Thread by @shockproofbeats

Here. Since @EmmetKirwan and @dave_tynan's unmissable DUBLIN OLD SCHOOL has now dropped on Netflix, anyone wanna hear how a small part of it is based on me, very high, mending a hole in a wall at a birthday party using only newspaper, plaster, an XtraVision card?

APRIL 2010. TEMPLE BAR, DUBLIN. Ordinarily the part of Ireland used to keep the geordie hen parties and American football fans away from the rest of us, tonight it is host to young Emmet, celebrating his 30th in a simple but spacious apartotel rented for just the purpose.

It was a weird time. The economy had shat the bed but we were still too numb to really deal yet. Everyone was either minimum wage or on the dole, and all social expectations on young people collapsed, and since we were stupid, this freed us instead to get extravagantly high.

One attendee, let's call him Barney - barrister by training, ninja by vocation - was in such high spirits within a small room off the corridor, that he was moved to lighten the mood with a nice little forward roll. CRASSSHHHH.

The room is tiny, really small, and kindof unfit for any real purpose. The kinda place that would cost about €2600 per calendar month these days - zing! #satire - and Barney's big, leaden foot smashes through the wall, creating a great big hole.

His foot cracks through the plaster like a farmer's thumb through a Fray Bentos pie. The gash in the wall is huge, like the size of a human head. There are about 100 people in this not-massive apartment making loads of noise and now we've put a giant hole in the place. Not good.

At this point I was telling off someone for singing IRA songs in another room. This was before absurdo-nationalism was a thing so no irony was involved and my biggest pet peeve when high was "Closing Time Republicans", well off south Dubliners going all RA while hammered.

But all was interrupted when word started getting around there was a big hole in the gaff. Emmet had paid a hefty deposit so this was big, bad news, Barney, incidentally, overreacted, and ran off - literally out of the house. We were all pals so no need, but I guess he was paro.

Anyway soon everyone was being shown the hole, it was like a wee feature of the party for a while. It was like a Marian grotto had just opened up in the middle of the sesh. We all had to pay respects to it.

People would bring it up like it was a feature of the gaff. I was made properly aware of it in a conversation that started with a friend wiping something off my face "oh you have something on your cheek there, let me get it-OH WAIT have you seen the hole?". A landmark.

The place was nice and big like, so there was the kitchen/living room where the decks were set up, the bedrooms were people were chatting or chilling out, and then if you took a fancy, you could take your drug for a walk and check out the hole.

Everyone poked their head in (to the room), felt the edges, tried to fit their head in (the actual hole), depending on their skull shape they were either satisfied or disappointed, opined something like "scalet" or "hate dah" and then left the room to resume their sesh.

The hole was big. Like bad news big. Definitely big enough that these days it would be a really exciting rental opportunity for a motivated millennial excited at the idea of 21st century hole living.

Anyway, I was just looking at it, trying to fit my head in, when one of those horrible coincidences of inaction fell on me, like badly-repacked pasta from a top shelf. I just happened to be there at the same time as my pal Tom, who declared WE MUST FIX IT.

Yeah, I agreed absent-mindedly.

Shit

WE?

I didn't have the werewithal to refuse. I didn't have the werewithal to speak, so

CUT TO me and Tom on the quays, trying to find a hardware store. We buy filler, pick up some evening heralds and I think maybe a basin too. We are both utterly meltybrains.

We looked like we'd had our skin taken off and put back on by people who were on their last re-skinning before they clocked off from the person skinning factory for the week. I forgot the change and had to go back and then had to again once I noticed I'd forgotten other items.

So we get back and there's been a noise complaints but we don't care because we are working men with a task in hand. It feels good. All these other callow session gremlins, and we have a wee job to do. Important. Meaningful. Steady guys.

Our first move was to get into the hole room. As when we left it, it was receiving tourists from the wider session when we got there. "Alright, yeah yeah" we said, like detectives clearing a crime scene, "stick your head in, let's get it over with, we have work to do".

We laid down some newspaper, and started packing the hole with same. Like loads and loads of it. Two or three whole papers I think. Then we get the stuff in the basin and mix it up and start basically filling the recess as best we can.

It looked, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely fucking awful.

It was still a hole but now it was full of evening herald. It was just a big oblong mound of shite, it looked for all the world like an outy belly button sticking out of the wall.

And you couldn't even stick your head in any more which had, you may recall, been a huge perk.

In quieter moments, we reckoned the landlady would likely have kept it on as a charming conversation piece in her home, so greatly had it improved our session.

But this was just not good at all. I was suddenly v negative about the whole thing. The initial delight and meaning had worn off and now I just felt like this was stupid, what are we doing. It wasn't looking good.

I lso wanted to not be performing domestic fucking labour on the sesh. By this point I'd been absent from the business end of the session for over an hour. Which in session time is about a fortnight. Everyone else was having the craic. I had a job.

Here I was indifferently fixing a hole in a wall. That I did not care about. I wouldn't care this much about a hole in my own home. I wouldn’t care this much about a hole in my own body.

But Tom wouldn't stop. He's one of the most positive and productive people I've ever known. It's maddening. He just kept slapping more and stuff in. There's mulch and wet paper and brown paste everywhere. The smell alone is weird. This was a silly idea.

Meanwhile I'm checking the door every moment in case the neighbours come back complaining. Like isn't it worse to have destroyed the wall in this weird, high attempt to cover up the damage?

I'm fretting also because session tourists keep coming in and seeing both of us very high, up at the wall, on our knees, trying to fix it. They're all equally high but say things like "should ye be doing this"

Like they've walked in on us whittling dildies from our own shite

And just when I'm really thinking this has been easily the worst decision of my entire life I look back from the door and I see Tom wiping the excess away with my XtraVision card.

Wiping the very last bit of it.

From a
Sheer.
Flat.
Perfectly smooth.
Wall.

The colouration is different and it's wet. But it's flat as a pancake, with no sense of a dip or a rim. No hole there at all. It's gone. The hole is gone.

Quite soon after this the door goes, the cops have come to shut us down. We grab the builders bits, the foamy excess, the drying putty,the newspapers and the dust and sling them out the window into a skip we had the lads who'd already been kicked out push under his balcony.

We were on the third floor Emmet did get in trouble with the Landlady. Which is, let’s face it, understandable. There were about 100 people in a 6 person apartment, in fairness

But her final report refusing to repay his deposit came back with only one mention of that one small room off the corridor that had been our workplace and lab for the preceding hour or more.

"Paint worn off wall".

None of that made it into Emmet and Dave's film DUBLIN OLD SCHOOL, probably because they are manifest cowards, sucking on the grisly teat of the Hollywood system. But it is still excellent and you should all watch it tonight. Wan the lads.