Graham and Edith's Naughty Half Hour.

Mr and Mrs Graham Whitethorpe, a fine couple of midfortysomethings who lived along Marlborough Road, Dublin 4. Being good Protestants as they were they went to church every Sunday and were of good standing in the community.

Now there is a rather unfair prejudice against Protestants that they're tightfisted cockmunchers. Of course, that's not true. However, a little story may illuminate you as to the ways of Mr and Mrs Whitethorpe as particular examples of the Protestant kind.

Graham and Edith had just had a romp one Friday evening as they were about to go sleep. Edith was rather tired and needed to be up in the morning in order to bake cakes for the Mothers' Union cake sale that Sunday afternoon, and so she turned around to go asleep. However, Graham had other ideas.

'Edie dear,' said Graham, 'would you fancy another bit of rumpy-pumpy?'

'Whatever for Graham darling? I must be up rather early in the morning to bake cakes. And Reverend Swann is coming over for elevenses!'

'Well, I just thought, while I have you here we might as well get our money's worth from this rubber. I mean, it did cost all of two pounds fifty, which I think you'll agree was a little bit on the steep side.'

'O, always the thrifty one Graham dear! Go ahead then darling.'

'Close your eyes and think of England, and I'll be done in two minutes.'

And so they had another bit of slap-and-tickle. However, the poor condom had given its money's worth already and gave up the ghost just as Graham was getting into the, er, swing of things. And so Edith had a child at the age of forty-six, which was terribly inconvenient for her career. But at least it gained her a little bit of credibility in the Mother's Union circles.

God love them, even though he probably doesn't love Protestants. A-women.

Pahnell.

"Excuse me young lady," shouts the Gard through his megaphone. "Can you please get down off the statue?"

The Parnell monument at the top of Sráid Uí Chonaill, just there outside thambazdr where My Chemical Romance (huh huh!) will be playing on Tuesday night when they remove all the dead bodies. Good old Bvv, scaling Parnell and trying to ride his statue. It's not the first time either. As a matter of fact, the Gards were getting rather pissed off as it was the third time this week she'd done it.

"Bvvvvvvvvvvvv, Pahnell," she said, making noises like a cold hoover. In fact, it was rather chilly up there near Parnell's crotch.

"Excuse me, you're going to have to come down off the statue as you're causing a public disturbance."

"Matthew will you read please. Conor turn your phone off or I'll have no choice but to rip your head off do you understand."

The Gards couldn't hear what she was saying, but they were right in believing she was insane, and so called immediately for reinforcements.

"You have to write six essays and then three more and eighteen of them in an hour and a half and then the Protestants said that Home Rule would be Rome Rule but Hitler wasn't like that at all because he was small heheheheheheh. I lav Pahnell."

Poor weird little woman. Mizbrigck. Bvv.

"Bwooh, no, that's not how you do it, it's BWWWWWUUUUUUUUUUUOOOOOOOOHHH!!!!!!!"

"Bvv. Hihih."

"Please get down off the statue. Please, get down off the statue."

"Pahnell I love you I know you never really loved Kitty O'Shea it was me really wasn't it Pahnell O Pahnell let's get married and live in Avondale forever and ever bvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv————

BANG. They shot her with a rifle that once belonged to Aimin' de Valera and there she was, did.

"Well, that wasn't as bad as I thought Brendan," said Garda Fitzgibbon. "Going home now, the wife's making fish cakes for tea. See you tomorrow."

"Bye Barry," said Brendan. "Enjoy the fish cakes."

Brief Interuption

We will return to the Lesbo Trilogy shortly after this coverage of some golf game somewhere.

"Well, Tom, isn't it a lovely day here at this large expensive-looking green place?"

"Yes, Tom, I couldn't agree more. It's very green here today."

"We have some guy with a stripy tee-shirt at the eighth hole. I presume he's going to try to put the ball in the hole now."

"Yeah, Tom. That's a good guess. Oh, here he goes. He's started to wiggle a bit as he lines up or whatever they do."

"That's right, Tom. I'm going to predict that he's going to strike it next."

"OH, yes. He's just hit the ball using the stick. Remarkable."

"So, the ball is now on its way towards the hole."

"I think the ball might go into the hole, Tom."

"Yes, Tom. It might go into the hole. But, I also have my doubts. Maybe it won't go into the hole."

"Well, I have to say, it's surely going in the direction on the hole."

"I see your point, Tom. It is going in the direction of the hole, but maybe only the general direction."

"It's pretty tense here as we continue to watch the ball travel towards the location of the hole."

"Oh, look at that, Tom. He's missed it."

"He has missed it, Tom. I really thought it was going into the hole."

"I was thinking that myself. But I now see that I was right to doubt that it was going to go into the hole on that shot."

"All the standing around leaning on sticks isn't going to change the fact that the ball just didn't go into the hole that time. For a while it looked like it was going to go in..."

"It did, Tom."

"...but, in the end, it didn't."

"And he doesn't look happy about, Tom."

"Well, I wouldn't be happy with that miss either. Want to go for a WKD?"

"Bang up job, Tom."

A Romance on Two Wheels.

—Come lesbians all, rejoice,
With heart and hand and voice.

Pippi was a lesbo and she was feeling down. It didn't help that she even sounded like a lesbo, so she couldn't really escape it at all.

—Hi, my name is Pippi.

—Are you a lesbian or something?

She really didn't appreciate that. However, she did her best to hide her lesbianisms and despite the bright red shoes, the manly gait and the Southamerican girlfriend she did an okay job of it. She spent her time trying to make it up to Gawd by singing the Easter proclamation (the exsultet, not the proclamation of the ayrish rhepablick) and visiting old people's homes. That is homes for old people, not the homes of old people (just so we have that one cleared up).

So when Pippi started to become an aulone she knew what people were thinking. Look, it's Pippi Magee, old lesbo in denial. So after a long hard think, she came up with the solution.

One day as she visited the old people's home in Ballymun she met a nice old gent in a wheelchair named Jim. Now it so happened that he was actually the bastard child of An Taoiseach Jack Lynch and Lennie Bernstein (who wants to do Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen) who used to tune pianos for a living but somehow ended up in a wheelchair and basically couldn't manage it anymore. How often do you and your wife manage it, Mr Fawlty? A couple of times a week as a matter of fact. Well, he certainly couldn't manage it, and neither could he tune pianos, so Pippi fell madly in false love with him straight away and they decided to be married by Father Brian right that day in a gunshot ceremony, during which someone was actually shot outside in a drug-related incident, leading Father Brian to declare that it was just sick. They trundled down the aisle together to the strains of the Mendelssohn wedding march as played by an aulone on a casio keyboard (on single-finger setting) with Dr More and co in the background smiling like gobaloons and strumming guitars. (Mrs More played the flute, which Father Brian also said was sick but found secretly arousing.)

And so Pippi and Jim lived happily ever after. He died two weeks later when he fell out of his wheelchair outside the Fingal Coco offices and Pippi was very sad (at least on the surface, as she was actually relieved that she wouldn't have to push that fucking wheelchair around anymore). So it was win-win really. Jim died rather more happy than he had expected, and nobody thought Pippi was a lesbo anymore. The plan had worked.

Well done Pippi, well done Jim, well done lesbos all. Amen.

The Most Reverent "the Bish" Elizabeth "Emily" Bishop.

As I sit here, seemingly intellectually, with the daily edition of The Nova Scotia Times, I warn people not to read my poytree-- it's hard work.

I take the old coffee-maker from the stove
and spill it on my book like a careless child.
It's a mess and I ask grandmother,
she says to put it out the back of the house
to dry. The coffee drips like sweetened tears
in the full moon, as predicted in the almanac.

Most places I visit are full of nothing and I take solace from that. What childishness is it ... to see the mouldiest places, with the strongest possibilities for aquatic imagery, the other way around?

The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.

"Look Lizzy, he sez to me, everyone you used to know is dead or in prison. And I've nothing but this black aul knife, the blade of which is almost worn away.

"Be careful with that match lighting up that cigarette," he warns me. I smoke on one side of the road, where the hedge is, because that's where it appears everyone smokes. On my last drag I watch the Lucky Strike logo smolder away to just Lucky in a semi-circle.

"So, I hear you're a lesbo now."

I cough out the now second-hand tobacco smoke (that seriously harms you and others around you) in surprise as the old man says this.

"Eh, so? so? so?" I say to him.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
I can see my glass of beer
behind the wooden two-by-four
in the corner of the barnyard floor.

My rhyme is in my poetry:
Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry.
I use it to describe
that from which I cannot hide.
I also use it to isolate lines away from the others in quite a clever way.

I read the National Geographic and think of my Latin American girlfriend. Her tits are SO much nicer than the droopy ones in this publication, Eeeew. The yellow frame around the cover, the yellow frame around the cover... I scream. I awake sitting quietly in my room with Pascal banging his head against the wall looking for an exit. Quite a sight, you say? Always, always delightful.

The clever almanac falls from the wall and it splatters like an egg on fire (as I laugh uncontrollably in class).

"Time to plant tears," says Arfurr from beyond the grave in Westminster Abbey. I fished a fish in Florida but never forgot him. He hung a grunting weight but it was no concern of mine for obviously reasons. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper stuck with glass-smooth dung as if it were a transmutation of fire.

The themes are epi-shite but the rhyme is just right. But, I did warn them. It's hard work.

It's a pickled mickey!

Look!