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My First Blog Post

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

This blog that I’m writing is a message of hope for all those people who are alone and stuck at home. We’re all in this together and, at the very least, all the celebrity aristocracy are every bit as miserable as the rest of us.

I try to think about the time of the plague and the Black Death, and all those calamities that happened so long ago. What the fuck did the population of London do then? They didn’t have television – a result because there’s nothing on there that I like these days, anyways; they didn’t have computers or radios. All they had was each other, so they were the real Blank Generation. Now we have access to a lot more. I heard somebody walking around the reservoir near me say: “This lockdown is depressing. Thank God, I have some valium. It stops me climbing up the walls”. The one thing we all have is a conscience- some of us get to use it. The doctors and nurses and all the carer and support workers use their conscience every minute, of every hour, of every day, working tirelessly. To keep us all safe from the menace that is COVID-19. A big thank you to everyone out there for making our lives more livable. Please check out my Facebook page, as I’ve posted a video of a song of hoe that’s called The Angels are Coming.

Slainte,

Paul Maddog

Growing Up in Dublin

I was 10 years old. It was 1968 and I lived on the Ballymun/Santry border. The street I live on was called Old Town road. I went to Larkhill Primary School. At a very young age you learnt which families were the catholic and which were protestant. If your surname began with an ‘o’ i.e. O’Brien or O’Shaughnessy, you were Catholic; if you had a name like Brooks or Morgan, you were probably Protestant.

I ran home from school every Friday excited to have my favourite meal – fish and chips – from a nearby chipper, and to watch a programme on television, called The Monkees (they were an American band not unlike The Beatles). I often ended up staying up late watching programmes like The High Chaparral or The Virginian on Radio Telefis Eireann. I woke up on Saturday mornings to the sound of a rag-and-bone man exclaiming ‘Bring out your rags!’. If you brought them out, he would give you a thru’penny bit and you could go to the local shop and buy yourself a Golly Bar (an ice cream with a silver wrapper that had pictures of golliwogs on the wrapper). Then, after lunch, every Saturday, a van came up to the road with a sign on the side panel that read ‘Swastika Laundry’ and had a picture of a swastika on it. They were picking up and delivering the dry cleaning to the houses on the street, while all the young children played curb ball. You throw a ball at the curb, and if you catch it when it comes back, you score a point. The older boys all played pitch-and-toss. As the van came up the street, they would shout ‘L.O.B.’, which meant ‘Look out boys’. If you were lucky, you win a game and keep the coins on the pavement after playing curb ball. Afterwards, I would go home and have some dinner that my ma had made. After the Saturday night film, I would go to bed and in my room, get under the covers and listen to Kid Jenson on radio Luxenbourg and songs by bands like Slade or T. Rex.

I woke up on Sunday mornings early. I hated Sundays – as a Catholic you were expected to attend mass. I soon went off religion very quickly. It seemed to me the cause of all the troubles and struggles in Ireland. As Sunday night turned into Monday morning, I got ready to go to school again. A catholic primary school in a white hall, a bus journey away. All through the week I looked forward to the weekend ahead to hopefully do it all over again.

Take care, stay safe.

Slán agus beannacht saoirse éire

Paul Maddog

Kings and Queens of lockdown

This blog is going out to all the kings and queens of the lockdown scene. I’ve just read that lockdown may last a while. We’ve always taken our freedom for granted – the way that it is, is the way that it is. The messages out there now seem to be: take nothing or nobody for granted.

Nothing ever goes back to the way it was before after a change like this takes place. In 1918 , there was a flu pandemic and what followed was the roaring twenties, so hopefully when this is over, some more seismic events will take place for a long time. Humanity has been behaving very badly, like a naughty child and now Mother Nature is taking it’s children by the hand and walking them upstairs and we’re all being locked up in our rooms.

I think it is important to start experimenting with yourselves at the moment. Rather than letting boredom creep into your life, look inside yourself and release your inner Shakespeare. We’re all poets but we don’t know it, so start writing your feelings down and maybe even start putting them out there. During these times, communication is so important with your friends and your family, or perhaps to simply help all the other people in the world that might feel the same and get a feeling of togetherness. You are not alone.

This pandemic has started me meditating on what’s important and what my priorities should be from now on. I have also started being inventive with things that before I found obsolete to keep the boredom away. I found a glut of shower gel and I’ve decanted it into a pump bottle, because unused shampoo can be used to hand wash delicates. Life is throwing us more than our fair share of challenges, at the moment so it’s time to fight back. I personally love going to the gym and working out so I’ve started working out at home instead. Most late afternoons, I’ve had to be inventive and go back to the days when I first started working out, try to imagine what I did and recreate it.

I realise, as there’s no clear end in sight to this lockdown, many of us might be feeling anxious at the moment – I know I am. An ex partner, now a yoga teacher, has been sending me WhatsApp videos of her lessons and I find that doing these yoga moves has helped to reduce these feelings of anxiety that I get. This lockdown won’t stop for a while, and I know how much you all loved your routines, so it is understandable how adrift you must be feeling, but don’t wallow under you duvet – wake up and start doing things. I’m going to list a few ideas to get you all started:

Create a plan when you wake up and for how you’re going to spend your day. Routine is important. This will give your life a sense of purpose.
Exercise, be it in your font room or outside in your garden. This will help release your endorphins and help elevate your mood.
If you have any children or friends who live with you, go and play game with them out in the garden or on your balcony. If you live alone, you can find lots of games to play online.
This is a good time to learn new skills. I enjoy playing my guitar and writing songs. If you can’t have an instrument laying around the house somewhere, this may be a perfect time to pick it up and start learning. Otherwise, think to any other skill you may have put off for a while.
Having a thorough clear-out of things that you no longer us in you cabinets/cupboards.
The toughest task we all face during this period is taking care of your mental health so finding things to do is so important. Remember that this experience will strengthen your resilience muscles, so when you come out of this lockdown, you will feel stronger and more robust.

Lastly, I’d just like to say: spread the love. Think about your fiends and family and all the people in the NHS, those in care homes, support workers and all the people out there doing essential work and remember we’re all in this together and perhaps your situation isn’t as bad as someone else’s I’d like to send all my love out to the people who are working hard to pull us through.

Big love, Paul Maddog.

Don’t let the virus get you down

Today, I wanted to talk about the stay-at-home lockdown scenario that we are all going through.

When I was a child, my dad, Jim, who sadly passed away in March, liked to share with me what it was like when he was growing up. In Dublin during early May 1941 he told of 4 bombs being dropped on north Dublin, which urged people to be put into lockdown and use their houses as bomb shelters for the rest of May. In some ways, we are also fighting a kind of war with this ‘invisible enemy’ and suddenly my father’s story has come to life for me.

I heard on the radio the other day that a school is advising pupils to view the lockdown as a summer holiday camp, rather than a camp corona – that reframing it might help shift the perspective of pupils and in turn might help with mental health and to remain calm during this crisis. Ministries are dreaming up schemes to keep people at work but much of these schemes are happening in isolation. Sometimes it seems more like a series of giant experiments rather than a joint battle. And yet, every human on this planet has come together in a different way to respond, fight and to develop vaccines for a cure for COVID-19.

Strange days, indeed. I recently heard that one of my favorite country folk musicians had passed away. Bruce Springsteen and Sheryl Crow were among the stars who cam together to pay tribute to folk singer John Prine, who at the age of 73 (he was one of the most influential figures in country music), contracted COVID-19 and died in a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. His songs will Iive on forever.

Outside early in the evenings the streets become bare in London. We see that emissions of toxic fumes from traffic have fallen as a results of this lockdown. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Love you all xxx

Slainte Paul Maddog

The world should stand together in this fight.

Mad dogs and Englishmen

Hi my name is Paul McGuinness or my nickname to my friends, if I have any left, is Maddog. In these blogs I’d like to talk about my life, living with a brain injury and music.

To quote W. C. Fields “I was born at an early age” but it’s taken me 56 years to write a book about myself. I‘ve got to say, I was reborn at an older age. The rebirth I had is due to an accident I had. I can’t recall any of the accident so I’ll have to take someone else’s word for it, and if I trust any ones word it’s got to be my sister, Mary. I owe that girl my life- without her support I doubt if my rebirth would have taken place.

My birth took place over 56years ago and I’ve got Chrissie and Jim to thank for that. Thanks Mum. Thanks Dad.

Chrissie is short for Christine and she was called that by her parents because she was born on the 26^th of December. If Irish people are good at anything it’s making up nicknames so very quickly. They started calling my mother Chrissie before someone from Liverpool started calling her Crimbo. Jim is the short version of James and he is responsible for making my mum pregnant but and this is clearly an Irish catholic sin. Christine got pregnant before she was married to Jim, and if I know anything (and I don’t), that is the reason why I was a sinner while I was still in the womb. To cut a long story short I continued as a sinner right into my older even more sinful years.

I don’t remember any of younger years until I was four so I’ll have to consult my Mother to help me on that. Apparently I was born in London and continued living there until I was about four years old, it was then I made my way by ferry to Waterford. Then through lack of a job, Jim carted us all off to Dublin where he had the good sense to get some mullah that’s money ££££ and put a deposit on a house in Dublin in an area called Santry. The road was called Old town road, Bally mun was not built yet but to increase my fun as a child they built that later. To get the rest of the money to pay for the house and the ever increasing bills my Dad took a job as a commercial traveller. He took the job from his father Leo (more of him later). My grandfather, Leo, demanded a lot from my father and unfortunately this meant he did not spend enough time with my mother so this pissed my mother off. If there’s one thing a woman can’t stand, it’s a lack of attention from their man and that caused a lot of controversy in the house. My earliest memory was the birth of my eldest sister, I wasn’t at the birth but I was there when she was taken home. She was born in the rotunda hospital. My mother and my sister returned from the birth to our home in Santry and my first memory is seeing the baby lying on the floor. She was having her picture taken. I don’t remember much about the photo session but I remember the design on the carpet probably because I spent most of my time staring at the floor but the carpet was the same colour as the baby and that colour was red. This came in handy years later when I cut my head open and bled all over the carpet. I don’t remember the baby being christened but we called her Deborah or Debbie for short and short she was, but she soon grew up and became a great support for me. It took Jim another few years to impregnate my mum again this time my mother gave birth to an even redder child. This one was called after Gods Mother, she was called Mary, so from the age of eight I had a family- I was the eldest, a condition I’ve maintained over the years. Debbie or Mary never managed to catch up with me but they managed to pass me by in every other respect.