“Insanity is inanity with an ‘s’. These posts will have plenty of both.”
Corona virus means normality hiatus and boredom stupendous! So I’ve taken it upon myself to do my bit for humanity by recording my daily (ish – I’m really terribly busy) musings from West Cork isolation. Expect a plethora of wit as evidenced above and an inundation of time-wasting nonsensicalities as illustrated below. Stay well. Stay educated. Stay off yer bleedin’ phones!! Unless you’re talking to me – please ignore real people for virtual me at all times thank you goodnight x
“I’m just chilling with my puzzles, buttered snacks – bread, cupcake, Mars Bar, croissant, butter – and new handstand-learning timetable. And. by handstand timetable, I of course mean loosely suggesting to my sister that now would be a good time to practice handstands and – hey, that wall looks like a perfect handstand wall! That wall is waiting to be handstood against. Let’s totally set aside time each day to handstand around/in/on that one by two metres patch of luminous green plasterboard. “
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Groundhog Daze: I felt restless so I gave myself bangs
My fitbit has given me eczema. Pneumonia has allegedly given me asthma – I have an inhaler now and it seems incongruous with everything else I think about myself. I am wearing pink jeans that are too tight to make any kind of movement comfortable. I cannot bend down, sit down, squat down, come down…
Groundhog Daze: How Future Holly will make Past Holly proud
Watching Little Women while attempting to eat pizza should qualify for a new Olympic sport. Attempting to swallow molten mozzarella while choking back sobs is, I believe, a feat of Herculean strength. Just an observation I’ve had. The solitary hair sprouting from the corner of my right upper lip is still very much there, doing…
Groundhog Daze: The Roast Dinner Conundrum: how many scoops of mash does a monster make?
I wish I was the kind of person who knew how to correctly apportion food. Tonight, I swore I only wanted a snack, a nibble, just a few bird-like mouthfuls of Sunday’s roast skewered together in perfect symphonic harmony and somehow I ended up with a plate the size of a small child. I said…
Groundhog Daze: Mary, Mary, surprisingly hairy, how does your moustache grow?
For the past week I have had the troubling sensation of feeling there is a hair in my mouth. Curled around my lip and into the cavernous vortex of my gob, a rogue follicle is rakishly entangling itself in my food until the moment of mastication when it detaches, like a lover who’s just heard…
Groundhog Daze: Blah like Enda Kenny
You know that Tame Impala song, “feels like we only go backwards”? Well, word on the deserted city streets is Tony Holohan has started a secret petition to make it our new anthem-elect until 2047 when all of this shite ends and we remember what it is to shake hands and walk up to a…
Almost as it was before
18.10.20 I didn’t go for the morning run I said I would. Instead. I turned over and waited for the cat, curled away from the crook of my knee-calf, to sense that I was awake and begin purring. He did and I rewarded his love with the stroke scratch tickle we can never truly know…
Day 44: What Holly Did Next
First things first, can we please have a moment for the visual accompanying this entry that perfectly demonstrates me leaping into the unknown? THANK YOU. If I had to estimate, I would say it’s 45 degrees right now and there is a 30% chance that this is horrendously inaccurate. Still, for the purposes of entertainment,…
Day 43: “Hey, u up?” and other things I’ve emailed the UN at 2am
Another one from the archives. Or, more accurately, the multitudinous, multi-faceted ether of my iPhone notes. Does it surprise you that it’s always been my dream to work at the UN? If it does then I’ve been highly misleading in these diaries. Well, dearest reader, that dream almost came true for me the other night…
Day 42: What does one listen to if not listening to The National? Asked the human cookie monster.
What you’re reading is approximately ten days to two weeks stale. Proceed with caution and apologies if it’s a little soggy. I am so sick of my own music. Dear God, what did I listen to before The National? Is there a life outside of the same frigging playlists that I keep relentlessly shoving on…
Day 41: Potato salad fingers.
I am sitting in the back of my parents’ Hyundai eating potato salad with my bare hands. I am on day two of the worst hangover of all time and I am insatiable. I wanted a 99 but Circle K thwarted me again. Why is the world so against me indulging in some soft-serve sugar?…
Day 40: I have some news…(I’m not pregnant)
Is this the chosen subject line of the email I sent one head of department in my organisation to tell him I was quitting my job? Maybe. WHOEVER SAID I SOLD OUT AND BECAME AN I-DOTTING, T-CROSSING, NINE-TO-FIVER WITH MY REGULAR SALARY, PLEASE KINDLY EAT YOUR WORDS NOW. I’m still eccentric, I’m still a maverick,…
Day 39: Keeping an anti-social distance from “normality”
I’m back in Dublin. After over three months spent in complete isolation in Cork, where the only people I have spoken to outside my family are siblings’ other halves, two family friends and the lovely cashiers in my three trips to Ireland’s best, prize-winning Supervaloo, I am back once more in the cacophonic breach, floating…
Day 38: A Love Letter to my TDs…
Today I spent my lunchbreak writing letters to my TDs and government ministers asking of their plans to ensure promises of ending direct provision in the next government’s lifetime were upheld and urging them to put the worsening situation in the Mediterranean to the top of their agenda. Here is the letter. To show you…
Day 37: 23:03 pm musings
23:03 – I have spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to only get certain blog posts to display on certain pages. The smug euphoria is unlike anything else I’ve experienced this week. I am back in Dublin in my happiness box – the small, sublet of a room I’ve lived in for two…
Day 36: I dreamed Dolly Alderton and I were bezzies and, apart from social inequality, have thought of little else.
I don’t really know what else there is to say. My weekend dreams in lockdown are BEE-ZARRE. I think it’s the fact I’ve nothing going on so my dreams are trying to make up for it by being perfectly outrageous. Although I do have strange dreams as a human anyway. Incredibly, minutely, realistic and so…
Day 35: I ran 17 kilometres and now my end is definitely nigh
I know now is not the time to be flippant about death so please read the above caption with the required level of concern. I THINK I AM DYING. I have had to eat so much sugar just to keep my poor heart in motion; I may be having a very modest, quietly unobtrusive, delicately…
Day 34: Is George Floyd to 2020 what Greta Thunberg was to 2019 and, if so, is this a good thing?
I hate that I’m this person and yet, I can’t help thinking it. I cannot help but be irked by the tsunami of influencers and everyday people essentially blackwashing their platforms in the aftermath of George Floyd’s. Except, just as Greta Thunberg was not the inaugural climate activist, George Floyd was not the first person…
Day 33: I am one convulsing nostril
It is 21:58 and all around me I am surrounded by chaos. Boxes that contain my life, my loves, my infinite passion for vintage dresses and bombastic patterns, trinkets that sit somewhere between sacred relics and culturally appropriated junk and the thousands of books and journals I am perpetually on the verge of starting, finishing,…
Day 32: Mea Culpa
I will keep this short because, if you have been following these, you will know I’ve been up-the-walls busy simply by the fact you haven’t heard from me. I just want to apologise. My last piece was ambiguous and therefore truly hurtful to some family members. I wrote what I thought was a dry caricature…
Day 31: The abominable facemask
I’m trying to write and my sisters are intent on derailing my creativity with intense chats about our next choreographed lip-sync video. If you haven’t yet experienced the joy of our first masterpiece, here you go. I have been called whore, boring, shit craic, rude, and selfish in the space of three minutes. All for…
Day 30: A useless short story, a one-liner rejection and a boulevard of broken dreams.
I went to enter a short story competition yesterday because I am going to be a writer and put myself out there until one day I too have a novel adapted to a TV show and my portrayal of sex is the main topic on Joe Duffy. It is a personal goal of mine to…
Day 29: Mamma Mia, here I frigging go again
Approximately two weeks into our lockdown – thus now almost 756,000 million years ago – middle sister introduced us to TikTok. By ‘us’, I mean myself and my parents because every other family member – including our cats – was aware of this phenomenon and I am now within their generational bandwidth in terms of…
Day 28: Me and Trump vs the Lamestream Media
I get most of my news from David O’Doherty’s Isolating podcast and the snippets of Joe Duffy and Sean O’Rourke I catch as I potter making coffee and elaborate quarantine breakfasts. It is perhaps, not the best of cocktails: a smattering of wildlife trivia (the Irish term for ladybird literally translates to ‘little cow’), fun…
Day 27: Never underestimate the magic of a mini brioche
I don’t know why I continue to willfully underestimate the power of a mini brioche roll to fix all manner of physical, emotional, or imagined ills. I mean, hangover = gone. Inexplicable grief caused by a global pandemic = vanquished in a bite. Randiness = butter will suffice. They are heaven shaped into pudgy faux-baguettes…
Day 26: Am I still being bootycalled?
It’s the question that’s been on everyone’s mind since diary entry #3 when a mysterious stranger decided to light up my phone one brisk and impossibly early Saturday morning. Now, after weeks of suspense and as you all mourn the death of Normal People and find yourselves endlessly trawling the Internet for another impossible love…
Day 25: I thought it would be fun to list things
The photo of my dog is sadly unrelated to this post – I just really wanted to get your attention. Look, I know what you’ve all been thinking. Hol, it’s great, we love your work, we live for your run-on sentences that are often ten lines long and usually don’t seem to have any real…
Day 24: The leg hair has returned and my vocabulary is improving
I’ve taken to writing down words I like in the margins of whatever notebook is closest to hand. I just came across a small pile of them in a now-defunct diary. They were stacked like a turmite hotel and read like this: Febrile. Spurious. Nadir. Purposive. Torrid. I will try to use them in a…
Day 23: I should be ordering fifteen euro eggs and nursing a mimosa right now
I am hungover. Two freely-poured aperol spritzes, 1.5 cans of Guinness (the remaining 0.5 woke me up with its RINGING judgement from the lofty heights of my bedside locker this morning) and I am a pale and anxious mess. I went to bed fully-clothed, having been Facetiming a friend in Australia and, when my battery…
Day 22: Today is absolutely the last day of not getting dressed properly
I am either very, very tired or very, very energised. Those are my two states of being in quarantine. I either want to give hours to making intricate TikTok dance videos or else I’m lying down on my bedroom floor barely able to lift my arm to separate the tangle of the 3,000 piece jigsaw…
Day 21: Things I Must Have Written But Can’t Remember and Won’t ReRead.
I am bubbling over with things I want to tell you – I keep writing them down on scraps of paper and in my phone notes. These diaries are transforming me into a poor parody of Jo March from Little Women – dashing through the house to reach some form of pressed parchment and record…
Day 20: Things I’ve cried at in the past 24 hours
Oh, hi there. Nothing to see here, just a woman now sort-of in her late twenties but still very much under the impression her age, looks, and penchant for terrible hair cuts paused at 22, crying into a supermarket trolley, improvised buddha bowl, chocolate pavlova. Whatever happens to be close-to-hand and weirdly inappropriate. Thankfully, salt…
Day 19: Ok, I’m turning this into a food blog now (because there’s not enough of those)
Ok, it is 21:09. I have 21 minutes to write the absolute bejaysus (do we think this is a plausible spelling) out of this entry before I positively PLUMMET back into Modern Love and the chocolate pavlova awaiting assembly downstairs. (Note to the long-time readers: I know you’re thinking that I’m breaking my strict, vehemently-principled…
Day 18: She sleeps alone.
Pros of lockdown: No longer having that feeling, as you fall asleep celibate and alone, that every other twenty-something is out there having passionate sex with all and sundry. Cons of lockdown: Falling asleep, celibate and alone. Pros of lockdown: Sisters being legally prevented from seeing their boyfriends and love interests, making them seem every…
Day 17: Why is my sister hitting a sliotar with a surfboard?
Today has been a funny day. Funny as in strange (not sure if you’ve come across this word in emails much recently – it’s usually found sandwiched in between the words ‘these’ and ‘times’ which are themselves preceded by “I hope this finds you well and safe.” For example, I was glass of wine in…
Day 16: The window is open and the world is swimming in
It is 7.51pm. My window is wide, attempting to swallow the world; to suck it through its gaping, starving mouth and gulp it into my room. I am opening my own mouth to it – glugging in the nectar of birdsong, sipping the soupy sky – the seep of it like whiskey across the grass.…
Day 15: It’s been SEVEN hours and FIFTEEN days
Since you took my pints away. Ah-ah-ah-ahhhhhhhha. Can’t go out any night so sleep all day. Since you trapped me in 2k. (wistful side-eye) Since lockdown can’t barely do a thing I waaaaaahnt. I can’t see any ma boos. (looks down tearfully) Wah-ah-ah-ahaaaaaaa Can’t even eat my brunch in an overpriced restauraaawwwwnt (defiantly raises head,…
Earnest & Ethereal 