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The day my mother read about me shooting heroin into my c*$!

Yesterday, I posted this article about my mother and I doing a joint pub review one time. Denise asked if my mother ever reads the stuff I write about her. I replied honestly, saying that I have no idea. In fact, there’s only one article I’ve ever written that I know for certain my mother has read.

It involved some heroin and my penis. About three years ago, myself and Johnny Savage were in Mayo working on an article about religious practices there. My mother put us up, fed us and even came out and climbed Croagh Patrick with us. My father had died very recently, so she was glad of the distraction.

(In fact the project was largely conceived as a way for me to spend more time with her.)

We had a great time there, several family friends wound up being mentioned in the finished article and, sure, religion is right up my mother’s street anyway. So when the issue came out she asked me to send her down about half a dozen copies. Which I did.

Next time I was home, however, I noticed those half dozen copies still stacked on the back kitchen. I asked why she hadn’t given out, but she just kind shrugged and mumbled something vague. I should have left it at that but I persisted. She went quiet. She said I’d written about some things that she wouldn’t want people to see.

It wasn’t the religious article, she said. It was something else. I flicked through the magazine wondering what the hell she was talking about. Eventually my eye fell upon this line from a throwaway Rose of Tralee spoof diary I’d done.

FRIDAY
Wake up. Inject heroin into my cock for breakfast.

There’s a sanitised version of the article here. The original was a bit more graphic. To put this in context, I suppose, I pretty sure my mother has never heard me swear. Not even shit or bollocks. She’s flinches when people swear on television.

It’s weird how it occurred to me that I was sending her down copies of a magazine in which I claim to have injected heroin in my cock. I suppose you wouldn’t write about those kinds of things to being with if you were imagining your mother sitting down by the fire in Ballyhaunis reading it.

I made a half-hearted attempt to talk to her about it. But she didn’t want to. She just said that she hoped I was joking but, all the same, she didn’t know why I’d want to write something like that. I suppose it was embarrassing. Although it wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as it sounds telling it again.