I am bursting at the seams to write about the progress of the rehearsals for my play ‘An unexpected party’ which will be staged from May 1^st to May 6^th at 9pm in the Teacher’s Club on Parnell Square. (Get your tickets HERE….). However it seems sort of wrong to be sharing information about it so early. I’m slightly afraid of jinxing the whole thing before it’s even begun. Therefore – except for the no-doubt tiresome – promotion I have taken a vow of silence on the specifics of this topic. Rest assured there will be a gory post mortem of the play and the process once it’s been completed. For the moment however I’m keeping schtum. 

Which raises a slight problem. This blog details (in a slightly exaggerated manner) my day to day life. Nobody (not even I) could care to know about my daily grind at the coalface of office administration, in the industrial wastelands of County Dublin. This means I need to write about my life outside work. When you are spending rather a lot of time outside work rehearsing, and when this topic is off limits then it’s a struggle to come up with something anyway interesting to babble on about.

I suppose I could just make stuff up – pretend that my life is one of glitter,  glamour, shoulder pads and cocktails with umbrellas in them.  The problem with lying however is that not only do you have to remember that you have lied, but you are also obliged to recall the details of the lie at a later stage. And that (as opposed to lying being morally wrong) is the reason that one should not lie.

I bet that nobody will want to hear the tale of horror which happened last week, when I went to the lavatory at work.

Well too bad – I’m telling it. I entered the Gents. One of the cubicles was empty. Or so I thought. The green ‘vacant’ sign on the lock could be trusted right? Upon entry I was faced with the site of one of the managers on the throne with his trousers around his ankles. I don’t know which was louder – my yelp of terror or his yelp of embarrassment. I have avoided him since. I suspect (or at least hope) that he will be more vigilant in future about locking the door.

Then again a moment of trauma like this one is not sufficient to keep a reader engaged.

I could tell an account of how on Saturday I went to a bake sale to raise funds for a rival show in the festival, and how despite my solemn oath, to stop purchasing books I slunk home with three new books in my stylish man-bag.

On the plus side I read one of these new books to completion over the weekend – namely ‘Squirrel seeks chipmunk : A wicked bestiary’ by David Sedaris. David Sedaris is an American humourist who writes surreally hilarious accounts of his day to day life. He has published several volumes of these works. I’ve read a few of them in the past – ‘Naked’; ‘Me talk pretty one day’; ‘Barrel fever’; ‘Dress your family in corduroy and denim.’

‘Squirrel seeks chipmunk’ is a work of fiction. It is a series of illustrated short stories dealing with anthropomorphically personified animals. So we hear the tale of a pair of storks fretting over how to explain the facts of life to their children; about a judicious brown hen who decides that the way to avoid slaughter is to get very fat; about how a crow tries to teach a sheep how to meditate – except his real motive is very sinister. To the final tale of a widowed owl who while grieving for his dead wife experiences existential angst. He befriends a hippo at the zoo (the hippo’s slave name is Dotty) and together they ruminate on life.

It’s an interesting idea for a book. It’s entertaining in places, and the illustrations are hilariously revolting. All in all though it’s rather disappointingly slight when compared to his more traditional writing style. At least I’ve finished it. So it joins the growing ‘read’ section of the bookshelf.