Daily Ireland

...and how a butterfly might just end up at your belly button

I saw a man with a noose tattooed around his neck and the words ‘A Rope for the Pope’ running around his throat.

Here’s The Thing - by Robin Livingstone

There’s a girl at the Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education (Bifhe) who’s doing a dissertation on just why it is that young women in certain parts of Belfast spend all day in their pyjamas.

I advise her to be careful.

I’m open to correction here, but I reckon I was the first to alert the globe to the phenomenon of All Day Pyjama Syndrome (ADPS). I first committed the matter to paper almost exactly three years ago (**see article >>here), and since then ADPS has become a pandemic. I remember vividly the first time I realised that ADPS was a notifiable condition under the convention of the World Health Organisation. It was July 2003 and I was walking through Turf Lodge at around 2.45pm. In the space of a couple of minutes I spied seven women going about their daily business in their PJs. Not standing at the door talking to the neighbour or nipping out to the doorstep to pick up the milk – actually doing everyday things that normally require a person to get dressed.

Two women were walking along Norglen Gardens, proceeding to who-knows-where in that peculiar shuffle necessitated by the wearing of fluffy mules on the feet. Both sets of pyjamas were pink, silk(y) and baggy. Both twentysomethings had large gold hoops in their ears and they had both had a Turf Lodge facelift (ie the scrunchies had pulled up their hair so severely that the skin around the cheeks and eyes was lifted too.) Both had their arms folded defiantly and both had a lighter and a twenty-deck of Superkings tucked in their armpits.

Inside a nearby newsagent another two women – one in her twenties, the other perhaps 40 – were picking up a few items: the older woman browsing for a newspaper, the younger buying crisps and chewing gum. Again, the pyjamas were silk(y) and baggy – one pair pink, the other yellow. Both had fluffy mules, facelifts, big earrings and cigarettes. I was still considering the import of all those when across the street I noticed another young woman with ADPS getting into a black taxi, which seemed somehow even more shocking because she was leaving a district in which her mode of (un)dress was the order of the day to travel to another part of the city – the city centre for all I knew.

I made some enquiries like all good journalists do (had a chat down the Roddy’s with my pals) and it turns out that by mid-2003 ADPS had also spread to the lower Falls. So I wrote a bit in the paper about it and a number of wimmin were less than pleased, which is why I reckon the Bifhe girl needs to be careful. A right-on republican friend of mine argued that because women in working-class areas are all too often left alone to shoulder the onerous burden of raising a family and keeping a home, it’s no surprise that some decide to remain in, ah, housewear all day long. If the roles were reversed, she argued, men would in all likelihood do the same. I sheepishly took my medicine and went on my way. I didn’t have the nerve to tell her that she was wrong – wrong because men just don’t wear pyjamas any more. If I went to the shop in the morning dressed in the clothes I go to bed in I’d be arrested, for no self-respecting shopkeeper is going to let a bloke in a Spirit of Freedom T-shirt and a pair of black trunks anywhere near the coconut fingers.

One good thing about the PJs is that they cover up the tattoos, and tattoos are another aspect of contemporary life of which I am a student. Tattoos were in vogue in the year 2000 BC, if not before, examination of Egyptian and Nubian mummies tells us that much. Squinter’s not sure what the tattoos said back then – Mummy Loves Daddy perhaps? FTP (F**k the Pharaohs)? (Click photo to view)

Of course, tattoos have become much more sophisticated down through the ages. I was in a black taxi a few years ago and saw a fella – now perhaps in his mid-40s – with the entire back of his right hand covered in a three-deck navy-blue message: SHOW WADDY WADDY.

Seemed like a good idea on the night you have to suppose. Barrackbuster of Olde English, jar of Indian ink, needle, friends, Pretty Little Angel Eyes playing in the background. What more could a bloke ask for?

Regular readers of this column will know that the Andytown News wildlife correspondent, Dulra, and I are countrified gentlemen, big into huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. Some years back when I was a pimply youth a fellow field sports enthusiast was enamoured of his ferret – a big yellow dog polecat that stank to high heaven – that he had its name tattooed on his lower arm. Even today, when he’s a professional man doing very well for himself, the letters ‘TC’ occupy that important little space between his watch and shirt cuff and are a constant source of wonder and surprise to clients at meetings. He wouldn’t change it for the world.

My aesthetic sensibility tends towards the minimalist: the pared-to-the-bone installations of Sol Lewitt, for instance, or monosyllabic, masked reductionism of Noh theatre. So it is with tattoos – the simply home-scrawled classics are what do it for me: Mum Loves Dad; Bap; Soupy; Fra; UTP; FTP; the swift copied off the matchbox cover; the cross; the LOVE-HATE knuckles.

Disturbingly, the tendency in tattoos seems to be away from the Indian ink and needle of my youth, and towards the tattoo parlour. It’s all Celtic bands around the bicep now, butterflies on the cleavage, roses on the shoulder and dolphins on the buttocks. All of which might seem hip and cool now, but take it from me, if you’ve got one off these, posterity will judge it to have been a huge mistake.
What’s the Celtic band going to look like come the inevitable day when the skin tone has gone and the back of your arms is flapping like a mainsail in a force ten? How’s that butterfly going to look when your cleavage has gone and it’s nearer your bellybutton than your chest? And when the district nurse turns up to give you a jab for the old lumbago, what’s she going to say when you bend over only for Flipper to peek over the elastic on your thermals?

It could be worse, you could be a loyalist. Poor, demented Sam McCrory, sometime UDA bigshot, was one of a group of UFF men who met Mo Mowlam in Long Kesh a few years back with the word ‘Oi!’ tattooed on the side of his neck in three-inch high letters. At a City Hall demo, I saw a man with a noose tattooed around his neck and the words ‘A Rope for the Pope’ running around his throat. Didn’t do him any harm at job interviews. And the leg pictured upon this page belongs to a loyalist bandsman taking part in one of the non-contentious and perfectly peaceful Orange parades along the Ormeau Road.

And as for the $64,000 question… do I have any tattoos? Well, that’s between me and my bathroom mirror... And eventually my home help.

robin@irelandclick.com