How your grandparents met

This was a text I read for Daniel Kemeny’s exhibition at Able Galerie in Berlin. He filled the room full of balloons and to see the work you had to climb around them, or just burst your way through. I wrote a story about balloons. I gave instructions at the beginning so when ever anyone heard a trigger word they’d do an action with a balloon.

Sheep – pick up a balloon

Sex – draw a face on it

String – tie the balloon to your arm

Sword – kill the balloon

Anyway, it was a bit of fun and this story is completely made up.

How your grandparents met

The story is set in the 1960s in Ireland in the middle of the Irish sexual revolution. It’s a story about balloons but it’s also about how my grandparents met.

In the sixties, while North Americans were having orgies up and down the west coast, the French were falling into loud orgasms whenever they heard the words Serge and Gainsbourg and the Germans just stayed nude for most of the decade, over on the farthest tip of Western Europe on a small island, called Ireland, a sexual revolution was also taking place.

One cool, autumn evening, all the women in the Irish countryside packed their belongings into bags and left.

They had read about the glamour of London and without even saying goodbye to the men who one day hoped to marry them, they left the countryside to follow their dreams. Like a fart in a phone box, the place cleared in an instant.

Now of course, not all of the women left, that would have been impossible. The mothers, the grandmothers, the gypsy women who might curse you as soon as kiss you, the girls young enough that they were still just boys, and the bearded ladies of which there were quite a few in the countryside stayed behind.

But the women. The real women. The kind that make young men write poetry, climb balconies and brush their teeth twice a day were all gone. That cool autumn evening the lazy bachelors went to bed thinking, I’ll ask her out tomorrow, and the next morning they were all gone. The Irish countryside was left in a terrible, terrible state of shock.

They’ll be back, the men in the bars said.

They’ll miss the place.

What’s London got that the countryside doesn’t they asked and then looked out from the dirty window as six types of cold black rain beat down upon the dark dirt road.

Of course they’ll be back, they told themselves. Electricity isn’t everything.

After two weeks there was still no sign of the girls and a heavy pessimism descended.

We’ve lost them forever, the men from the Irish countryside said.  And in their anguish, despair and loneliness they looked for comfort in the one place they knew they would always find it.

Sheep.

The pretty ones. The ones who moved through the long grasses like models on catwalks and chewed the grass like they were eating lobster on some fine terrace in Moncao. The men would lean against the walls of the field and stare for hours lost in the sheep’s beauty and charm.

It became clear to the town leaders that unless something was done a whole generation of young Irishmen would be lost to wild animal romance.

They called for an emergency meeting. They had to bring the women back. But what would do it? There were discos in London but the only thing that came close to a disco ball in the countryside was when the clouds ran past the full moon.on stormy nights. No, they had nothing to compare with swinging London, but they did have the most powerful manipulator of human opinion known to man.

Mother’s Guilt.

They rounded up all the mothers in the villages and ordered them to start writing letters immediately filled with descriptions of illness, disease and crippled family pets. The mothers were resistant at first. They were happy that their daughters were living rock star lives in a foreign city. But when it was put to them that their sons were considering romantic liasons with farm animals, they soon started writing the letters.

It worked. Many of the women decided to come home.

But travel then, wasn’t like travel now. A trip from London to Dublin could take weeks to plan and by that stage the young men of the Irish countryside might have already fallen under the charms of the sheep.

They had to either kill all the sheep in the countryside or somehow find a temporary replacement for the women.

“What about the balloons?” one of the older men said and the room fell silent.

Now did you know that Ireland was the leading producer of balloons after WWII? Alongside butter, potatoes and whiskey, the Irish countryside was full of balloon factories. There’s a lot of spare wind in Ireland so it made sense. They produced simple white balloons and children all over the world played with them.

But when colour TV became popular in the late 50s, people lost interest in simple white balloons and nearly all of the factories closed down. Thousands upon thousands of balloons never ever got to see the light of day.

Could the balloons be a temporary replacement for Irish women?

They thought about it. There were many similarities between balloons and Irish country women. The skin colour was more or less the same. They both had that coldness of character where you could never understand if they were delighted or boiling with anger. Kissing a balloon was somewhat similar to kissing an Irish woman and having sex with a balloon was as equally impossible as with an Irish woman.

So they decided, to give every man in the village a balloon and a piece of string. They could attach it to their hand, take it with them where ever they went and this would keep them away from the temptations of the farmyard.

It worked. The men began to bond with their balloons. Some painted faces on them, others gave them wigs, and they all had the nicest sounding names imaginable. Eveline, Anne Marie, Sara Jessica, Florence and so on.

The men brought their balloons to the bar with them. The atmosphere was much improved. They were less aggressive towards each other. Their frustration had died and the animals lay their pretty, pretty heads upon the warm grass and slept easy at night.

Now while everyone else in the village knew that the balloons were just a temporary thing, for my grandfather a deeper bond was developing. He called his balloon Gale, because her movements reminded him of storms he’d seen out at see. And while the other men joked about their attachments, my grandfather only used the loftiest, most graceful language when it came to talking about his balloon.

She understands me, he used to say. Or I’d be lost without her, or she’s opened up my eyes to things I’d never have seen without her. My grandfather was a terrible sleeper. He spent the night at battle with the blankets. Gale had a calming effect on my grandfather. They did more than just share a bed, they shared their most intimate thoughts and desires.

“I always wanted to be a dancer,” my grandfather admitted to her one day.

Gale said nothing. But in this way she let him know that if he tried, he could do absolutely anything he wanted to.

And then, one bright afternoon in early Spring, the women started coming back. They had changed. They wore make up and their hair was unusually clean. The men got rid of their balloons. They all felt silly. Childish even. To think that they’d spent the whole winter going round with a little ball of air attached to their arms. My grandfather held tight to the string attached to Gale and wouldn’t let go.

“Ah will you ever get rid of that thing,” the other men said.

“Her name’s Gale,” my grandfather said.

The men felt bad for him.

“What do you see in her?” they asked.

“She never has a bad word about anyone,” he replied, “And that’s rare as gold in this day and age.”

It was around this time that my grandmother moved back to the village too. She had a round and lovely face and a body as skinny as a piece of string. She wasn’t much of a talker, in fact she barely said a word at all. And years of avoiding the two days of sun that God gifts the Irish every year, had left her skin as white as a balloon.

She saw my grandfather out in the fields, digging a hole. Gale, the balloon, was attached to his arm as ever. She was instantly attracted to this strange and stubborn individual. But my grandfather only had eyes for Gale. He said hello to my grandmother as she passed but wouldn’t look her in the eye.

Now there is nothing in this world more fearsome than an Irish woman when she sets her eyes upon her man. Two armies couldn’t stop her. And my grandmother was a very determined woman. The story goes that when she was only eight she refused to eat her broccoli and was forced to stay at the table. My grandmother stayed there for a whole ten days until her parents finally gave in and took away the broccoli. Upon victory she collapsed and the doctor had to be called for. Her family said that it would be easier to move the world than to move her.

Every morning throughout winter she took a detour in order to pass the field where my grandfather was digging, and every morning she’d stop and say hello to him. In this subtle and determined way, she slowly won his attention.

Now digging holes is a very popular pastime in the Irish countryside. Some men go from their youth to old age digging the same whole and never get tired. Ireland is a land of epic holes. My grandfather loved his hole. It was more than just dirt and stone and worms, it was like a good friend. He had grown up in that hole. It had taught him to become a man and it had won his trust. Now, rare as it is in other places, in Ireland, sometimes holes talk.

One day while my grandfather was digging, the hole opened up its mouth and spoke.

“You’re wasting your time,” the hole said. My grandfather was so shocked that he fell on his ass.

The hole continued to talk.

“You need to find yourself a woman.”

My grandfather knew that his hole was one of the oldest and wisest in all Ireland, and that its words were to be believed.

The next morning when my grandmother was walking by the field, my grandfather went over to talk to her.

“Do you like walking?” he said to her. My grandfather was a charmer from the old school.

“I do,” said she.

“Do you like walking in company?” he said to her.

“Its nice,” she replied.

“Can I take you for a walk this evening?” he asked.

“You can,” said she.

That evening my grandparents had their first date. They went walking. Gale came too. Maybe there was something in the air or it was actual jealousy but she moved between my grandparents with an aggression that my grandfather had never seen before. It was as if she sensed the end was near.

My grandfather sensed it too. He needed to make a decision. He made it that night he stared in the mirror and the words of Oscar Wilde ran through his strong, country head.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word.

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

And that’s how my grandparents met.

The Swedish Dining Table and the Frigid Lamp

There was another reading last night at the Springsalon. A group of artists and performers put on a show and asked me to open it up with a little bit of fiction. I had this idea that at night while we’re all sleeping, the furniture in the house get together and party, and sometimes even hook up. So that’s where I took this story. Payment in beer again, nice.

The Swedish Dining Table and the Frigid Lamp.

You would never call him a slut but it’s fair to say that in almost ninety years of existence, the dining table at the Hasselhoff’s place had got himself around the block a few times. Born in Sweden, he was naturally good looking and when they shipped him to Germany in the fifties, he got enough compliments in that first year to last three lifetimes.

He traded homes three times before finally arriving at the Hasselhof’s place along the Ufer in Neukolln. By then he’d darkened and wrinkled and the polish no longer covered up his scratches and scars, but the cutlery and the curtains agreed that ageing had only improved him and besides amongst all the other German furnishings, his charm stuck out like a lighthouse

The Swedish Dining Table remembered events throughout his life based on whomever he was squeezing at the time. For example when JFK visited he was doing a line with a Persian rug who insisted on keeping the lights off. When McCartney announced the end of the Beatles, he had just finished a wild 48hrs with a leather suitcase on its way to Paris, and when the rest of the world was boycotting the Moscow Olympic, the table showed it’s solidarity by engaging in a short fling with a kinky Russian teacosy with bad breath.

The longest relationship he’d had was three months with a coal oven, but later he’d admit that the only reason he dated her for so long was so he could get closer to her cousin on the landing.

You see, The table regarded nothing in life as good as sex, and felt no responsibility for anyone’s feelings while he made his way from apartment to apartment sewing his wild splinters.

If the Swedish dining table were to die right then, he’d say his greatest achievement had been the time he’d made love to both a fruit bowl and an armchair after a New Years party that got completely out of hand. If he were asked his greatest failure he’d say it was the fact that on the night in question he hadn’t managed to convince the futon to join in too.

‘Once you hit 24 years of age there’s no such thing as love anymore, it’s just business.’ He’d say. And he meant it.

That is until Mr.Hasselhof had a change of fortunes and lost his job as a BMW rep and was forced to sell partially used U-Bahn tickets at Schleschies Tor station. To do this job he needed to know the city’s rail network like his own hand. At night he had to study crowd patterns, work schedules and learn English expressions like ‘day ticket?’ In order to do this he’d need a desk.

The Swedish Dining Table, once familiar with fine wines and the best foods was now a landing sight for rulers, coffee mugs and pencil shavings. He’d become the one thing all dining tables hate, a simple, boring desk.

To add injury to insult, Mr. Hasselhof drilled a hole through the surface and mounted a gangly looking office lamp in its place.

Now the lamp was one of those metallic, twisty devices not known for their good looks. On top of that, this lamp was a feminist and refused to change her appearance to satisfy male whims. From day one they hated each other.

The dining table would make wolf whistles at the vacuum while Mrs Hasselhof did the cleaning, and never tired of asking the three ducks on the wall ‘How’s it hanging?’

The Lamp would blush or turn away, disgusted that she was compelled to spend her days and nights with what she considered was no more than some 2-dimensional, sex mad, hunk of Scandinavian wood.

The Dining Table on the other hand would buck and jolt and do everything in its power to try and shake her loose from her hinge. In fairness she was cramping his style. Not even the bean cushion – who’d normally get up on a gust of wind –  would touch him now that he had a lamp sticking out of his ass.

Strange things happen in the lives of furniture. While they act as if there existence is their own, they’re really only one cleaning accident away from disaster or one garage sail away from an upheaval.

Upheaval started slowly at the Hasselhoff home. The first signs were when the family began eating from Penny Markt instead of KaWeDe. Mr Hasselhof wasn’t doing so well from ticket sales. There was competition from the junkies and the tourists had all read that same Lonely Planet advice section warning them off ze Germans at train stations.

One day, he hopped on a stepladder and removed all the paintings from the wall. They were never seen again. The Dining Table wasn’t so fussed, he’d had them all several times – they were a bunch of cheap tarts. The walls could do with an upgrade. But when the bay grand piano went, the dining table started to panic.

The Lamp noticed his concern. “It’s going to be okay?” she said at a loss for words.

“Did they teach you anything in Media Markt?” said the Dining Table.

“Are you all you lamps as dumb as you are ugly? It’s a recession. We’re fucked.”

The Lamp didn’t quite know what to say so she said nothing.

In early January things hit rock bottom and the Hasselhof’s were forced to leave Neukolln and move to a cheaper home in Marzahn. Mr. Hasselhof was now collecting Hartz IV so his work desk was no longer needed. The lamp and the dining table were dumped on the street.

“What’ll we do now?” said the lamp. The Swedish Dining Table, normally so macho, felt like a lost child.

After one day, they were taken by a group of punks and brought to their squat along the Spree. They decided the Dining Table was bourgeouise so they chopped his legs off to stumps. Beneath the noise of the saw, the punks grunts and the Dead Kennedy’s record playing in the background you could just make out the Dining Table’s soft, soft weeping.

The Lamp tried her best to console him. She poured warm light on his stumps but he refused to even open his eyes and look at them. In a word, he was a broken table.

The punks covered them in candle wax and piss. From time to time they’d brawl or fuck right on top of the once proud surface. At times like these the Dining Table would lift one stump so the lamp could curl up beneath his strong body and stay safe.

Furniture, if treated well, can last several lifetimes. It became clear to the dining table and the lamp that any longer like this and they’d be nothing more than fire wood and broken metal.

They hatched a plan. Every morning at 6am the garbage men pulled up outside the squat. The next time they came by they could throw themselves out the window into the back and drive away to anywhere else.

“I don’t know if I have the strength left,” said the dining table.

“I believe in you,” said the lamp.

Now all would have gone to plan if it the bull hadn’t visited the squat the night before. The bull was the fattest punk in all Berlin and somehow he ended up passing out drunk on top of the table. The next morning they heard the rumble of the garbage truck outside.

“I can’t budge him,” said the table. “We’re stuck here.”

“Watch this,” said the lamp.

She crashed her face into the floor and her bulb smashed across the room in a million tiny, shining pieces. The glass ripped right across the Bull’s face and he jumped to his feet. In that instant, the dining table leaped onto two stumps and with energy he didn’t know he had, jumped clear through the open window and onto the back of the garbage truck.

The Garbage truck rumbled off down the lane, but the Bull followed in hot pursuit. The lamp used her mechanical arm like a slingshot and fired club mate bottles back at him.

The Bull took one right in the groin and he fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

The truck eventually passed the city limits and made its way East. At a traffic light, they dining table and the lamp climbed out of the back and made their way into the woods at Treptower Park.

They scurried along the edge of the river until they came across a gentle bank overlooked by fine Willow Trees.

“This is the place,” The Dining Table said.

“Can you still bear to be with me even though I don’t have a face anymore?” said the Lamp.

“Till the end of time,” said the Dining Table.

And as sunset that evening, the Dining Table and the Lamp shared their first kiss and made sweet sweet love to each other.

For the first time in his life, the Swedish Dining Table learned that sex didn’t always entail someone getting fucked and the Lamp learned that just because you’re a feminist doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a piece of wood.

In time the Dining table and the lamp grew old and ivy wrapped itself around their worn frames but they were happy, and in the tough and precarious life of a piece of household furniture that was as good as it ever got, and as good as you ever wanted it to get.

And on soft Berlin nights, if you make your way along the sweet side of the Spree to Treptower Park, you can sometimes hear the faint grunts of metal and timber.

Between the Panty and the Ho

Last night I gave my first reading at a photographic exhibition. The show was called Between the Mop and the Bucket and the artist was a Welsh feminist called Becky Beynon. She uses tights to create prison-like webs in houses. It’s a clever way to show the restrictions imposed by domesticity. In response to this I thought I’d write something about my favourite feminist, Nell Gwyn, who in the 1660s was the most famous prostitute in all Europe. No one threw eggs or rotten fruit and I was paid, rather handsomely, in beer.

“Nell, Nell, sharp as a bell, pretty as a flower and bad as hell.

When she died nobody could tell, till they dug up her body and gave it a smell.”

Nell Gwyn was born on the eve of festival of Brigid, that old Irish Celtic Goddess of fertility and strength. Of course, Nell wouldn’t have known that – by that stage the Roman Catholic Church in its attempt to dismantle the competition had demoted Brigid from Goddess of fertility to just an everyday saint.

Nell never knew her father and her mother died from alcohol poisoning when Nell was still a teenager. That said Nell didn’t rely too much on parental care anyways. She started turning tricks from the age of nine and aged 12, sold her supposed virginity to a noble man in return for clothes, food and a roof over her head.

Nell jumped from client to client selling her virginity, climbing a career ladder that would bring her from musty bedsits over taverns to parkside mansions on Suffollk Street but her passion lay elsewhere. She joined a theatre and started off selling six penny oranges at intermission. When a law was passed allowing women to share a stage with men, Nell, who had about as much education as a chicken, paid a girl to recite the lines over and over to her until they were lodged permanently in her head. She got her first role age 14, playing Montezuma’s lover in a John Dryden play. Nell also became the first British woman to have her name on a performance poster outside a national theatre.

The theatre didn’t bring in much cash so Nell continued to work as a prostitute but she didn’t feel bad about it. One day her couchman attacked a passer by who called her a whore. The coachman was about ready to pummel the guy to death when Nell jumped in and said, “I am a whore, now can’t you two find something else to fight about?”

Now, some would have you believe that prostitution is the oldest profession ever created, but that would be doing a disservice to all the gatherers, healers and tribal leaders who made up the first matriarchal stoneage societies. I say matriarchal because there’s a strong strain of revisionist theory maintaining that until weapons were developed, women, who had recognisably stronger, innate survival instincts, ruled supreme. It was only when their male counterparts picked up sticks and stones and transformed these erstwhile tools into weapons that the age of hunting really began. See, where previously women had plucked, scraped and collected berries, worms, grubs and edible plants, men were now stabbing, harpooning and tearing strips of animal flesh to small edible shreds. Overnight they became killers. The gatherers became hunters, humans became carnivores, and women, fully cogniscent of their need to survive amidst the blood and violence on their doorsteps, adopted, as a prudent safety measure, a secondary role in society.

Like a dog in a thunderstorm they hid behind the couch.

The rise of religion copperfastened this position. God hated women and so men were afraid of them. Disenfranchised, disabused and driven back to cower in their muck and straw houses, the only business that a woman could engage in was supplying the one thing heterosexual men just couldn’t seem to get enough of by themselves: no strings sex.

Now England at that time was a mess of a nation. The English were unhealthy both in mind and body. The Plague was rampant and so was religious hysteria. The Apocalypse was close as hand, they said. There were frightened murmurs everywhere. People were petrified of the end of the world and named their children Abstinence, Ashes, Tribulation, Lamentation, Forsaken and the number one bonny baby name in 1662: Fornication. London was burning too. From St Paul’s to Pudding Lane the city was engulfed in smoke and flames. And while all this was happening Cromwell was butchering his way across the Empire and the teenage king Charles II was in Paris learning the fine art of tuning an acoustic guitar.

When he returned to resume his kingly duties, the first place he went to was Nell’s theatre. Nell had red hair, green eyes and porcelain skin. Her name “Gwyn” is the Welsh word for white. It was said that she had the brightest smile in all England. Charles fell head over heels in love with her and asked her out after the performance, for coffee and a slice of chocolate cake. Charles forgot his wallet so Nell had to cough up for the bill. That, she told herself, would be the last time she’d pay for anything again.

During pillow talk and between various sexual acts, she managed to get titles for all her bastard sons, property signed into her name and she even convinced the king to build the Royal Chelsea Hospital in London.

The King was not a simple man and Nell had many rivals. He set them up in houses all across Britain. Thousands of whores. Lying back, perfumed and scrubbed and waiting for the king to call. Occasionally they’d all come to Windsor Castle for a type of royal gangbang. Nell, a shrewd card player would hustle all the other prostitutes out of their salaries.

Nell’s fiercest rival was a nasty piece of meat called Barbara Castlemaine. Barbara was Charle’s first mistress. She’d popped his cherry after all, and popped the cherries of his sons too. Barbara was a nymphonmaniac who slept with both men and women and once reportedly bit the penis off a dead bishop.

Nell fed her laxative for two weeks till the woman was so dehydrated from shitting that Charles had her shipped off to the countryside to recover. Nell became King’s Mistress number one, and never got knocked off the top again.

In her latter years Nell spent less and less time on the stage and more of it striving for the better treatment of women. She organised a fund for female prisoners and set up a girls school in the slums where she was raised, and she wouldn’t have done more but for a stroke that killed her off at 37.

Nell was the firs British woman to not curb her wit for the sake of propriety or at the request of masculinity.

One time a heroic cavalryman, invited to dine at Windsor, made a pass at Nell. “You may spend your days mounting wild beast,” she said, “But you’ll have to bide your time if you want to mount this wild beast.”

Nell donated her considerable legacy to the Newgate women’s penitentiary. She also left enough money for all her illegitimate children to establish themselves in proper British society. And that they most certainly did. Nell’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandaughter shares a bed in Downing Street every night, with the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.