halloween

I love Halloween - it's an excuse to dress up and indulge in a bit of a party without the endless palaver of Christmas or the emotional blackmail of a birthday.
I also love it because it's a festival invented by kids, for kids. The idea of ghosts and ghouls and witches and green-slime and calling at the doors of complete strangers looking for sweets is so compelling and thrilling for a child that they have, over the past few years, pestered us adults into turning it into a major event.
Halloween has, of course, got its roots in religion - All Souls Day. And now the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales have issued a statement saying that Halloween has lost it’s true meaning and that it shouldn’t be about ‘occult’ celebrations of witchdoctors and zombies and green-face paint and sweets that turn your tongue black, but that our kids should all be dressing up as saints and we should leave the neighbours alone and instead be celebrating this important holiday by taking them to mass.
On behalf of the children I would just like to say to the Bishops – get stuffed!
Firstly, All Souls was a complete non-entity of a religious celebration until the kids got hold of the whole sweets/skeleton/wrapping each other up in toilet paper to make-the-best-egyptian-mummy angle. They invented that and made something out of it. Not you!
Secondly, haven’t the English Bishops little enough to worry about when they can issue miserable, boring, pronouncements about people taking religious holidays more seriously – trying to banish the bit of cheap fun out of our lives in the middle of a joyless recession?
And thirdly - oh thirdly. Do you not think that the world’s children have suffered enough at your hands, Holy Fathers, without drawing attention to yourselves by passing judgement on how they should and shouldn’t be interpreting “your” religious holidays? Generations of being taught to cow-tow to Rome has not proven a particularly healthy route for our children to take after all, resulting largely in endemic abuse and untold misery.
The Irish Bishops have stayed quiet on the subject. They have enough on their plates - keeping their heads down on the subject of anything to do with anything, especially children.
This latest pronouncement, although it seems archaic and laughable, is not merely a sign of how utterly detached the Catholic Church remains from the working of the real world. It can be easily interpreted in the more literal sense; the institution of the church doesn’t like children very much. The Pope giving out about Harry Potter is one thing. Rome’s complete inability to grasp the dark personal horror of institutional abuse is another.
“They just don’t get it,” a priest friend of me tried to explain to me once. “You can argue and talk all you like,” he says, “the institution of Rome would sacrifice every child in the world to stop one gay marriage. It’s a different world. A brick wall.”
Newsflash – you might say - the Catholic Church doesn’t like women and children? Didn’t you read the memo? But as a mother who is bringing her child up as catholic – it is a constant source of horror to me just how much the old boys club that is running the institution which runs parallel to my chosen belief system (I try to live by basic, good, Christian values – they purport to represent me as God’s homophobic, morally violent Military Wing and there is seemingly not a damn thing I can do about it!) is utterly detached from my life as an ordinary Catholic mother.
My son will dress as an African Witch Doctor and go the Halloween party at his school, which is Catholic, and the local priest Father Paddy will be there drinking tea and having the craic with the kids and NOT standing outside the school gates with a banner saying “Down with witches!” My son’s lovely school, and my kind, intelligent priest, make it possible for me to enjoy the benefits of being a practising Catholic in 2010. Outside of the individual religious that I defer to in the day to day practise of my a la carte Catholicism, the liberalism and tolerance and humanity that contradicts the bizarre belief systems of their supposedly appointed elders, I’d have to leave and become an atheist, or a protestant or perish the thought – a new age dingly-dangly “Buddhist” type which, frankly, all seems like a lot of hard work. I already know the Rosary and most of the Saints – even though I don’t encourage my son to dress up as Matt Talbot and wear a barbed-wire cillus belt at Halloween, (although, now they come to mention it….I’m sure there’s a few martyrs the Halloween tradition could suitably mimic. Perhaps they should put in an Opus Dei flagellation stand in the €2 shop?)
While the rest of the world remains open-mouthed at the archaic, detached statements emanating from the fossils in charge of what is still our biggest, wealthiest religious institution, ordinary Catholics will continue to let their children dress up as witches and dunk for apples and trick-and-treat their neighbours, because nothing makes us feel more alive than being part of a community, and seeing our children bring creative and enjoy themselves. Some of us, including me, will go the mass and light candles for our dead as well. Surely God – if not His Bishops - is big enough to accommodate both.

/Users/moragkerrigan/Desktop/TOM (take two).mp3


This is a beautiful piece of music by my friend Lola wrote about my brother Tom who passed away last year. It's and extract from a suite of pieces called On The Gradient Road. Her stuff is stunning check it out on her website www.lolaperrin.com - with details of performances coming up in London.

hooray for the new fashion season

I was getting ready for a speaking engagement recently and instead of just admitting I was nervous, I got myself into a state decided that I had nothing to wear. I had a black trousers and jacket but what I had was no blouse. “I have no blouse,” I said to myself, whilst fingering and flicking aside at least six of them. What I meant was – “I have no blouse which will make me feel better about myself. No blouse that will lift my spirit and make my nerves go away and make me look to other people as if I am a serious person who is cleverer than I actually am. Yes, I have blouses, but I have no blouse that actually suits me.” The reason for this, (and you would think that having been dressing myself for forty odd years I might have spotted it by now), is that blouses do not suit me. However, this fact had not halted my ongoing graw for the sexy-secretary look, the pencil skirt with pussy-bow collar worn in a post-modern ironic way. Every season it comes back and every season, (despite the fact that I have abnormal feet and cannot wear high heels and therefore pencil skirts), I decide that blouses are ‘the thing’. However, blouses do not make me look like a sexy secretary. They make me look like a middle aged old woman in a blouse. For pussy bow blouses to be sexy they have to be worn by eighteen year old fashion models. Otherwise you’re in Angela Landsbury/Miss Marple territory.
None of this entered by conscious mind, unfortunately before I made it into a TopShop. Imagine my joy when I found not an ordinary blouse, but a “directional top”. It had cropped frilly sleeves, a high neck and a slit down the back. I could barely contain my excitement when I looked at myself in the dressing room mirror. This was ‘it’! Directional, great with jeans, “funky” – I had, at last, deservingly – found my blouse. So I bought four. One in every colour. It cost me 125 euro but as I said to my underwhelmed husband when I got home and ripped open the bag, “I won’t need to buy another thing this winter. “This,” I announced holding the frock/smock/blouse confection aloft, “is Morag – Autumn/Winter 2010. This will carry me day-into-evening, casual-to-smart. This is all I need.”
Two days later I decided I was ready to present “Morag – Autumn/Winter 2010” to the public. As you can imagine people were lining the streets. Not.
Except that when I actually put my miracle blouson on it turned out to be an absolute monstrosity. It looked beyond ridiculous. Instead of a looking like a middle aged woman in a blouse, I looked like a middle aged woman in a horrible blouse. Worse again I realised that where my fashion mistakes once were an unfortunate mishap one could overlook, they now look almost comical.
I did give my blouson top a single outing, to a business meeting with my writing partner who is so utterly disinterested in clothes that she wouldn’t notice if I turned up in a bikini.
“How do you like my blouse?” I asked on the way home.
“It’s very frilly,” she said – far, far to quickly.
When are they going to start putting security guards at the door of Top Shop to stop old people like me getting in and buying things which are too young for us. Is it wrong to grieve that I have moved a fashion season closer to the “smart-casual/tailored-seperates” phase of my life?

third bonniest baby in killala

“Who’s judging this year?” I had been interrodgating my fellow mums in the village shop about the Bonny Baby Comp at our local festival. “Outsiders,” was the word on the street. Damn - there was no political angle to exploit, no vicars to charm, no counsellors to lobby. Tommo’s wide reputation as a charming flirt among the customers of Lucy B’s hair salon, his sojourns being baby-sat behind the till as I whizzed round Centra would count for nothing. It was all about how he performed on the day.
I got to the festival early so we were there for hours before the competition started, and a shower of rain put pay to Tommo’s crawling explorations . By the time the judges got to him my gorgeous baby was as angsty as a bag of rats and, despite my best efforts, covered in snot and dribble and expensive Ella’s Organics Carrot and Sweet Potato mash . He tried to launch himself off my lap, wriggling himself out of his posh christening jeans onto the slippery marquee floor. Then he caught sight of a lifesize Barney, eyed it suspiciously for a few seconds, before howling. A giant Minnie Mouse tried to console him, and he went mad altogether.
“He’s normally very good humoured,” I said to the judges. “He’s tired – you know?” Then in a pathetic attempt to win favour I added; “We got here too early. He’s been sitting in the buggy since twelve.” All around clean, beautifully turned-out babies giggled, and gurgled adorably.
“Let’s go,” I said to Niall as we waited for the judges decision,“He’s not got a chance. There’s at least three bonnets in there. Maybe I should have got him a bonnet?”
“Hang on,” he said, “lets give it another half an hour.”
We stood and looked down at the pitch as the village kids slid around their primary coloured inflated wonderland in the school grounds. Friend and neighbours drifted about drinking tea, and doling out change to red faced running offspring for their umpteeth bag of popcorn and bars.
The school grounds are sheltered at the back by little green hills. The sun was shining and I said to Niall; “This is great isn’t it? This life – our set-up here?”
“Yeah,” he said non-committedly. ‘No complaints’ was the sub-text. We did the right thing moving here.
I had holidayed from London in this area every year as a child – hooking up with my Ballina gang of friends, going to discos in Ballina Rugby Club, swimming in the old Downhill pool, taking the bus out to Enniscrone. Although I have been living in Ireland for twenty years now, seven of them full time in Mayo, being here in the Summer months still brings me back to that feeling of holiday excitement I had as a child. The soft rain on an overall sunny day, the smell of burning turf reminds me of a time when we had no money, but still managed to get out at the weekends and have a bit of craic.
Tommo came third in his category. No overall place, but there’s next year – and I’ll be ready then. I’ll have him worn out and fed before we arrive- oh, and if the judges are reading this? Third bonniest baby in Killala? I don’t think so!

www.katekerrigan.ie

working too hard....

....and not getting the time to blog. Niall has been crippled with a bad back all week - in bed drugged up the eyeballs smoking fags and ringing down for cups of tea. Getting me back for the meals on wheels service I made him give me when I came home after my c-section last august; ("Where's my pudding?")
Had a good run at the new novel today. The sequel to Ellis Island - I've been fecking about with it for the best part of a year now - but hoping I cracked something today.
Promise to try and keep more up to date with the blog. Column in Femail section of Irish Daily Mail tomorrow - if you can bear to read anything more about my bloody boring life!

The TV Bookclub reviewed Ellis Island this week. THANK GOD THAT"S OVER. I held it together until about an hour before the show on Sunday - then fell apart. Mercifully, they seemed to like it - so now my life can get back to the normal business of writing. Putting the finishing touches to my memoir about our family's past traumatic year - then on with the sequel to Ellis Island - working title City of Hope.
If I am slow to blog it is because I am LOCKED in my mothers shed writing for the next six months.
Laid back life of a writer eh? Who would have thought that such a sit-down job could produce so much bloody adrenelin!

Since when did the human condition become a disease? Because it seems to me that low level hypochondria is all pervasive in our society. I think it’s because our expectations of life are too high. We expect that we should feel vital, and happy and full of energy and fun all the time, and when we don’t we think there is something ‘wrong’. I have seen too many people go half out of their minds with grief because they had a chest infection – and then take to the bed with depression because of the effects of the anti-biotics. I think I would have preferred it in the old days when people gave birth in fields and dropped dead from consumption cutting turf. Getting on with the business of keeping onseself alive until – BAM – time’s up. Imagine a world before you asked people “How are you” and they actually told you? The freedom of not having to listen to your whinging friend (we all have one) regaling you with the boring minutae of her daily ups and downs. The days when you didn’t have to worry about the shape of your thighs because (a) they were like moulded steel from walking backwards and forwards to the well and (b) nobody, probably now even your husband, ever got to see them. We are so bloody precious about ourselves these days. Going to homeopaths and spending twenty euro on 2ml of bottled water for some imagined ailment. “Stress” is what most of it seems to come down to. And yet, what really have most of us got to be stressed about? Nothing. Stress is a useless modern invention – more painful that the Brazilian wax and more pointless than the hostess trolley. People who are starving or dying don’t get stressed – they get sad. Perhaps we get stressed to stop ourselves feeling guilty about all the real sadness in the world. Because, after all, you might internalise other people sadness and that can lead to chest infections! Or depression. Another bandied about term. Depression is a misunderstood ailment – and that is partly because it has become so commonly used to describe how one feels when one is not on top of the world. For that reason, many ‘real’ depressives remain undiagnosed because they are afraid that their very real symptoms – lethargy, feelings of hopelessness, suicidal thoughts etc. – are just them being self-indulgent. The reason for this is because so many of us are, now, self-indulgent about our feelings. We can’t cope with the stress of work, or world poverty, or not having been hugged enough as a child, so we get ‘depressed’. Not depressed enough to take medication, or book ourselves in for residential care, or kill ourselves (as friends of mine with real depression have done) but depressed enough to call is ‘depression’ and garner sympathy and comfort from indulgent friends and family. I just think this kind of emotional – and physical - hypochondria somehow takes from those people who are truly suffering. Selfish miserable attention seekers who used to be told to ‘get on with it’ are now able to take centre stage in our sympathetic, permissive society. Where does the line betweeen genuine hardship and indulgent neurosis end? If there is one thing in my life I would like to change it is my neurotic nature. My tendancy to get het up and hysterical over problems which do not exist. Panicking over posting letters, worrying about my pension, stressing over wrinkles and wobbly thighs. Modern malaises which were once the hilarious “does my bum look big in this” obsession of my Bridget Jones generation. But the joke is starting to wear a bit thin.