IN KILKENNY WITH KIM PENNY

(and Donna Wescott, but she doesn't rhyme)

Our planned trip to Kilkenny finally blossomed, after much stopping and starting, which was incidently a bit like the bus journey there. Donna, with a sudden hankering for peanuts, had a fumble in the overhead luggage compartment as the bus lurched around a particularly vicious corner, and nearly did a graceful twirl down the stairs and through the emergency exit, out into a pot-hole-frenzied boreen, rolling into a nearby field with some nonchalant cows who looked in desperate need for exactly that sort of excitement.
Luckily though me in my heroic manliness saved her from such a fate. And by heroic manliness I mean I got in the way.

They call Kilkenny the Marble City, which is ironic in a way as everyone in the town seems to have lost 'em. There was so many stag and hen parties out that night running amok that I felt like I was on Animal Farm, there were horny hens clucking in one corner and stags clashing antlers in the other. And there was me, Kim, Donz and Scary Mary and her extended family in the middle of the sweaty animal melange of Matt The Miller's. One bestial stag grabbed Donna's hair in a frenzy of give-us-a-kiss schoolboyishness, but all he got was a kick-in-the-balls. I was, for a brief time, caught in the middle of a hen party at the precise moment a male stripper started doing his thing, but I assure you it was just a unhappy coincidence. Ahem.

Kim, the birthday girl, left us a wee bit early, caught up being bauld in a herd of stags, which left me an Donz walk home together to the hostel. It was a pleasant night, not too cold, the air filled with kebab-tinted wafts the sound of football-chant melodies. Donz, a devout veggie was struck by the drunken munchies so bad, that she even considered crossing the threshold of Abrakebabra (Or Ab k ba ra, judging by the sign outside), and only turned back when she saw that queue: "Nah" she said, trying a Pizzeria: "Nah" she said when she saw the queue there. We settled for eating more peanuts, scoffing a packet on the stairs of our hostel, regardlessly scooping stray ones off the wholey unwholesome carpet. Here there was no bus jerking around corners, but our balance on those steps were less than steady. A bus-swerve moment seemed imminent, but heroically we survived, and the only thing we rolled into was our beds.
I awoke to find some girl bending right over me, hovering seductively above my pelvic region, fumbling at something. My early morning brain tried to process the scene in front of me, and I remembered my last act was polishing off those peanuts. Was she trying to steal our packet?
"Are you looking for my nuts?" I thought I heard myself say.