[Note: while my sister had gone on holidays, I was staying in her house and looking after her dog, and wrote the following one night and sent it to her in installments via texts. It gave her a laugh, which was pretty much my objective. Any similarity to characters in a certain movie trilogy is entirely intentional.]

8.30pm: I was on the couch in my sister’s house on Abbot’s Road in Blackrock, dog-sitting her delightful hound Luna, when I was roused from my semi-slumber by a loud pounding at the door, as if it was being hit with a heavy stick. When I opened
it, I saw a very tall man in ragged grey robes and a ragged grey pointed hat,
holding a dark wooden staff carved with eldritch runes. Behind him were ten
very squat bearded men in horned helmets and a motley mix of battered leather, dented armour, and rotting animal hides. The tall man intoned: “Long and arduous has been the path to the Black Rock, but we can rest in the shadow of this fortress
and the dark god Tsathoggua shall find us not.” The revolting little men were
already setting up camp behind him in the driveway. Their fierce expressions,
huge rusty axes, and scarcely conceivable body odour made me reluctant to argue
with them.

9.30pm:
There was another pounding at the door and when I opened it the tall man was
there. He said in his sepulchral tones: “Gatekeeper, canst thou fill our empty
bellies, for I and the crunpits [the name for the revolting little men,
apparently] have journeyed far across a barren land.” I offered them the Rolo
yoghurts from the fridge, but a fusillade of angry oaths from the crunpits in a
horribly guttural language suggested that these were not adequate. They then
began shooting down seagulls with unerring accuracy and hacking down the trees
to make a huge fire upon which to cook them, while swigging lethally strong
moonshine out of the mugs I reluctantly gave them.

10.30pm:
The neighbours were complaining vociferously. Not only was the avenue shrouded
in thick black smoke and the quiet of the evening completely ruined by the
shrieking of dying seagulls and the lusty but foul-sounding singing of the drunken
crunpits, but they were also flinging burnt, half-eaten seagulls into the
neighbours’ gardens and at passing cars. On top of that, when told Blackrock is
rather short of elk and bison, they began chasing startled dog-walkers down the
street with the clear aim of eating their precious hounds. Luna has only
survived because I told the tall man that she was ‘the black dog of night of whom
legend speaks’. This seemed to impress him, as he nodded sagely and then raced
off to rescue one of the more inebriated crunpits, who was being savaged by an
Irish cockapoo while its owner had him pinned beneath her zimmer frame. Luna is
getting on great with the crunpits, possibly because of all the roasted seabird
they’ve fed her.

11.30pm:
The fire brigade turned up because of all the smoke, and the tall man was
immediately convinced that Tsathoggua’s minions had brought a monster to devour
them all. When they began blasting their hoses at the bonfire that now
threatened to set all of Abbot’s Road alight, he yelled, “tis a dragon that
breathes not fiery death, but water as of the mountain stream!” and the
crunpits rushed it with their axes (as much as they could, considering how drunk
they had become). The firemen pulled out their own axes, and a squad of Gardaí who had just arrived joined in with their truncheons and tasers,
leading to a pitched battle in and around the driveway. The tall man kept
roaring, “thou shalt not pass, hordes of darkness!” while trying to hit the Gardaí surrounding him with his staff. Swarms of seagulls, with vengeance on
their tiny minds, swept down to attack the crunpits, but in the thick black
smoke ended up viciously pecking everyone and each other, while the maddened
cockapoo, having acquired a taste for crunpit blood, was darting in and out
savaging ankles and shins. Neighbours across the road, whose view wasn’t
obscured by the smoke, watched from their upstairs windows, some cheering and
shouting encouragements to the crunpits, who were putting up a doughty but
clearly doomed defence. Everyone loves an underdog, I suppose.

12.30am:
Silence reigns across Abbot’s Road. The tall man and the crunpits have been
taken into custody, and the injured Garda and firemen to various A&Es around Dublin. The driveway is completely destroyed: the churned-up gravel is strewn with
burnt wood, feathers, mashed flowers, broken axes, and blood, and is completely
saturated. Rosie has thrown up the half-eaten seagulls the crunpits fed her,
and her wobbly walk suggests they gave her some of their moonshine too. The
stench outside is indescribable. As the Gardai took away the exhausted crunpits
(the firemen’s hose had at least given them their first wash in many months),
the tall man said sadly: “Gatekeeper, our fate is of a certainty one of woe and
anguish. The auguries told us we would find a welcome reprieve from the endless
battle at the 32nd house on the Road of the Abbots.” When I told him that this
house was 22 Abbot’s Road, his face darkened and whatever language he spoke
then, I’m very glad I didn’t understand it…

A wiser person than I, whose name I have forgotten and can’t be bothered to look up, once described the path of our life as being like that of a bird who, on a freezing winter’s night, flies in through one window into a long banqueting hall crowded with people and warmth and light and then out another window into the dark; a brief fleeting moment of activity and colour and noise between two vast dark empty immensities of night and silence. If so, my art is the tiny poop the bird squeezes out and deposits on the straw-covered floor below as it passes overhead. Of course, were the metaphor entirely accurate, I would be aiming to hit a dignitary’s bald head or, better yet, the slice of cake he’s raising to his lips…

I get the feeling that, beside the vast gleaming ocean liner that represents the corpus of the fine arts past and present as it glides elegantly from the past into the future, I’m a termite in an upturned bottlecap bobbing along in its wake (ahhh, now that’s good metaphor!).