. . . .on bunking off
I HAD A DAY OFF recently. From everything. I bunked off from Life and emerged from the experience eager to encourage everyone else to do the same as often as is parentally or otherwise possible. If my Bunking Off Life had been a play at the Dublin Theatre Festival there would be five shiny stars perched above this column. This is what you call a rave.
I didn’t actually see any of the – by all accounts – powerful plays at the festival. Or at the Fringe, either. I’ve missed pretty much everything in the cinema over the past two years. I haven’t seen The King’s Speech or Bridesmaids. I am not proud of any of this – what I call “cultural inertia” – but the vacuum is pertinent to the subject of my playing hooky from all things humdrum, because most cultural experiences, whether a poetry reading or a death-metal concert, offer the chance to bunk off from Life. This day off offered a bit of escapism that was long overdue.
For the record, I didn’t intend to mitch. One Saturday when my boyfriend had to work, I booked a babysitter with the intention of going into the office for a few hours to catch up on Life. Life had got on top of me. It was pressing down the way it can sometimes, and making me feel like a half-drowning person. So I pencilled in an extra day to come up for air and get my Life in order. Then, on my way to work, something happened and instead of sitting at my desk I mysteriously found myself in my favourite city-centre cafe, eating a pear, blue cheese and bacon sandwich and watching the world go by.
That was pretty much it for half the day. The battery had run out on my phone, so it wasn’t there to distract me from random notions such as what Jesus would think about the pope wearing red Prada slip-on shoes.
I spent the morning staring into space. I had an exceptional view through the half-open door of a wedding dress shop. I spent at least an hour watching beautiful young women emerge from a dressing room wearing various concoctions of lace and chiffon and crystals and bows in every shade of white and ivory and cream. At times it was like having a front-row seat at a couture wedding show. And other times it was like watching Don’t Tell the Bride on a loop. Anyway, it was riveting, and to be recommended, but probably not if you are a man. If a man was caught peeping in at a wedding shop it would look creepy. When I got caught I just looked like your woman out of Muriel’s Wedding, which was fine by me.
I spent the guts of another hour staring at the back of someone’s head.
This tall, elegant older woman was wearing a tailored black blazer, had the most wonderful hair, which she had formed into two curls held in place at the back of her head with jewelled pins. Her exquisitely decorated head was so mesmerising that when the waitress came to ask if wanted cake I didn’t hear her at first. “I’m sorry,” I said when I landed back in the coffee shop. “I was somewhere else completely.” “Don’t apologise,” she said. “It’s called having nothing to do. Enjoy.”
This brought me back down to earth. Hello? I was not somebody with nothing to do. I was somebody with loads to do. I just didn’t particularly feel like doing any of it. So I half-thought of heading to the office, but decided it was too late for that now. I carried on as I began. I left the coffee shop and bought some egg cups and wandered aimlessly around town.
During my wander I bumped into David Norris three times. I watched him with people and saw how he made them smile and all the goodwill he engendered. I floated off still a floating voter, still unsure where, if anywhere at all, I would eventually land. I went to Paris for the rest of the afternoon. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that is what happened. I walked into a cinema and I bought a ticket and I sat down on a red seat and I went to Paris in the 1920s. I drank champagne with F Scott Fitzgerald and red wine with Hemingway and had a laugh with Dalí and I did the Charleston with Zelda.
Woody Allen’s new movie, Midnight in Paris, turned out to be my first time in Paris. Like a character from another of his films, The Purple Rose of Cairo, I stepped into the screen and I had a really great conversation with Gertrude Stein about the first lines of a novel I was going to write one day.
Yes, it was just a movie. No, it wasn’t just a movie. It lashed rain in the final scene and when I came out of the cinema the streets of Dublin were slick from a shower that had just passed. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to recommend anything to anybody, mostly on account of the fact that I haven’t seen anything in ages. So, go see Midnight in Paris. And second, as soon as you can, and for as long as you can, bunk off from your Life.
In other news . . . I am intrigued by the premise for Cecelia Ahern's new novel, The Time of My Life, where the main character is invited to meet her Life in the form of an actual person. It got me thinking about my own life and what he or she would be like if we ever met. Eek. Thanks for that, Cecelia.