Sweet Satay

There was this game we played when we were kids. I think it was Payday. It was a board game and sometimes, when we could sit still for more than a couple of minutes, the cousin would take it out and play it for a bit. There was this square on it called Sweet Sunday. And every disliked it because you did nothing on it. Sweet Satay, we called it. Boring! A few other things we used to thing incredible boring when we were kids. Walking. Why would anyone walk when they could run? Consequently when i read the story of Roger Bannister and how he could not walk anywhere i thought, Right on! Run anywhere and everywhere. Sleeping in the afternoons! Who could imagine sleeping being of any use at all! Covering your eyes with a rillow to prevent the glare of the sun from waking you... sitting down and TALKING. How could adults do anything soooooo boring? Talk, what are they talking about? And how had talking made any difference (i actually still hold this view subversively in meetings...especially those that have mor ethan five people in them). What other incredibly boring things did people do as adult? Buy jewellery. My mother would stop in front of every jewellery shop we passed. I could not think of anything more boring. I still can't. However, she's the one with the gold reserves, not me. um what else? Shopping oh shopping is incredibly boring - and still is.

Any way why am i going on and on and on about Sweet Satay? Because that is precisely what i'm having. Peter has taken the kids off to Donegal and today i woke up on my own, i slept for six hours straight without having to go for a bottle, i woke to a thoroughly messy house, spent the morning drinking coffee and reading the Independent and musing about the luxury of solitude. Of how much i missed my children, but also how much i could so book myself away on Inish Mor for about a week and do this over and over again. It would of course be interspersed with all sorts of disgustingly adult things like walking on the beach, reading Sylvia Plath, the Dao and digging at my allotment - would it, like hell? What did i do after the kids left yesterday? i'll tell you what i did. I dug out the Matrix and watched Revolutions and Reloaded, in that order, back to back. Kidding myself that i wanted to understand the philosophical underpinnings of the film, but really it was to oogle at Keanu Reeves and the cool S&M clothes. Wondering, where the hell did Trinity get those rlatform boots from? THEN i watched... what did i watch 9well i channel surfed for a bit becuase Peter managed to located some AA batteries from the remote, and then i watched Romeo and Juliet - Baz Lurhman's version - and then i watched the extended dance sequences from the Moulin Rouge, and then all the interviews, and then i think i watched East is East, but by this time i was so zonked out on TV that i could be sure. But oh my god, to not have to get up in between and attend to spilling Ribena, demands to put Thomas or Ghostbusters on instead, the guilt that clothes have not been folded or the toilet tidied, or that playdates should be arranged... oh my god... today i rediscovered what it meant to be an adult. Long live adulthood.

Maybe today i will write that novel...

or maybe i'll just schlepp around in my pajamas again...

or book myself onto a remote island off the coast of Galway... and visit Father Ted...