest called Duklon City, is a giant called Mommeh. He was conceived 400 years ago, born 300 years ago, and became an adult six years ago. He is quite big for a giant, 10 metres tall.

Mommeh is in a swimming pool, sunbathing, when he hears the 'Mommeh-Sheh-Mommeh' chanting from the cottage and thinks that his name is being called. He is very clever and can turn himself into the shape of the witch and make himself invisible.

It was the giant who stole Medicor's book of magic because he was in love with the witch and wanted to get her attention. He left it on Jack's doorstep because he was shy.

When he hears his name, Mommeh's heart is pumping, and he jumps straight out of the swimming pool. He travels the distance to the cottage in one twinkle-toe step. The witch is confused when she sees Mommeh as she can only see his knees, but then she looks up at his face and thinks it is beautiful. She has never seen him before, but he knows her from saying 'Hiya' to her in the forest and then from the book of magic.

Mommeh tells her that he can help her find the book of magic. Medicor replies, 'I will marry you on the condition that I don't have to give birth to any giant babies'. Mommeh says that he will make a potion and agrees to marry her.

The sun shines at the end of the story.

The Frozen Best Friend

THE DOOR

18 October 2017

The Coach House, Hilary Place, University of Leeds

Dom (questioing and acting)

This is the story of a woman in her twenties called Julia.

It begins at the end of summer and the beginning of Autumn on a Friday at 10am.

Julia is on her way to work at Trinity, which is a hospital in a village called Leeds, which is between the town and the countryside. She is travelling by bus and is still 20 minutes away from work, having only just left her house. The bus is on the main road to Leeds. Julia works in the hospital as a nurse.

The weather is windy, rainy and sunny.

As the story of The Door begins, Julia is reading a book and listening to music on her phone with her headphones. She has Alice in Wonderland on her Kindle and the music is on iPlayer. She does not notice, but underneath her feet on the floor of the bus, there is a small door, big enough for her body to fit through, wooden, round and red.

Julia hears some whispering voices and at that moment, the door opens and she falls down. The wind is blowing outside the bus. The first thing that happens is that she thinks ‘I am going to die!’ because she is worried that she has fallen under the bus. However, she somehow realises that she is now in another time and place, because there is now a totally different atmosphere.

It is completely dark there, except for a yellow torchlight, which she thinks is close by, but is actually far away. She decides to run towards the light because there is nothing else there, but after an hour, she is tired and she stops.

The moment she stops, she realises that there is another door on the right. Even though she cannot see it, she realises it is a huge stone door, because she can hear someone knocking.

*She tries to open the door because it is the only accessible way, and as it’s an automatic door, it takes her two minutes and a further ten minutes to push the door open. She finds herself in the office of the hospital where she works. She decides that she must go and tell her best friend what has happened.

Her best friend is in the Psychology Department, a person called Peter-Nick, who was frozen at the age of 13, 17 years earlier. Julia became best friends with him over the last year because she was lonely and talks to him. He was taken to the Psychology Department so that experiments could be conducted on him to find out, when he wakes up, whether he has the mind of a 13-year-old or a 30-year-old.

However, Peter-Nick is now missing. Instead, Julia finds a black hole in the mirror of the unisex washroom, a hole about the size of an adult handspan, which she finds out about because there is black smoke coming out of it and a very deep, desperate voice is calling out ‘Save me!’ Even though Peter-Nick has been frozen the whole time Julia has known him, she recognises his voice from her dreams.

Julia decides she needs to stop the smoke coming from the hole because it smells bad, like gasoline, so she puts her hand up to the hole. But the hole grows instead, now a couple of feet in diameter, and a frozen, green hand about the size of Dom’s hand pulls her into the whole. It is Peter-Nick’s hand.

Outside, there is sunshine and lightning.

**Peter-Nick is there on the other side of the black hole. Julia finds herself in Frozen, and she has become Anna from Frozen. Peter-Nick has recovered from being frozen, and he now has the appearance of Julia. She is frozen and green, like Peter-Nick was.

As the story ends, Peter-Nick goes off to find other people to freeze, so they can swap places with Julia. Julia becomes queen, but remains frozen.

The sun shines and it is snowing.

'The Rainbow Monster of Margaret Thatcher Park'

HORROR STORY (no cards)

(For Dom’s 45th birthday)

21 October 2017

Harehills Lane Baptist Church Hall, Leeds

Mick (questioning), Dom (first acting), Fay (second acting)

This is the story of a rainbow monster, a female rainbow monster, who is a monster because she shoots poisonous rainbows. She is orange with prickles on her back, and sparkly. She is 45 years old, which is middle-aged.

It is Spring on a Thursday at midnight.

The monster is in the park in a town called Grantham – the park is called Margaret Thatcher Park. She is there stealing handbags from younger women. She needs the nail varnish in their bags, so that she can drink it to change into the other rainbow colours. The woman are there for the Rainbow Festival, and Mumford & Sons are playing, a 25-piece rock band. The monster has been stealing handbags for two hours.

It is raining.

The story begins when the monster decides to pick some flowers, but when she does this, there is an earthquake and the rain turns into a hurricane. The monster tries to put the flowers back in, but that only makes the hurricane worse. She is upset and crying, but all the women at the festival are laughing, because everything has turned orange.

At that moment, capitalism falls.

When capitalism falls, everyone sneezes and there is infinite happiness, the Proleteriat are free, Brexit collapses – and Starbucks also collapses. The Starbucks coffeeshops are replaced with libraries.

Meanwhile, the monster is so upset that she involuntarily shoots out loads of poisonous rainbows – and these destroy the whole world. The monster then posts on Facebook, with the words, ‘Sorry for the world. LOL.’ She was able to use Facebook, despite the world being destroyed, because her rainbows also charged up some satellites.

The monster decides to get a seed from Jupiter, which she feeds with Moon juice, and grows a new Earth.

At the end of the story, the monster dies because her rainbows have all gone. And the Earth is repopulated with Margaret Thatchers. It is raining men.