Written January 14th 2007

My name is Louise McGrath, I am 25. This reminds me of an essay I got given out to for writing when I was in national school, I had just joined the ‘reading group’ and we were told to write an essay about ourselves. Mine was a series of about 20 very brief sentences with no comma’s laying out the facts of my 11 or so years of existence. The message came through loud and clear that commas were the way to go, and if you’re in any way intrigued by this blog it mightn’t be a bad way to introduce you to my writing than to say I love my clauses, and my curses, and brackets (alot) and generally wandering off the point in a quirky and frankly hilarious manner. Ahem.

So now, this ‘about page’ will have to be twofold, a little of the back story of me and a lot of the reason for me starting this blog at this particular point in my life. I fear it shall be a lengthy exercise, but I don’t fear that it’ll be written without humour and insight.

Back to the me bit. Its really hard to know where to start with this stuff isn’t it? How much is too much, what would one need to know? The bare bones of it are: I’ve lived in Dublin my whole life, did a wonderful degree in Dún Laoghaire (d.l.i.a.d.t) in English Media & Cultural studies, which finished nearly two years ago now and I still miss it. It strengthened my old beliefs and inspired many new ways of thinking and introduced me to a much larger world than a standard Irish education had achieved. Well I suppose that’s the point of college really, but I honestly think our course was a special one, a view shared by everyone I did it with, excellent group of people. Since then I’ve been working for a large multinational, a stressful role that was never something I had imagined myself doing but it has thought me a huge amount about the business world, its preoccupations, methods, limitations.

I am currently living with my partner Benny, my ex and wonderful friend Darren and our ridiculously intelligent cats Kaida and Padmae. Its a long story as to how that all came about but we’ve had an absolute ball together and I am going to miss being here immensely. But such is life, possibly my oldest and most loved motto runs something along the lines of: “I’d rather be sitting in my rocking chair looking back on a life filled with risks and failures than on one where I am left wondering constantly ‘what if’”.

So now, on to the second purpose of this ‘about’ page. Sligo. Why would I be abandoning the big smoke and moving down the sticks at the ripe old age of 25? Shouldn’t I be retired, wear alot of crushed velvet, have too many cats, and dyed my hair a funny shade of red before the pastoral idyll bade me come away to the waters and the wild? Well, no. Hairs still brown, cats will be lost in custody battle, and I’ve had Yeatsian subliminal programming all the way through secondary school and college in such alarmingly concentrated doses its a wonder I haven’t wobbled off the gyre a long time ago. So anyway, here’s why;

A couple of months back me and Benny went to St. Petersburg for a weeks holiday, he had studied over there for a year in 2002/3 for his business and Russian degree and wanted to share his favorite city with me. I wasn’t long falling in love with it myself, I’m sure I can (and will) go into the whys and wherefores at a later stage, but it shall be enough right now to say it blew me away on many different levels. We had spoken in our first few months of going out about how we both wanted to travel and needless to say we started making plans to go there for a year. It was going to be a tall order, me finding a job with beginners Russian, him finding any decent paying job without years of work experience behind him. Limited to internet searches for jobs it soon became fairly clear that we weren’t going to be able to secure a job in advance of actually getting there so I came up with the idea of going over in March with enough money to allow us a two month stay while we searched for work. In the event that we couldn’t find anything at least we would have had a prolonged visit before turning to plan b – spending the rest of the year working in New Zealand.

So we set to researching and after a while it kind of drifted along in the back of our minds. At a certain point in the deliberations it occurred to me that coming back to Ireland with no money and no accommodation at 26/27 might be a touch daunting, particularly as I’ve spent the last year and how ever many months since finishing college wondering what in gods name to do with myself career-wise whilst whittling the days away in my glamourous and highly fulfilling call centre job. Benny’s response was fairly understandable and logical: ‘if we don’t do it now when will we?’ and so the conversation screeched to a halt. I agreed with him but I couldn’t muffle my emotional response with logic indefinitely and as is the way with these things it started nibbling away at the sense of teamwork and single mindedness that has defined the lovely little bubble of our relationship since day one. Another unpleasant ingredient in the souring of relations was the previously mentioned call centre job – something I will always look back on with a certain amount of gratitude because it was the place that me and Benny met – but good lord is it a stressful and depressing shithole at times. Why stay so long then, you might ask? Dublin is not a fun place to commute, as it is it takes us an hour-and-a-bit to get there on public transport (where a car would take fifteen minutes)(and the cost of a car was out of the question too) so staying in the job longer than I had intended for the sake of getting to spend more time together was justified. Long story short it made both of us pretty miserable in the run up to Christmas and leaving would have been far to messy and unprofitable whilst trying to save for the grand tour.

So there we were, getting the pressies sorted for Christmas and getting ready for our second nine day trip to St. Petersburg (decided on a whim when we found out we had nearly a fortnight of unexpected holidays over Christmas) and sort of ignoring but constantly aware of the plan to go away in March. And of how hopelessly disorganised the plan was, and of how we weren’t really talking about it. By the time we got to St. Petersburg on Christmas eve the muffling and bottling had rather taken its toll, but, as is the way with Christmas, magical things happen and we sat down and thrashed the fucking thing out till our eyes bled and we reached a resolution.

Bugger Russia, we’re going to Sligo.

This is like one of those episodes in Battlestar Galactica or the like, where you see the end of the show at the start and its more about the how than the why, right? Sure it is, keep up.

The big breakthrough came in our favourite café Idealnaya Chashka (Ideal Cup) on Sadovaya, sitting in the smoking section at the bar that runs along the window, (possibly the most fun people watching spot ever in our opinion). We had been out the previous two nights on the trot, consuming copious amounts of Golden Pheasant and chucking stones in the frozen canals etc. and we were both suffering that nasty after effect of all day travel coupled with two consecutive rounds of most-of-the-night drinking – a really shitty mood swing. It was time to start being honest. You know that horribly honest where you don’t know when you start talking if the other person is going to understand, or even if you’ll understand it enough yourself to get any kind of resolution between the two of you? That icky ‘I’m opening a can of worms here aren’t I’ sensation, knowing that if you keep it bottled it’s just going to get worse but if you let it out you could get lost in it and not find your way out. Scary, uncomfortable stuff. The conversation in Idealnaya Chashka was only the start of what we spent the rest of the week working out but it was the start we needed – sometimes you have to reach the bottom to find the way to push yourself back to the top and I had reached mine, to the point where I was holding head in hands repeating I hate my fucking life, I hate the buses, I hate the customers, I hate Dublin, I hate paying through the nose for fucking everything, I hate living in that tiny messy fucking bedroom, I hate constantly not knowing what I want in life. It was nothing I hadn’t said before, nothing new to either of us, nothing that we hadn’t both whinged constantly on and on about for the past few months but something in the absolute despair of it triggered something in my head, and in Benny’s.

We talked about Russia, about my growing concerns on coming back to Dublin penniless and unanchored and he agreed, we hadn’t gotten any further in two months of looking into moving over than we had in the first two weeks and it had become clear that this shared concern, silently eating away at us in the background, was a large part of what had caused the idea to have gone stale for both us. So there we sat, swilling the last of our lattes around the crusty foam on the inside of the cup, gazing out at the mad rush of the street, surrounded by Russians, oblivious to our words and our worries. Our utter lack of purpose and their intensity of purpose, cars four lanes deep, horns blaring, neon lights flickering, everybody moving in one big tangled heaving rush simultaneously chaotic and ordered, us alone, static, physically and emotionally. Christmas songs played quietly in the background.

Distance and time, between us, between us and home, between us and the Russians. The glass we were looking out of, the past the future, the noise the silence, all of the lovely extremes and symbols. The impasse had been reached, ‘We know what we don’t want and what we cant have. We have to figure out what we want’. We looked at each other blankly. The Christmas music whispered in my ear, I studied my new walking boots. I thought of the cats. Of how I’d like another coffee but would prefer my own mug. I felt fat and wanted to go for a walk to feel less fat. I thought about the fire place in the song I could faintly make out, John Bailey’s words about the fire toasting his toes and a good book and a cat and the countryside. I thought, like I have done a thousand times before of how I would love to have that life. And then I realised I already knew what I wanted, sitting there like a gobshite racking my brains trying to think of what I wanted in life and I nearly didn’t notice that my mind was immediately returning to what it has dwelt on for months now, that daydream, that life of quiet and comfort and nature and homeliness that I had been escaping to every day in work for a year. I had said it so often to Benny in those last few weeks of work that if it weren’t for being able to read Johns Journal archives every day in between calls to escape, to find the calm and happiness I needed to combat the aggression and negativity that surrounded me, I would never have been able to stick it out for so long. I had even written a letter to John thanking him for that very thing in the month before we left.

The floodgates were opened, the dialogue began, we were soon talking about how all of the happiest times in our relationship had been spent down the country, going for walks, coming home to cook together, lighting the fire and snuggling up with coffee, books, music, talking until the small hours together, in my mother’s home place in Cavan, my Dad’s bungalow in Kilkenny, Benny’s mothers house in Meath when we were minding it for her, our first holiday together in Sligo. The vision we had shared in one of our long conversations at the very start of our relationship, of sitting in a small pub with a black flagstone floor and a roaring fire drying off after a long walk, a premonition of the day we got soaked to the bone walking on the beach in Rosses Point and of how we spent that afternoon in Austie Gillon’s drying off in front of the same fire we had seen in our minds eyes. We had talked when we were down there of how it would be a wonderful place to live but it was so soon into our relationship at the time it was still in the realm of fantasy. That evening in Idealnaya Chashka, in the magical supercharged neon unreality of St. Petersburg, it found a way to translate itself into our reality. The team was getting back on track.