It”s only in retrospect that I realize how hard it must be for school teachers to retain so completely the illusion of having no live outside of their jobs. They can’t give away any of their actual interests, the clothes they wear, the places they go at night, the people they spend their time with. Not only do various PC by-laws forbid them from acting too like genuine extra-professional human beings,
I wish I could describe Dublin’s tattoo shops as dusty backstreet parlours populated by burly ex-sailors and gangsters forming queues, with rusty needles picked up off the floor. But Dublin’s tattoo artists are a disarmingly friendly lot. Their shops are meticulously clean and, most shocking of all, family friendly.
Years ago in a previous incarnation of The Gloss, back when I was a 17-year-old, MAC makeup-ed young one, I wrote a piece beginning with the words ‘Its fabulous being a teenager’. Leaving Cert terror aside, I genuinely believed that I had learned all I needed to in life, and that I was ready to go out into the world, a fully-formed though thoroughly inexperienced Young Adult.
It’s fabulous being a teenager. Not at all the grungy, sturm und drang affair we have all come to expect. I should know: I’ve been one these last five years. The word ‘teenager’ is a label, a set of expectations, but also it affords us an incredible liberty.
