Shortly after my father, Joseph Anthony Gerard Morrissey, passed away in 2009, I discovered three handwritten diary entries on loose A4 sheets. He had already typed up and published many other entries on a Slovakian website, which is unfortunately no longer online.
I do not know who wrote these pages or how to trace the author,
so I am sharing them here to finish what he started.
If you have any information about these entries or recognise who might have written them,
please get in touch by leaving a message or sending an email.
Enjoy reading.
There is a small village General Store at the bottom of the three-kilometre lane from our village to the parent village of Hronská Dúbrava. In front of its steps is a dilapidated bench, lurching under a bedraggled conifer. In front of the bench are two used car tyres which, once upon a time, must have contained flowers. However, currently they contain nothing but assorted weeds and a million-or-so cigarette butts. These giant vehicular ashtrays are surrounded by dust in the summer and a quagmire of mud in the winter. In clement weather, the bench is occupied by a small congregation of out-of-work drunks, who gather there with their dogs, fags, and the cheapest bottled beer in the village. In our village, you can buy a bottle of beer, drink it outside, and return the bottle for the deposit, which is put down on the next bottle. Of course, the beer is supplemented by surreptitious bottles of home-distilled Slivo.
Our village drunk and executive is Jay, a regular. The most regular regular. The bench has the inestimable advantage of being adjacent both to the nearest beer for Jay and, just a few metres away, the village graveyard, where his late partner lies buried. So Jay can kill two birds with one stone—or should I say, two kidneys with one beer. He can deposit an armful of half-dead flowers higgledy-piggledy on the grave and guzzle a bellyful of beer at the same time.
By some miracle, Jay gets a 4,000 Koruna pension. This after a lifetime's non-contribution to any known, or unknown, pension scheme. Jay had, on the death of his partner, discovered religion, but not the attributes that go with it, like sobriety; he asserts to all and sundry that his undeserved pension is a blessing from God to his deserving, 'returning to the fold' sheep. He has got the Bible-thumping, self-justifying jargon of the born-again down to a tee.
He ought to run for the American presidency: his ignorance, stupidity, and incompetence, together with his cunning, should have him in with a good chance. His main handicap is that he can speak in complete, syntactically correct sentences when not drunk. It is clear to the rest of us that his pension is the result of some monumental, post-communist, bureaucratic cock-up. Not divine intervention.
