St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day seems to me to be less and less about celebrating the man who drove the snakes out of Ireland and more about people getting horrendously drunk in whiskey and Guinness.

Considering the excessive consumption of whiskey that I engage in, I'm not really in a position to comment on anyone getting drunk. Especially not when you consider the number of times that Fred has shown up at my place and found me passed out on the floor and had to put me to bed.

What I object to is the stereotype that seems to be cast on the Irish because of how people celebrate St. Patrick's Day, and not only that but the number of people who decide to tell the world that they are Irish because they have an ancestor fifty seven generations back who once visited Ireland for thirty one seconds.

Joe always puts on a bit of an Irish theme for St. Patrick's Day mainly because it's one of the biggest days of the year in terms of increasing his profit. I can't really fault him or other public house keepers or bar owners taking advantage of people wanting to get ridiculously drunk. They operate a business that exploits people's desire to drink like I exploit people's fears and paranoia.

If I want to go and drink at Joe's Place then I have to go early on in the day before most people start drinking - if it's a Saturday or a Sunday then I tend not to go anywhere near the place since people seem to be in there from the moment the doors open in force.

But luckily enough this year St. Patrick's Day fell on a Monday. This not only meant that most people were at work and the place was quiet, but I got to start off my week by spending most of my day in the pub.

Now there will be those amongst you that don't understand what the draw of spending all day in the pub is. Why on earth would someone want to spend so much time around alcohol with dim lighting and old decoration?

To those people I have said and will continue to say "Shut up, Fred." Yes, of all the people in the world to question my motivation for spending all day in the pub, Fred is always the first. Harry seems to understand it and well more often than not has a day off on St. Patrick's Day so is in the pub with me.

Harry says its jealousy but honestly, I think it's more because Fred doesn't like me drinking.

Now Fred is no teetotaler, he enjoys fine wine, strong spirits and ale like any other man of his class bracket. He doesn't really seem to have any problem with women drinking either. I say this because there is a group of men that seem to think that women need to have their alcohol content intake monitored more than men do. But Fred isn't one of their camp.

What Fred doesn't seem to like is watching me try and drink myself into a early grave. He does like to try and prolong my life for reasons that are completely beyond me. This includes keeping me out of gun battles and trying to get me to stop smoking because it will give me cancer.

Of course he still smokes when he is under pressure or undercover, so on that score he doesn't really have a leg to stand on. He still considers himself a non-smoker because it is only an occasional cigarette he indulges in rather than a consistent habit and he hasn't bought a packet of cigarettes in his life. In fact he only smokes when he is around me - so maybe trying to get me to quit smoking is less about me and more about him.

But even so, his trying to keep me alive extends to me not developing liver disease due to alcohol abuse. He keeps telling me that I should talk to someone about everything that has happened to me, that it would help me to get rid of some of my rage and demons and make my life better.

There possibly is a link between Kevin Metis, my family being murdered and my drinking, but then again I like drinking, I like spending time in the pub with Harry and I like the fact that when I do pass out on the floor of my office, Fred comes along, picks me up, puts me to bed and cradles me in his arms whilst I sleep.

St. Patrick's Day gives me an excuse to enjoy all of that earlier in the day before loud and obnoxious people invade and ruin it with drunken offers of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. 

Park

All the people, so many people, they all go hand in hand, hand in hand through their parklife. Blur definitely had it right with their analysis of the park.

I used to spend lots of time in the park, especially after Louise and Arthur were murdered. It gave me somewhere quiet to think that was busy and public and I could be lost in a sea of faces without having to interact with anyone. It also made it harder for Fred to find me.

To begin with he was just another cop to me, another busy body, another person that hadn't done anything to help find out why my mother died and then had stood idly by whilst my sister and father had been taken from me. He seemed to have fixation on trying to save from, well the same fate. He'd already been successful in keeping me alive and sending Kevin Metis to prison, but he just couldn't seem to leave me alone.

I told Harry Lee that Fred was stalking me and Harry told me that if I really thought that then I should go and talk to Ryan, Fred's brother. I asked why and Harry had merely shrugged and said "you'll see". So I went to find Ryan and when I did I understood what Fred was doing. Ryan was younger than me, about ten years old and already falling in with the wrong crowd at school, trying to cope with the death of his parents three years before.

Fred hadn't been able to save his parents, couldn't save his brother from himself and in me he saw someone who could be saved and needed to be protected if he was ever going to believe that life had some good in it. That people could be saved from the bad guys and that justice had some hope of surviving.

It's an odd thing to think now, looking back that Fred was as much in need of our friendship as I was. Of course at no point have I ever admitted to needing Fred - or Harry for that matter. You might think that every friendship would occasionally need such an affirmation for the sake of everyone's sanity; but so far none of us have found that we show each other how much we care by being there. By fighting alongside one another, by always being there to make sure the others don't get kill and rescuing each other when we get kidnapped.

This seems to be verging on being all mushy and close to a chick flick moment...so Fred and Harry are both morons who I'm as likely to shoot as sit down to coffee with.

There I feel much better for that.

Looking for the perfect present for Raven Siren fans? Look no further!  The Nicolette Mace books are now available in digital and paperback from Barnes and Noble.

New Year

New Year's Eve always seems to be the most disappointing time of the year. It is always built up by the media and by people to be this fantastic event - so much depending on it, how you spend the evening will be how you spend the rest of the year...

Rubbish!

In fact more than rubbish, completely and unutterably wrong! 

The only time anyone has been more wrong is Fred when he told me I needed to give up drinking and smoking. 

New Year's Eve has never been anything short of a drunken extravaganza designed to make bar and club owners rich and everyone else short of sleep the next day and a lot poorer to boot. 

Every year I hear people in cafes and bars and on the street and even in the off-licence talking about what they are doing for New Year's Eve and who they are doing it with - unsurprisingly some of these conversations involved a level of detail that no self-respecting eavesdropper would be comfortable hearing. Around the millennium it was almost unbearable to hear such hype that turned out to be nothing more than a doubly impressive let down.

In all honesty I try and ignore New Year, New Year's day often brings me a lot of profitable work so on the eve, getting to bed early and stuffing my ears with as much cotton wool as I can find has always been my common practice.

Now this has always proved to be somewhat difficult. There are many factors that always seem to conspire to make me stay up to see the clock change from 11:59 to 12:00 (as though I had never done that before). Most of these come in the form of, yes, you've guessed it - Frederick J. Barlow.

Fred has this horrible habit of thinking that I am lonely, that I am need of being kept cheerful on this most irritating of nights. Even worse than that is Harry Lee, yes Harry informs me continually that New Year's Eve is the perfect time to, and I quote "get Fred into bed and then let him down gently in the morning". What I don't understand is why Harry thinks I want to get Fred into bed, let alone let him down gently. I've never done anything gently in my whole life, I'm not about to start on New Year's Day.

That's the other thing that gets me about New Year, this idea that people's will power will somehow be greater at this point in the year than at any other time so they decide to create a resolution to do something... why the significance of the changing of the year? Why not when Spring becomes Summer? Or when Wednesday becomes Thursday (or Monday if you have managed to get yourself hospitalized and lost a few days in an unconscious state).

The only thing that has ever made New Year's Eve remotely fun was the time that Ryan turned up at 11pm telling me he knew where Kevin Metis was and that if I was quick I could shoot him in the knee caps and no one would ever know it was me...ah now that was a fun night - and no one ever did know I shot him in the shin and made him lose a toe the stiletto of the woman he was trying to seduce.

However it is now 10pm and I can hear footsteps on the stairs. It will be Fred coming to tell me that his girlfriend is no longer his and how he needs to drown his sorrows with me. If only I thought ahead every year I could go to somewhere remote and quite, like a monastery and not be disturbed, however I am not sure they would let me bring my guns or whiskey with me, so on balance that probably isn't the best idea.

Camping

There are many things in this world that I don't see the attraction of doing. Using sandpaper as toilet paper, being locked in a room with Kevin Metis, eating any form of invertebrates, I could go on. However camping had never really crossed my mind as needing to be on that list. Well that was until I woke up in a tent this morning.

It is a shock to the system when you wake up in a tent, especially as the night before you went to sleep in your own apartment. Fred and Harry felt it was a good idea to kidnap me during the night as a joke.

A joke!

I woke up under canvas with rain pelting down on it. Not only was I under canvas, but I was in the smallest space imaginable. Needless to say I was less than impressed. My normal reaction to this kind of behaviour would have been to chase them both down and shoot them in the knee caps. Unfortunately this was not an option at this particular time; not because I had any change in my character or had been flooded with a sudden sense of remorse you understand. Oh no, it was solely down to the fact that I didn't have my guns. In fact all I had on was my very thin, very see-through nightdress.

There are times when I can be a reasonable person, they might be very few and far between, but I can be reasonable. For example I have never, to date, shot Mayor Major Tyler despite him deserving at least two hospital stays for his incredible inability to do his job. I haven't spent my time consumed with plotting revenge against Richard Ellis even though he tried to put my favourite gunsmith out of business. Yes, I can be a very reasonable person. However when I am taken from my bed in the middle of the night in attire that is less than suitable for the great outdoors and shoved into a coffin comprised of poles and semi-waterproof material I am not really inclined towards being reasonable.

I could hear the two of them outside the tent trying to contain laughter, they have always found themselves far funnier than they actually are. So I decided, for the moment that restraint would be a good course of action...and when I say restraint, I mean I wouldn't bludgeon them both to death with rocks from the edge of the campfire.

Since my clothes didn't appear to be in this claustrophobiac's nightmare, I had to go out and face the two morons in something only slightly more discreet than my birthday suit. Upon emerging the first thing I noticed wasn't how breathtaking the scenery was, nor how peaceful the place seemed to be, no the first thing I noticed was how quickly Fred's laughter turned to blushing and looking away. Harry stared unashamedly and was given a damn good thrashing with a nearby fallen branch until Fred brought me my clothes.

Harry tried to talk his way out of trouble and when that didn't work the two of them took me out on the nearby lake to fish...as this was really going to improve my mood. As soon as we were in the middle of the lake, the two of them mysteriously ended up falling overboard and I rowed back to the shore before they could climb back aboard. Fifteen minutes later the two managed to crawl their way back on to dry land.

They were right though, going fishing really did make me feel so much better.

Lazy Afternoons

There are many reasons that I enjoy winter. It's dark most of the time, which makes my life much easier, lots of shadows for me to hide in. It's cold so most people tend to stay indoors and dress in thick layers of clothing. So there is always a feeling of sadness in what passes for my heart when I see the first snowdrops appear in flowerbeds.

It's not because I have anything against the summer. On the contrary, it's nice not having ice on the inside of my windows. What I have a problem with is the lazy afternoon mentality that people seem to get in the summer - that and the fact that girls seem to think letting erroneous parts of their body hang out of their clothing is a good thing.

How can I track targets covertly through parks and streets when people all look and stare at the woman walking around in a long black trench coat because they have nothing better to do than laze about in the sunshine?

Fred is also especially unbearable during the summer months. His mood always seems to be elevated to unacceptable highs. It makes it so much harder to annoy him. As soon as he has had his Star Wars geekery fed at the start of May, he is as giddy as a school girl with pigtails until September arrives.

Harry is the only saving grace of all this as he hates the summer and when I say hates, I mean he would love to pack it into a box and throw it off a cliff and then become best friends with Kevin Metis and Derek Long and throw parties in their honour...the strange thing is though, he won't explain why it is that he hates it so much.

He doesn't have hay fever, nor is he pale skinned to the extent that opening the curtains gives him sunburn. I have come to one of two conclusions on the subject though. He is either secretly a vampire (the kind that Sam and Dean Winchester would hunt) or he has an extraordinarily high body temperature that means when the climate changes to being in double digits he overheats. Personally I think the first one is much more plausible...

Dangerous Minds

There was a time when it was easy to tell criminals from the rest of the cattle throng. The shifty eyes, the scarred face, the tommy guns tucked under the arm - ah what days of salad and glory were these.

Again the modern world has taken away the ability to spot the criminal mastermind with the insurgence of teenage cybergeeks into, hitherto, the province of men. Anyone on a skateboard raises suspicion now, especially when they are found circling cash points. If you are within any doubt of who these creatures are, they can be easily recognized by the inability to dress. Jeans are worn halfway down the leg so that the majority if not all of their underwear is visible.

The vulturic tendency of the beltless generation aside, most of them do not have the skills nor lack the intelligence that criminal enterprise demands. This may seem to be a contradiction in terms but there are many people I have come across who think themselves highly intelligent but have no form of skill in any field other than mindless conversation - Mayor Major Tyler is an excellent example of this.

In all honesty I miss the days of the street thug and his master lurking in shadows waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting hero. Granted this does still happen, Kevin Metis and Derek Long are cases in point, but both are now currently rotting in prison cells and this does make life fairly dull in places.

Yes there is the constant annoyance of Fred Barlow to contend with on a daily basis but dodging him has become more of a tedium than an activity. What would be a refreshing change would be a criminal mastermind with both skill and intelligence, like Professor Moriarty but sadly I am no Sherlock Holmes. So someone on my own level to match wits and gunfire against would make my day for all of three seconds.

This doesn't seem to be very likely though so I shall have to be content with beating and shooting young men and women who live like cave-trolls and have no upper body strength but do manage to amass much of what is left of the rest of the world's disposable income...or rather convert it into technology and a collection of mint condition comic books and action figures.