Well here's a tricky junction...

George Orwell once said "An autobiography is only to be trusted when he reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simpy a series of defeats"

So, under such literary guidance I could just launch into a disgrace of mine and build in arbitrary stories until some semblence of a narritive emerges...

or, I could just start from the beginning, in the usual style, about childhood, school, adolescence, college...and I'm not much passed that so far. Also I've never done anything worth documenting, at least not in a historical sense, the treaty of Versailles, la recherche du temps perdu and the like. I've read a few autobiographies, going through Ustinov's now, I've read Stephen Fry's and I read both, thats both, of Mick Foley's, they're ok actually, you snob. I read Billy Connolly's biography. Also I tried to read this unofficial biography of robert deniro, but its was creppy because the ghostwritrer narrated events that he wasn't present at, in real depth, and he would even talk about things DeNiro thought when he was on his own...fucking garbage.

But you may notice, because you are observent, a thread running through that list of people...notice how they are all eminent leaders in thier chosen fields. Then there is me. Hello.

So what to do, part of me says delete this page, toss aside your vanity, there is nothing worth noting in here...then the other part of my head says stuff that, spill all, orate and therefore justify your existence, tell them of the ebb and flow, the trials and tribulations. Mmm, It'll have to be the second option, I don't think at this convergance in my life a structured autobiography would be permitted by my volatile concentration span.

I would start telling you about how when I was young, maybe eight, I fell into the crana river and my mother fished me out like a crane, I don't think I have been so forcefully handled since, and I hope I never am again. Then, becasue my clothes were wet and it was either my embarresment or my mother's obsession with the possibility of illness, she made me get in my younger brother's pram and she wheeled me home.

Stuff that in your fucking pipe Orwell!

Yeah...but then I bounce from that to one time when I went on a school trip, this must have been around eleven or twelve. We went to a farm, christ knows the name of it, but it was novelty, it wasn't a real farm. There was this boat ride, three or four kids got in and you had to row around a small island and return to the little wooden jetty. But becasue I was a tall kid I was told to wait with John Deeney and Barney Cully, the big kids, and we were told to get in one boat once everyone else had gone. We got halfway around the island and the boat began to sink from one side, the murky brown water then washed in and sank the boat. But there was nothing to do, we just sank up to or tits in brown water. Then we walked back to dry land and we had to walk around all day like homeless surfers.

Yeah, thats more fun, we'll do it that way, a collection of stories...well enough for now, I grow weary of being an introverted swine...well, thats not true, I'm just going to stop writing like one...

I went to Scoil Isogain.

As I walk by it now and I see these tiny, little people wandering around I refuse to accept the idea that I was once so imp-like, so now as I reminisce about days spent there I am twenty-one but sitting in a very small chair and maybe my grey trousers are too short and my legs dangle out like drainpipes.

Of course these memories are not really objective, they are all submitting to endless conjecture in my head, I don't know if I actually remember these things or they are a pastiche of oft repeated childhood tales. Anyway. Straining the first thing I can remember of my education is sitting down the back of...Ms. O'Hare? Ms. O'Hara? I'll have to look that up. Anyway, her class, I can still see her hair, it was a brown...how to put it? Like if you sqeezed a brown hairy doughnut onto her head. It was down the back of that class that I met the joy that is Mr. Joesph Cullen and the erudite and ever-inspired Mr. Mark Grant. I'm shakey on this but I think James Fullerton was down the back of that class...you see any memory of James from that period is muddled, because we were friends from birth, long before memory showed up, when it was all scraped knees and climbed trees and building that wooden fort out his back yard, and those lego mecchas. Anyway the thing that jarred me about Joe and Mark was that they had personalities, and seemingly the same ones they have today, obviously now they know a lot more and they get drunk more often and the like but as I look back Joe was always quite inoocent, unassuming and hhmmm, I can't think of a better word than peaceful though it doesn't feel right, contented doesn't work...and Mark, he would get excited about certain things, wrestling, skips and Liverpool then.....and women, beer and Liverpool now....also one of the funniest things I can think of today is me trying to make Mark laugh and him just looking at me like I'm a cunt.....

Enough of this introverted back-slapping....

I don't remember much else from those early years...at least I can't place it...I'll just go through memories as they come to me...

1. Joe throwing me a baseketball when I wasn't waiting for it and breaking my glasses...

2. Going to Mark's house and playing Goldeneye with his brother and the funniest (racist) insult I may ever have heard, I also remember there was a poster of Kurt Cobain in his room and we read from that Zombie book about a Zombie eating a woman's tit, or something equally thrilling to a pair of whater-year-olds we were

3. Staying up all night to watch wrestling pay-per-views and going in the next day bleary-eyed to be king...

4. I remember my cousin Martin, must get a picture of him up, getting told off my Ms. McAodha (Again, look that up) in the school yard, and for those that don't know Martin he is, and seemed more so when I was the imp I now deny, a giant. And Ms. McAodha is a tiny, thin, fragile woman. If I were getting pompous and Freudian about it I might say that that was the first time I questioned authority.

5. I remember what was called the special class, and I remember not understanding what was special about it because children, unlike adults, tend to use words as they understand them.

6. Wondering why people took umbrage with the fact that I didn't go to mass, didn't follow any ecclesiastical customs and didn't care about god or even have reverance for religion, always the little heathen...

7. The school play, where I played a witch, I was chosen as the villan because my voice was unnaturally loud as a kid, I've still got it, but I hide it...

Enough of that toss...

It's probably testament to how good my childhood was than when I remenisce about it nothing looms up like a dagger, memories dawdle to the surface of the water, shimmer, and return to the depths.

There...my childhood was fine...my parents never beat me, I wasn't forced into anything, I was educated and my interests were fully encouraged by a supporting cast so good you couldn't have called them anything else...

but I'm still gonna do it so fucking eat it Buk...

Scoil Mhuire

The hall immeadiately jumps to mind, and of course it should. The hall where we would stand, militant youths in our...was it royal blue, or navy blue? Being adressed from the pulpit, being guided, away from drink, drugs, vandalism and the like, toward good christian living, by the often tested but never beaten, Mr. Rainey. It seems to me that Princiapals (headmasters, whatever you want to call them) must have, at least at some point, harboured the noblest of ideas, to lead children, to teach them. They must be figures of authority when the first line of defence (teachers) fail but before the last (police) intervenes. Its a balancing act I couldn't perform and therefore, by obligation, admire.

But back to the hall, I really am getting too squeaky on this page, as if I'm some wizened laureate, in my study at Oxford reminiscing on who was present when I won my fields medal.....bollocks....

The floor was wooden and over scuffed with years over-eager stopping in mid-sprint. Doors led out of it, much similar to the layout of an aeroplane, to outside, to changing rooms, to hallways bespeckled with classrooms. In fact upon initiation I found the layout so complex I awaited years of stumbling around looking at door numbers and a map I'd crudely drawn. I can't find any information online about it....wing it then, shall I? Well I know, because my father went there and his stories are so vivid that they are hard to forget. He would speak of the nuns, of punishments recieved, of the lack of not only sypathy, but humanity. Not that it was an evil place, the terror was evenly distributed and each boy felt the miserys lot just a little. In fact most of his stories end with

"...our hands were red for a week"

due I'm sure as much to his mischief as to thier malice.

Anyway, the zeitgeist shifted, as it tends to and I arrived, under the tutelage of some of the same people. A confession then, albeit a mediocre one...I wasn't very good at school...

I was, however, ok, and I found being ok painfully simple, appallingly simple. So I did it. Milling around for five years getting Bs Cs and Ds, rarely As and rarely Es. I didn't want to be noticed academically because I didn't see any end that would justify those means. Besides, as a delusional teenager eager only for self-expression and, well, for people to think you were cool and original, academic success only seemed to usher you toward that conceptual nightmare of "the office job" the place where you would slave over numbers for some corporation and then go home to your boring house and iron your only shirt. through some twisted logic I assumed that by avoiding that (and by that I mean a challenging and thorough education) I could only get closer to being a rockstar....

I continued to shy away from sports, I didn't really take to science, its funny how much I love it now, if only I had been taught one interesting thing, like what relativity really means...but thats another issue...

There were my friends too, because you have to surround yourself with people then, a social shield, in every sense of the term. You find your niche in adolescence, though you have to shake it off once you leave, like a wet dog coming out of a river. I won't go into friends too much, or experiances with them, thats for another time, or maybe never, just between me and them.......

I got out with enough residue to get into college, which is all I really wanted, or could have asked for. In part, like most people I'm sure, I wanted to get out but I didn't want to leave, maybe because of the reluctance to grow older, to take on responsibility

DKIT

Media seemed like a good idea, creative media no less. You may have noticed that I'm splitting this up into chunks defined by what educational institution i was in. It doesn't feel good, but I have to streamline it somehow, otherwise it would take on a Miller-esque rant, two or three hundred pages of absract literary guff. Its difficult though. In year one I lived in a flat with yellow walls, painted on brick. I ate pasta in the and ran for trains. I would write in pen and be frustrated with how rubbish I was. In year two I lived in a house with people I didn't like. I realised that I could continue my game of doing ok with little effort. Spent as little time as possible in that house. In year three I lived in a house alone for half the year, drinking and writing and cooking. It was ok. Then the second half the Micster moved in and then Stephen and Andrew (Gambit), then Stephen moved out, then Andrew, then Mic, then me.

Then it was over

I got a 2-1

You can boil everything down.

The best times were in peoples houses, talking to all the people, like a drunken Wilde traipsing from room to room and craving acceptance. There was that disco. Oh and that bar, you remember that bar? With the sunken ships outside? What a treat, I really would dread returning to those cracked streets but christ, that bar was good. Sitting upstairs in candlelight having pints of Guinness. I remember a photo I once seen a photo of Stephen Fry playing chess against Hugh Laurie in Oxford (?) and I think that if someone had bothered to take photos of me then it could be something similar. But now when they want to put my bio in a hardcover, they'll ask, are there any photos of you looking cool, young, that is a precursor to your current success? No...

says I, no I don't. No-one thought to take a photo of me, I did media and everything, I thought I would always be having my photo taken, but no, nothing. I liked most of the lectures, sitting in darkned halls and being talked to is calming. Breaking the days up with coffee. I liked showing up to an early class but having it wrong so when I open the door there is just an empty space. And I could sit then and calm down and resign to my mistake. Those were the good days.

I liked the coffe shop, not the canteen, but the coffee shop where you could have burnt tongue coffee for a euro, sit on those high stools and stare out the window and talk to people, both of you staring forward.

Heading to Dublin just to get out, those were the bad days. But we made them. The third year was the best. I remember I was in the house, when I was in third year and the heating broke, or they cut it off because I didn't pay for it, and I walked around for two days wrapped in a blanket. The frost spread on the windows and I smoked cigarettes that had been left behind. I lit them in the small gas fire. I don't actually smoke though. I write about it a lot because I like them as a social tool, they can be put to such effective use. I often do that, use them to puncutate speech and create truncated monologues.

Look out for that.

I want to put up some sample of the work i did in third year, mainly because I wrote it and I'm in it and....

narcissim is a drug...

I graduated and got depressed on the night and drank too much whiskey, I was glad of it though. Should I name the people I liked and still think about, they know who they are and I would invariably leave out someone and then they wouldn't believe me, that I'd both genuinely forgot and genuniely didn't mean to forget them. Remeniscing is hard.

So, yeah, I left. I have left the education system. Now there is the long gap that ends, somewhere far ahead, beyond trees and houses, beyond twists and turns in the road.

This is the long gap.