» Spoilt Brats

Poor ickle Kittehs
When I was about 9 or 10 I used to go to my Gran's after school for an hour or so before my Mum got home from work. There was a stray cat that used to hang about that my Gran would feed. She was the most beautiful tortoiseshell and I called her Sally.

Next door to my Gran there was a similar setup although the little girl there lived with her Granny and Grandad during the week because her Dad was in the Army and her Mum used to work the Graveyard shift. This lack of interaction with their daughter inevitably made them quite guilty and they spoiled to hell out of her. Bear in mind this was the late 80s when the dole queue used to reach around the block. She had every material object that a little girl could want. She had a villiage of Sylvanian Families (as opposed to my 3 rabbits I got for my birthday), she had as many My Little Ponies as I had ever seen. She was the first person ever that I had seen that had their room painted with a 4 wall mural (a fairytale kingdom). Looking back I don't think her Mum could have afforded to eat to provide her with this stuff.

One Christmas I asked Santy for an Etch-A-Sketch as I'd seen an ad for it. It wasn't available in Ireland at the time, so Santy got me something similar and left me a note saying sorry. I was a little gutted but I was grand, I still had my Selection Box to contend with! I told the neighbour child this after Christmas. A week later she had an Etch-A-Sketch, "Daddy got it imported for me." My little heart broke a bit. Had Santy lied when he said that he couldn't get one?

Anyway, back to the kitteh. During the summer we noticed that Sally was getting round, not being a naive child I knew this meant only one thing... she had eaten too many cheezeburgers. Or that ickle kittehs were coming. A few weeks later in the middle of the spider plant we found Sally and her 3 kittens, it was like a manger scene the way the spider plant had splayed out.

Over the next week or so we found homes for 2 of the kitties and waited for them to be old enough to go. We were going to hold on to the third, Sphinxy, and she would be our very own kitteh.

Neighbour girl was not happy. Her grandad had Emphysema and her Gran hated cats so even though her parents begged them, there was no way she was getting one of our kittehs. My family was delighted at this because we knew they wouldn't be in the safest hands with her.

One Monday I came back to my Gran's and ran through the house only to have her stop me going into the garden. "Sally took the kittens away." She told me and explained that as she was a stray that she was never going to stay longterm. I didn't go outside that day but I looked at the empty spider plant through the kitchen window forlornly.

On Tuesday I went outside though. Neighbour girl had a smug look on her face. "What happened to your cats?" she asked. "Sally took them away to hide them." Then came the most chilling words ever. My stomach is doing a flip now just thinking of it.

"No she didn't, I took them, I put them under this box (an orange crate) and I jumped inside and squished them!" The crate was covered in kitty blood. :(

My blood drained into my feet and a fierce ball gathered in my chest and throat.

Still in my mind this is the most evil act I have ever come across committed by a child, it's like the work of a young serial killer. It really illustrated why it's such a bad thing to acquiesce to all of a child's desires and why it's called spoiling them. Such was her jealousy that someone else would have something that she couldn't that she was willing to kill tiny 2 week old kittens.

I asked my Mum if I could come straight home after school after that. Sally never came back either.




I hope this is cathartic in the long run but I'm feeling like crap now after dredging this up.
(Sat 11th Oct 2008, 8:56, More)

» My sex misconceptions

Rebecca Loos need not Apply
I have two prominent memories of sex misconceptions from my primary school days.

The fist was mine. I thought sex lasted a whole 24 hours (probably from reading the World Book that said something like "sexual arousal can last up to 24 hours", I also looked up fingering but surprisingly it yielded no results). Some of the "cool" girls were talking about some story one of them had read in their Mum's Bella magazine about a woman who had been kidnapped and raped three times over the course of a "25 hour ordeal". Now I knew rape was forced sex but the conflicting time-frames made my tiny mind implode. I had to reconsult the World Book.

The second was the boys in my class, they all looked to one boy who lived on a farm, in spite of which he still wasn't wise to the method of sexual reproduction (heaven knows what he thought the pigs were up to). He had the entire class of boys convinced that you impregnated a female through "shifting"* We also had a female teacher who was admittedly hot.
When we were in 5th class (11ish) there was a small kitchen fitted in our school and we were given a few baking classes. The Farmer's son, let's call him Derek, decided that he was going to get the hot teacher pregnant and have her come help him with his pigs. The girls were quite shocked to think he was going to try to have sex with the poor woman with his pig-poo hands all over her. That was until we saw him open up a freshly baked bun and gob right into it and replace the lid.

The boys were all excited about the prospect, the girls were speechless. He went on to explain to this rapt audience that you don't actually need to kiss that it's the saliva that contains the baby making properties.

*so obvious I'm Irish!
(Tue 30th Sep 2008, 19:17, More)

» I'm going to Hell...

Disability Seminar
Back in my college days I went to a disability seminar. There were all sorts of differently abled folk there to give speeches etc. At one point a lady in a wheelchair needed a push to get up the ramp to the podium. A gentleman who was a dwarf obliged.

It was then that the "roll up, roll up!" Circus Music started playing in my head.

I'm going to hell.
(Thu 18th Dec 2008, 16:42, More)