Ochone! Ochone! But I had the most terrible childhood, let me tell you. Every evening my father would come home from work, roaring sober, and crash into the house and grab me - grab me! - and throw me up in the air and squeeze me until I almost burst with laughter. And then he would chase my sisters and brother around and around until the place was a madhouse and my mother would be pleading with him, begging him to stop.
Friday nights were the worst. God, I can hardly bear to think of them yet. He'd come into the house without even going to the pub, his pockets stuffed with sweets, and he'd force us - force us mind you - to search for them. And then, when we were stuffed with eating the damn things, he'd diddle us on his knees and cuddle us until his dinner was ready and we were sent up the stairs to bed. Cruel, heartless bastard.
Relentless
And, as for my mother, well, what can I tell you? Not once did I ever come home to find her drunk and sprawled in the easy chair. Not once. And every night, without fail, there would be my dinner on the table. And every morning clean clothes. She was relentless, merciless.
Then came school. You won't believe this but this pair sent me to the nuns - THE NUNS! What those dreadful Sisters of St Louis did to me was just unspeakable. I cannot remember even once being beaten to within an inch of my life with the cane. Can you believe that? Never was I made stand all day in a corner with my back to the class. Not once was I ritually humiliated in front of the other kids.
Instead, those awful women asked us questions about our families and, in my case, our occasional holidays in Glasgow; told us wonderful, magical stories; taught me to read and write and taught me Irish - even though they knew I enjoyed it. Evil bitches, the lot of them.
Wait, it gets worse. I became an altar boy. Well, you know what's coming next, don't you? Can you believe that not one of those priests in the 10 years I was an altar boy groped me? Not one of them tried to get me into bed. Not one of them offered me sweeties to slip upstairs for a few minutes. I mean, I know I'm no looker, but. . .
So the question I want an answer to is this: What chance did I have to make millions from writing about my miserable bloody childhood in a bleak, dismal and drunken Ireland?
Even though I, too, kicked stones up and down the streets of Clones, what chance did I have of writing a brilliant but terrifying and deeply pessimistic novel about a child psychopath like the one written by your man McCabe, the cousin.
Even though I, too, chased up and down the Hairy Mountain and played Cowboys and Indians in Rabbie McGuinness's field, I never met anyone who showed the slightest signs of becoming a nutcase. What rotten luck, eh?
What chance did I have of writing a pathetic, over-the-top piece of self-indulgent twaddle and have it become a worldwide best seller and then have it made into an even longer, even more ridiculous and risible film by Alan Parker, no less?
Tin bath
Unlike poor Frank McCourt, the only time I ever saw water on the kitchen floor was when we'd finished splashing around in the tin bath in front of the big, black range. We'd no running water at all, you see, far less a floor full of it. And unlike McCourt's Limerick, what I remember about Clones is the tar sticking to my bare feet, the summers were so hot.
It's all my bloody parents' fault for treating me so well. I mean, who wants to read a book or see a film called Margaret's Merriment or Jack's Joy? And what chance did I have of hitching a ride on the fastest-growing of the Celtic Tiger's many cubs: Ireland's misery industry, where the greatest load of chancers on the planet vie with each other to produce the most God-awful reminiscences of an Ireland that my parents - yes, them again - never let me see or hear about.
These people remind me of nothing so much as the Yorkshire businessmen in the classic Monty Python sketch. You know the one: "Oooooh, when ah were a lad we were so poor we 'ad t'live in cardboard box at side of roooad."
"Cardboard box? Cardboard box? We were so poor we'd 'ave killed for something as grand as cardboard box."
Misery
It would make you sick. I could have been a bloody millionaire by now if my dad had been a drunk, my mam a dipso. Was that too much to ask? Why was I unlucky enough to be reared in a loving, caring environment in what was probably the poorest town in Ireland. I know well there was misery there. Too bad I just didn't know where to look.
Worst of all, what chance did I have of becoming imbued with the self-hatred necessary for writing newspaper columns bemoaning the Celtic Tiger and all its works and its pomps. Or, God help me, saturated with self-importance like those poor eejits who write letters to The Irish Times which begin: "Once again we have become the laughing stock of the world. . ."
So, Mam and Dad, wherever you are: all that love, all that laughter, all that joy - "I'LL NEVER FORGIVE THE PAIR OF YOU!"