'I'm fed up looking like Father Christmas,'
Muttered Father Christmas one year.
'I need a new outfit. I must move with the times.

He was seven and I was six, my Brendon Gallacher.
He was Irish and I was Scottish, my Brendon Gallacher.
His father was in prison; he was a cat burglar.

That fire, they said, was red as red as red
as red as a fox, your lips, a cherry;
that fire, they said spread and spread and spread,
faster than a cheetah or a nasty rumour;

His name is called and there's a pause

just long enough to halt a war

tame timber wolves and trim their claws

hide diamonds in a secret drawer

He swears on his mother's life he wasn't there.

And if he was there

he swears on his mother's life it wasn't him.

And if it was him

Forest could keep secrets
Forest could keep secrets

There she was on the news,
Miss Goody Two Shoes
caught on CCTV.

Don't look so shocked.
Of course you know who – who else but Goldilocks!

It's New Year, 1979, at Funderland in the RDS in Dublin. 
In the cold calculation of the January air, a young girl tries to talk 

I like to stay up
and listen
when big people talking
jumbie stories

I does feel
so tingly and excited
inside me

But when my mother say
“Girl, time for bed”

Nobody can see my name on me.
My name is inside
and all over me, unseen
like other people also keep it.
Isn't my name magical?