Some oxygen I could live without.

(I wrote earlier on facebook that this post would be in 3D. It's not. I just wrote that to rope you in. How can a blog post be in 3D anyway? Cop on. May as well keep reading while you're here, though, you'd look like an awful dope otherwise.)

So here I am. Home. Back in Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan. Just a quick visit, mind. I'm going back to Edinburgh tomorrow for a week and then coming back back here for Christmas on the 23rd. I've already spent a few days in Dublin, met some folk, bailed out a few pub landlords. The usual. But, while Dublin is where I find most of the people I know best, Dublin is not home.
This is home:

Long aul picture, I know. And you can barely see the house. But we'll plough on.
So this morning I woke up to find my mother clearing out the porch to make way for Christmas decorations. Once she knows I'll be home in the next month or two, she likes to leave all big jobs (cutting the hedge, moving cattle, setting up the wireless printer) until I get home. I'm a big strapping lad, there's not much I can't do. Next time she plans to come to Edinburgh I should stop washing the dishes and not iron for a month (not that I iron anyway, but she doesn't read this).
So aye, the porch, that bit of brick and glass that connects the front door and the hall is, 11 months a year, COLONISED by plants. And I hate every every fucking one of them. They're the ugliest, most horrible ways to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen I know of. And this post is dedicated to them.

NUMBER ONE:

Look at this anaemic looking thing. It's barely trying. We' good people that we are, have given it a whole pot to play about in and it does sweet fuck all. It grows four or five flowers, most of which look to be trying to escape the pot and even less leaves. You couldn't even make a salad of that thing. Hold on until we look at another angle:

Still not much, is it? And the stalks are weird. They look like spaghetti. I don't like this plant.

NUMBER TWO:

This looks a bit like the pot threw up. It seems to be some kind of leafy mould that, given time, would creep across the floorboards and cover the entire ground floor of the house. It's the most sickly colour of green ever too, like what you'd get if the accounting department of evolution got to design a plant. Efficient, but about as boring as Tuesday evening telly.

NUMBER THREE:

Like number one, this plant is just plain lazy. It's looked this way for year, not bothering to add on an extra inch up top or maybe get all leafy for the boy plants who live nearby. It just sits there, not really doing anything. Might tie a bow around it for Christmas. That'd piss it off something serious, like when the lesbian girl in the movies gets all dolled up by the cheerleaders. I'm not thinking of any specific film here, but I think it happened in The Mighty Ducks or maybe Little Giants. I don't know, I wasn't paying much attention, I got a Gameboy that Christmas.

NUMBER FOUR:

Fuck, I'm regretting taking so many pictures of plants earlier on. This one, in hindsight, doesn't look so bad. Hold on until I go up the stairs and try to remember what made me hate it so bad.
Oh yes, THE SMELL. This is some kind of lemon plant. May as well call it a marshmallow plant because it doesn't smell like that either. It smells, instead, like death. And I don't use italics lightly. It smells like piney disinfectant. My mother says it keeps flies away. It keeps me away too, I would've moved home years ago if it wasn't for this gypsy of a plant. Burn in hell, lemon plant.


NUMBER FIVE:

I feel a bit bad slating this plant, because it was in my granny's house and we took it after she died. So I won't get personal with this one, and slate the fact that it can't speak English or that it has no job. Instead I'll keep it simple. I hate this cactus. Every time I've came within a foot of this cactus I've gotten ten or twelve wee pricks in my fingertips. And it's ugly. Moving on.

NUMBER SIX:

Oh, here's a favourite. In that it's one of my favourite plants to hate. It looks dopey. No two ways about it. Its leaves are big and chunky and waxy and the whole thing looks like it was made with lego.

LEGO. I was never given Lego as a child, so I hate Lego. I had K'nex. Was still good, like, got to make lots of big things. Once made a helicopter. But K'nex couldn't make houses. It's overcoming such adversities like that that made me who I am today.

NUMBER SEVEN:

Ah, I've lost inspiration now. As much as I hate these plants, they've brought back a lot of memories. In the past half hour, I've been taken back to Christmas Eves in my granny's house, to building a (quite excellent) K'nex helicopter (with missiles) and some film I didn't bother paying attention to. So what if this wee chap couldn't be bothered growing over the rim of the pot. This rant has to end. And it will.

Right after...

NUMBER EIGHT:

SPIDER PLANT? SPIDER PLANT! I fucking ABHOR spider-plant. In fact, it was spider-plant that spurred me to write this whole thing. Spider-plant would, if left to it's own devices, take over the planet. If number two was some slow moving moss, spider-plant is like the xenomorphs from Alien. Sending off wee baby spider-plants to grow elsewhere, continuously growing, feeding. All those bits hanging down off it on the front are new spider-plants hanging by their horrible spider-plant umbilical cords to their bitch of a spider-plant mother.
I've a fire lit right now, if I could throw spider-plant in it right now (without consequences), I would (I don't think the mother has me Christmas present bought yet, have to keep her sweet).

Anyway, that's me for this evening. Good to get that off my chest. Flying back to Edinburgh tomorrow, and I'm back home here on the night of the 23rd. If I don't post before the big day, have yourselves a very fine Christmas. Toodles.