Have a lovely weekend. I’m knitting a lilac scarf, watching a new show about the Catholic Church investigating possessions and miracles called Evil, and doing a one-page assignment for a course I’m enrolled in. xx
I got one of those cross-town buses last week that gasps up O’Connell Street. In between staring, slack-minded, at the awning for the upcoming The Clery, which promises ‘culture’ in whatever font is commercially trendy right now, I saw Peter Mark was running some new deal. I don’t think the deal was particularly good, making it one of those oxymoronic deals. Like when a massive website promises you 10% off something. A true deal has to make me, the consumer, feel like I’m doing the producer out of the profit they wanted. That your buyer fucked up and I’m reaping. It must make me feel like a scammer, even if I’m falling into the quicksand of your playbook. I should feel like a dirty late-capitalist foot soldier. It should con me into thinking I’ve gotten a bargain.
Peter Mark deals give me hare ears because I associate the long-running 20% off Peter Mark deal with the last global recession. RIP. A monochrome poster hung in salon windows for what felt like years and it is one of the signposts to my past. I entered third-level education in 2008, I exited my first stint in 2012. To this day, I’m surprised when tea and a sweet treat or a cloddy scone cost more than €3.50. I think all lunches are overpriced. There are swathes of Marks & Spencer I do not buy at full-price.
Over the years, I’ve read many snippets about different economic health indicators with feminine shapes. The lipstick index - women substituting their luxury spending with smaller doses of lipstick - was the early noughties one. The nail polish index tried putting a flag in 2008 to 2013’s moonscape. The hemline index says mini skirts equals boom times. That latter one makes sense what with the midis of the past few years and the fact my hair is looking so odd because I can’t afford to be spending close to €200 to dye and fix the mop.
I am not an economist, and someone with a degree in the area pointed out to me that there is no structure in place to decide who is or isn’t an economist, but I think my measuring stick for universal overdraft doom might be when Peter Mark tries to convince me that I’m getting a deal. When the powers that be stress the dip is only temporary.
I passed a newspaper stand last weekend and one tabloid warned of environmental protesters planning to shut down cities and targeting businesses. I think I was supposed to be faint with indignation. But this run of protesters - from schoolchildren to the people who’ve been warning us for decades - they wave honest posters proclaiming the state of fucked we’re all in. They know the deal we’re gliding through is bullshit.
There are a lot of long captions and short articles about how the Dublin we’re in right now is dying and changing. The bars whose toilet graffiti we knew like webs of scarring are going, going, gone. The apartment buildings we could afford haven fallen to a vampire’s bite to become either tightly-spaced hotels or those student accommodations my friend tells me are going to undergo an eventual purpose change to sci-fi adult lodgings.
But then there’s also a lot of the same. The cycle of people looking for a home to live in for the rest of their lives, or even just a few years, are still being fucked over - this time in a sleep-in-a-car rather than a congratulations-you’re-now-an-expert-in-negative-equity way. The farewell parties. The stagnant career paths. Political parties aren’t listening to the angry swells - even though this time around they have the means to talk to people up and down the country directly. Rural Ireland isn’t figuring in the conversations. Or rather, the complex reality of it isn’t. I got asked did I know anything about the slurry pit murder. I see face palms about a cabinet in Kerry. But on the phone to my mother I hear about another male suicide, another robbery of someone’s precious belongings. Okay, I will admit we also talk about Coleen Rooney. Queen of Relevance who didn’t need to change one damn thing about herself, unlike the robot Victoria.
WAGs in the news and Peter Mark telling me I can maybe justify a cut and colour, if I skip eating out and banish direct debits, are eerily familiar timestamps.
I’m not saying that Dublin’s just shedding skin, that this is a natural cycle. I was reading about the phenomenon of humans eating placentas and how it is touted by the people who encourage the various means of doing so as a traditional and natural act. It is, for some animals. The historical evidence of it being normalised among our kind is so slim as to not exist. The studies on its supposed benefits aren’t there yet. (I eat white and black pudding so I guess my approach to eating placenta is “might as well while I’m here”.)
The Dublin I’m living in and seeing from the bus is gorging on its afterbirth. The years of people who stuck around through spiralling rents to make something of their spaces. The communities which sprung from nothing but the desire to find connections. Dublin is a wellness mom performing unnecessary and ultimately muscle tensing callisthenics. She’s going through toxic motions and hasn’t copped the WhatsApp chat is quiet because there’s another chat she’s not in. But she’s not worried about that. Her friends of old won’t matter for a while.