LOOSE UNICORN

I was talking to my friend at a loud party last night and i was describing someone i knew as a 'loose unit' and she was like Oh wow i love that a loose Unicorn and the next minute she was on a roll about the magic horn, etheral white glow and how amazing they were.... FYI she's American. The Americans love that shit, the elf ear implants and all that creepy extreme fantasy stuff (these are the kinda people that have "relationships" with their golden labradors and miniature ponies). When i was a kid my aunty who lived in the US would post us these amazingly beautiful and incredibly tacky stickers of unicorns with glitter rainbows and crystal waterfall backdrops. We stuck them on everything we owned, pencil cases, my bmx, my baby brothers Massey Ferguson toy tractor and all over our beautiful antique mahogony beds.

In August in Ireland we have a big horse event called the Dublin Horse Show, it was the nucleaus of our summer as kids litreally nothing existed outside of it, we would be foaming at the mouth weeks before they had even started putting the signs up. It was here that we conducted reunions for Pony Camp which occured earlier in the summer in June. 
A plethora of kids leading ponies of all shapes and sizes would pour out of horseboxes onto the racecourse like some weird, crash landed Kinder Egg with saddles and bridles and grooming kits as extra bits.  We all camped over night in the bars on site, it was pretty much where everyone tried smoking and got their tits felt for the first time.  It was great, man oh man i have some special memories from there, everyone had traintracks and bad timing so there were cut bloody lips and everything....lots of snogging, one handed wrestling with bra straps and dry humping in the racing stands. 

The horse show was a haven for animal lovers, they always had stands there for associations against testing on animals, my sister and i would donate our hard earned cash and pick up leaflets featuring pictures of pink faced monkeys with all kinds of electrodes and things in their heads and lop eared rabbits with their fur shaved off and weeping eyes. The RSPCA were more into emaciated donkeys with long curly hooves and starving dogs. The dunkeys really did us in, I remember myself and my sister  bawling our eyes out the entire drive home in the back of the car looking at these pictures and just our hearts breaking all over the place.

I had a hell of a lot of empathy for animals as a kid. I had a  pet cemetery in the garden where i would conduct burials for all the roadkill i stumbled upon on my daily local trots. Shovelling up the tiny little corpses off the road, wrapping them in newspaper and burying them in miniature raised graves side by side with the cherished family pets consisting of mice, hamsters goldfish, cats, guinea pigs....etc there was a pretty high pet death toll in the Cooney household. Each animal had it's own handpainted tombstone. One grave housed only half of the corpse of my beloved pet eel Dick Francis, the other half of Dick Francis's slippery little body lay in the grave next door in the belly of my cat Benjamin Wolfgang who had eaten Dick Francis the day before he himself got hit by a car. Holy hell there's tragedy in childhood i tell you, the  tenderness of youth leaves you vulnerable to every living thing's pain.