Róisín Ingle: There is no relief here at the a*se end of 2021

Happy Twixtmas! Welcome to the dregs of December 2021. Sh*te isn’t it? Please be sure to leave all your joy and seasonal happiness at the gate. You will not be needing it for some time, possibly until 2023, and even then I wouldn’t be making any plans if I were you.

Can all passengers please have proof of their booster shot ready for display or in the absence of your cert please provide a lengthy anecdote about how you attained the booster. Passengers are advised that the old fully vaccinated are the new unvaccinated and if you are struggling to keep up with this, get to the back of the line and do 20 press-ups.

Those without booster shots please ensure you explain all the ways you have tried to get the shot and the ways you have yet to try. Antibodies or a recent negative Covid test will not be accepted as proof of robust health and I don’t have to explain this rationally, it’s a suck-it-up scenario so, you know, suck it up. Everyone, the boasty boosted and the almost boosted and the never getting boosted, should now all take a communal shot of something strong enough to cause temporary blindness. Ready, steady, shot.

I think it's this bit of December that is causing the meltdown. This being the bit of December when you do not know what time of day it is or whether to have lunch or dinner or a bowl of corn flakes

Welcome everyone. You have now entered that grey, no-woman’s land, the inbetween time, the nothing days. Twixtmas, the optimists call this time between Christmas and New Year. They call it Twixtmas to try to make it sound jolly but lately optimists have been exposed as the complete fools we always knew they were. An optimist usually writes this column, for example. I say usually because it looks like I’ve been hacked like the HSE and I can’t afford to pay the ransom. Compliance, my placid state of being for the past two years, feels less doable in this hacked-off state. Never mind circuit-breakers, this columnist has been short circuited. Blown a fuse. Happy Twixtmas.

Helen McEntee and Sally Rooney had a good 2021. Eoghan Harris and Dolores Cahill did not

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I think it’s this bit of December that is causing the meltdown. This being the bit of December when you do not know what time of day it is or whether to have lunch or dinner or a bowl of corn flakes or maybe just the pink and orange sweets from the tin of Quality Street that nobody wanted to eat. The fridge is so full you cannot close it properly and yet there is nothing in the fridge that would make a decent dinner.

You are in what might be called the perineum of the festivities, such as they were. Perineal massage, which can relax, aid sleep and reduce anxiety, is, along with most other potentially helpful therapies, banned. There is no relief here at the arse end of 2021.

What to do? That’s a good question. You have a few options but none of them are particularly appealing. You don’t really have any interesting friends any more; your WhatsApp groups are full of people talking about their booster appointments. Luckily I have one remaining WhatsApp group in which people confess to drinking so many margaritas pre-curfew that they puked up in the bushes outside their home. This is better than booster chat. Booster chat is worse than listening to people who want to tell you about their dreams.

Speaking of which, wait until you hear, I had a perturbing dream about Pat Kenny recently. I haven’t had one of them since roughly 2008. I think the dream arrived because a man who ambushed Pat in a park about his vocal support of vaccine passports put the video on social media. I watched it 72 times. Pat was so calm and assured and eloquent with his facts in the video that it made me come over all peculiar, hence the dream.

What to do? I am playing a lot of cards. Nap, a game my nanny in London taught us and another game called Up to 10 and back again. Play cards is my advice. Play cards for money. It’s the kind of gambling where you might actually win, not like the gambling in the National Lottery which nobody ever wins, not even Bernard Durkan.

Merry Twixtmas everyone! The restaurants don’t open late any more and most of the shows are cancelled. In many ways the past two years has been excellent training for this perineum part of Christmas. We’ve been living in the perineum for two years which is why it stinks. If you’ve any sense at all, you are now either mildly depressed, over-reliant on alcohol or worrying about the prospect of reopening your homeschool. You might as well make a loaf of banana bread and be done with it. You might as well restart your sourdough starter. You might as well go back to your crochet project. You might as well.

I’ve been hacked it seems like. Or maybe we’ve all been hacked because how else does any of this make sense? There’s something rotten going on and I’m not just talking about Covid. I think I’m starting to sense a conspiracy. I think I’m not feeling quite myself. I think somebody should do something about all of this but what?

The view from the perineum is bleak and don’t get me started about the smell. Something stinks to high heaven. But I am sure it will all be fine again when I pay the hacker’s ransom and normal optimistic service will resume. Until then, enjoy your so-called new year.

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]