As part of our summer series, we invited ‘Irish Times’ readers to write accounts of their other lives or careers. Here’s a selection
Anne-Marie O’Farrell: ‘I’d have made a most frustrated nun’
My other life would have been as a Loreto nun. I could never have foreseen that, 20 years later, I would be a wife, a mother, a priest and a musician.
At 18 I wanted to be a priest, but I settled for joining religious life after college. Each month I would cycle to Rathfarnham for the community weekends that were part of my first year as a “candidate”.
There was psychological testing, lengthy chats with my spiritual directors and much prayer. The women were caring and insightful. I also remember being struck by their beautiful phrasing as they sang during the daily office.
Some weekends I would come away feeling drained from the psychological analysis. In the end, that self-enquiry helped me leave, since I’d come to know myself better. The year ended with three weeks of live-in experience with an older community. At one point I negotiated obtaining a key to the front door, clearing the way for me to attend, of all things, a fundraising concert for the National Maternity Hospital.
Soon afterwards, when my doubts about religious life could no longer be ignored, the order laid on an independently run retreat to help give me space.
I went on to find my spiritual home in the Church of Ireland. I’m now a priest, serving in Sandford and St Philip’s, Milltown in a voluntary, part-time capacity alongside my work as a harpist, composer and teacher.
I’d have made a most frustrated nun.
Gerry McNamara: ‘I wanted to be a crusading journalist’
Last year, I visited the new offices of The Irish Times.
The tour provoked mixed feelings. The bright, quiet newsroom with its gleaming technology was nothing like the dark bedlam of Fleet Street in the mid-1970s, and thoughts of what might have been kept intruding.
In my final school years I was sure I wanted to be a journalist, a career that seemed to offer a unique mix of intellectual challenge, social responsibility, glamour and travel. In 1974 a friend got me a summer job as an Irish Timescopy carrier.
I collected stories from journalists in such places as Leinster House, the RDS and Bowes’ pub, brought them to the news editors and onto the great, smoke-shrouded sub-editing desk.
Douglas Gageby, Donal Foley, Maeve Binchy and Mary Maher passed before my starstruck eyes. They were brilliant, passionate and exuberant. The constant banter was as sophisticated as I had dreamed.
However, as the summer drew to a close, I began to harbour doubts. A conversation with the gregarious Henry Kelly confirmed my pessimism, when he said, meaningfully: “You know, to do well in this business, you need a big personality, or to put it more honestly, a neck like the proverbial . . . ” I took the hint and changed direction.
Aisling Twomey: ‘I considered myself a circus artist’
My brother and I, at a young age, frequented the banisters of our house, sliding down, climbing up, dangling from them – you name it, we chanced it.
Every time, I considered myself a circus artist, clambering higher and higher to provide entertainment to screaming hordes below. I intended to do this for the rest of my valid life.
My career was cut short when I was but five years old. Casually clinging to the highest bannister in the house, some 20 feet above any kind of solid ground (solid ground that was was nothing more than stairs, so doubly dangerous), I realised I simply could not hang on any longer.
After that night, my career path changed; I simply was not meant to reach those heights.
Egregiously trusting in the imagination that once made me a circus performer, I followed a different path – I became a writer.
Breandan O’Broin: ‘I could have been an All-Ireland champion’
I had just scored a point from a long way out, on the right touchline. It was my third score of the game. I was 12.
“Mark my words, that boy will play for Dublin some day.” The Christian Brother who managed our school team turned excitedly to my father, who rubbed his hands, partly because it was cold, mainly in proud anticipation.
But it was not to be. I stayed small, and to make the grade at senior level, you had to be able to catch a high ball; players kicked the ball high back then, rather than hand-passing it.
And so I found myself on Hill 16, on tippy-toe, looking on, thinking ‘I could be out there, one of Heffo’s Heroes’. I could hear the Dubs fans chant my name, like they chanted Jimmy Keaveney’s. I could see myself marching to the Artane Boys Band, scoring the goal, kissing the medal, hugging my Dad.
In my other life, I could have been an All-Ireland champion and, later, a media guru. I missed out by inches.
Barbara McKenna: ‘Kamal proposed to me in the lift’
The year was 1982 and at 28, with a failed romance in Dublin, I took a job in the male surgical unit of a hospital in the United Arab Emirates.
The work was hard but the patients were pleasant and often had their own servants. Kamal was such a patient. I cared for him after a small nasal reconstruction and did very little for him except ask the servant to give him his medication. I became very fond of him through our shared love of English chocolate, which he had imported.
On his discharge date, he proposed marriage to me in the lift. He told me he was rich and a famous wrestler in Cairo. I was overwhelmed and briefly dazzled. I would have my own servants, a villa and maybe the occasional ringside seat watching him perform.
I declined when I saw his huge wife joining us at the discharge desk. He pressed a box of the English chocolates we both loved into my hands and looked meaningfully in to my eyes. I gazed back and saw the sun, sand and fame slip away. But at least I had the chocolates.
Vickey Howell: ‘The nearest I got was playing a munchkin’
It started with my regaling bus passengers with Over the Rainbow, and continued with weekly classes at the Billie Barry Stage School.
While I could act and sing , I was let down by a distinct lack of terpsichorean dexterity, meaning my two years were spent in the corner reserved for girls with two left feet. The nearest I got to my dream of becoming a musical actress in the mould of Judy Garland was playing a distressed munchkin.
I am relatively secure in my 9-to-5, get a regular wage and keep up my acting and singing. I'm available for weddings, funerals, shows, though probably not dance spectaculars. I'm even appearing in The Pirates of Penzancein the National Concert Hall and Spring Awakening in the Helix in September. Come if you dare.
Frances Myers: ‘I applied for a brickie job in London’
In the summer of ’69, I was sent my aunts’ to do a job.
I was 15 and not expecting to build a henhouse. I looked with confusion at the heaps of bricks. My aunt raged: “Do they teach you nothing these days?” She whipped up the spade and sparks flew. “Walls can’t stand without feet,” she hollered to the hills. Boys sniggered behind hedges. Two, brave enough to sneak in, showed me how to measure, mix, line up and level. Not once did she chase them away.
I woke every day to a brand new view. Flatness was replaced by a growing square with angles and lines dusted in lime – more beautiful than the Taj Mahal.
A few years later I applied for a “brickie” job in London during a bored lunchbreak at the office. They hid their shock well, then told me it was against regulations. “We only have one toilet and it’s a gents’ – sorry.”
I believe the henhouse still stands, despite extensions, decking and garden gnomes. Isn’t that something!
