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comprehensible to be here recounted, save that we
began rewriting the lyrics to It’s A Great Life If You Don’t Weaken until, through an infinite regress of pragmatic modification, its refrain became merely A Fine Life, An OK Life and, finally, A Grand Life. We left the world put back to rights and, stumbling home at 6am, Faron Young’s mantra was still ringing in my head, comingled with thoughts of It’s A Wonderful Life, no doubt inspired by the Christmas decorations that bandied across homes from Ranelagh to Rathgar, unmolested by my amorous friend. Falling into lidless, gurning sleep, and kicking the sheets like an idle pup, I reflected on how acid had made it easier for me to be kind to Mick, how such an altered state can make a brother of anyone. And the good type of brother, not the type who tell you your brain might explode. The way that being high made you drop your defences and embrace your need to be kind was, I thought, a lot like how Christmas performs that same task for society as a whole. Those who can’t get their hands on acid, at least. It was because of the acid that I got the letters gig, since by the time I joined Cyril on his rounds the following evening, my mind was still unravelling from the previous night’s exertions and I shuffled about in a state of exhausted euphoria. Cyril was a philosophical soul who smoked rollies – one at a time – and didn’t listen to the radio on principle. “I listen to the city,” he said, purring these words like a giant novelty lion, while pointing out things about Dublin I’d never seen before: the sites where Rebel boys had hung, where bullet holes pocked the statues on O’Connell St, and the ignoble spout where the Poddle flows from its underground concourse beneath the castle and into the Liffey at Wellington Quay. Ordinarily, these kinds of touristic sentiments would have seemed wearing or sentimental, but they were comforting to my fragile state, and coming from Cyril, who was plainly the country’s last postman poet. He was philosophical about retirement, and his last day coursing through Dublin’s environs along a route he’d worked for decades. He was proof of there being people, and times, that can speak simply enough to make you feel like an idealist, where others might seem corny or arch; who can mine through that thicker outer layer to retrieve some softer, pre-cynical segment of your id and speak to your better self. Talking to Cyril freed up that sappy part of my brain activated whenever I try and speak a foreign language and find myself saying pleasant nonsense about how beautiful Ireland is, partly because it’s easier than describing, say, Athlone in detail, and partly because it’s something I’ve always believed but only feel comfortable saying in German to an Albanian man I will never meet again. I told him he was a good choice for Santa Claus. Spurred by our connection, he told me that job would be shared out amongst all the relief workers, unless I wanted to do it by myself. The next day I left Vinnie to begin my new role. Like working in the media or writing for a living, opening children’s letters to Santa is one of those jobs that feels better to tell people about than to actually do. So, I told everyone. I regaled tables at parties about how I was the sole person on Earth allowed, legally or ethically, to open any envelope containing those children’s innermost wants, and I described the toys, bicycles and boys they so desired. I told everyone how any letter addressed to Santa Claus, even if it just had Santa, with no address, and no stamp, would find its way to me. It sounded heartwarming – it was heartwarming – that any which had a return address would get a personal reply from Santa, sealed with a Lapland watermark and a North Pole stamp. The bulk of the letters I got were clearly sent in batches by teachers who’d received templates from An Post and coached their class through their letters, before packaging them together, with neatly appended addresses for each child. But there were still some mavericks among the clade, those who had clearly gone out on their own and assembled their own letters off their own bat, who wrote long, fiddly messages in barely readable handwriting, screeds that went on for pages and pages and finished with a hopeful, but fundamentally useless, “Micky, aged 8”. Sadly, around 20 percent of all the letters I received were sent by children who hadn’t gotten the memo, and either didn’t know their own address or thought it unnecessary to provide it to a magical flying man in the habit of delivering billions of toys in twelve hours. It was these which were placed in the bin, and it was these which began to work on me the longer I worked there; the sadness of that pile of spurned missives, filled with dreams and love and the hopes of a kinder world. And it was these which I began to tell people about more and more, until I noticed they didn’t like that part of the story quite so much. On my last day, I opened one such letter, addressed simply to Santa, without even a stamp or a seal. It was, surely, filled with the promise of bicycles not to be, but I opened it to find two words in Mick’s sarcastic scrawl. “Don’t weaken,” I read, smiling, before tossing it in the bin. ● 35