A Review Of Days
Days running around doing publicity for the book. A bookend
of sorts. I’m out putting flyers up in odd little spots I’ve found; tucked-away
noticeboards, quiet corners, places most people ignore. The AM publishers sent
me a batch and then left the rest to me; all the work lands on my shoulders. So
I sellotape the little sheets wherever I can, on the fly, turning it into its
own strange adventure.I’ve got stories now. Places I’m going. Banned from Lidl
in Balbriggan for the freakiest of reasons; something about an email address;
so I’m deep in the adventures of Kev these days. The nearest discount store is
Aldi in Laytown. I’ve built a system; a mixture of walking and train rides,
keeping costs to the absolute minimum. At Gormanstown station there’s a little
hut. I shyly squash my poster onto the wooden space with that tacky plastic
glue. Maybe I should switch to something more organic next time.These are the
days. I enjoy them. I roll with them. They’re new and opportune; I
like the vagueness, the oddity, and most of all, the chaos. I can’t help
but enjoy the chaos. I’ve been forced into these ventures; this is
not entirely my choice. I am here under the halo, living in a new world.Last
night I watched Tip Toe by Russell T Davies. Channel Four was bold enough to
run it in that 2-3 a.m. slot, as if even us unemployable alcoholics; the
Hutlers of the world; would still be up and enticed. They were right. It was
unmissable. The later third-act scenes start to drag and turn contrite, and of
course they reveal their hand about the left; painting people like us as if we
believe Covid isn’t real and are plainly stupid in a general sense. Then again,
it ends grounded in something like reality. Based on a real event? I don’t
know. But still, that’s not us.For one thing, we don’t watch football and we’re
not those manly-men knocking back beers. My people; those who didn’t take the
vax and came up short in varying ways; are far more complex. Our issues with
the trans scene and all that surrounding noise often feel like hyperbole,
ignorant, and downright shallow when you look closer. Yet as drama, and as a
story lightly based on actual events, I can believe it captured something real
about that odd 2022 coming-out-of-Covid period; the imprisonment, the
over-ruling era, the forced masks and social distancing, the overbearing sense
of rules on top of rules. People losing jobs, losing hope, suicides spiking,
the Tory government telling ballet dancers to retrain as computer programmers.
All those days I lived through.I wrote my book right through it. I started when
Covid started. 2020 was an epoch; a world of sudden, total change, nothing
quite like it had ever happened before. Did it happen partly because of
novelty? Was a pandemic exciting, even as the disease itself was rotten? Where
did it come from? Questions that still linger. But it gave me space. As an
event, it could be compared to the three-day week and oil crisis of the 1970s.
Then the prices of oil rocketed, and in April 2020 they crashed; people were
practically being paid to take the stuff.
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