MY SILKY MILKY IN CLONAKILTY

I awoke on Saturday morning and there was a stranger in my bedroom.
It was peering at me through a crack in the curtains, prodding me awake with piercing unfamiliar eyes. My bleary friday night consciousness tried to distinguish between my dreamworld and the environs of my bedroom, and as my wakeful focus kicked in I tried to put a name to my unexpected guest.
It was sunshine.
It's vague familiarity was clearer to me now, I remembered seeing it as a child, and I thought I had seen it between blinks last summer. I flicked up my blinds and welcomed it in; I would say it was an old friend but we never really understood each other. I don't know it well enough to care, and it gives me a ruddy scarlet rash.

It was the perfect day for a visit to Clonakilty though; The crazy inhabitants of 53 Ballyhooley road and I had this mad idea about getting out of the city for a while. As if the gargantuan skyscrapers of Cork were hemming us in, giving us concrete clautrophobia and we were being choked with the smoke of this sprawling metropolis. So we walked to Inchadoney from Clonakilty town to spend the day at the beach, little aware that it was a two hour round-trip on foot. Which was scarcely enough time for a paddle, a game of frisbee and a mini-picnic and a fart, but somehow Donna managed to fit the last one in. Or out, whichever way you look at it.

It meant that a visit to Hayman was right out; and I had to text him with the words "I'm stuck in Cork", words that could only be worsened by replacing the word "Cork" with "Beirut". I Jest though, I love this town, even if the word "cork" seems to be endowed with a certain phonetic harshness, a raspy spit of a placename that has probably filtered through to the fierce effrontery of Cork city culture.

When we returned to Ballyhooley though, I was in for a shock. My milky, silky Irish skin had been attacked. That morning visitor had pinched my nose, cheek and forehead with a rosy glow, not enough to be painful, but enough to be a source of wonderment as to how someone can get sunburnt in early April. And certainly enough to be embarrassing to the bejaysus.
Sunshine. What a prick. Next time he tries to get into my room I'm going to kick the shite out of him.