Me: Stop torturing the cat.
Herself: I’m not torturing her, she likes it.
Daniel: It’s mean to torture animals.
Me: Yes it is.
Daniel: And to kill them.
Me: Yes, indeed.
Daniel: But you ate a lamb.
Archives for January 2010
Vindicated
I have always loved languages. I am fascinated by the ways they are similar and the ways they are different. My brother is firmly of the view that foreign languages are useless as we speak English and everyone speaks English.
I have just received the following text message from him: “In South Tirol. No one speaks English. German or Italian only. Major stress. Maybe you were right about languages being important.”
Hah.
What mid-lifers like to watch on television
When I was a teenager, I was given grinds in Irish by an older cousin who was a primary school teacher and therefore spoke fluent Irish. He performed this service in exchange for tea and biscuits, so it was a pretty good deal for my parents. He was 6 or 7 years older than me and, of course, when you are 17, that is a lifetime. In between making me laugh with his outrageous impressions of Peig, I quizzed him about what it meant to be fully grown-up (as Gaeilge, of course). For me, the litmus test was the news. Did he watch the nine o’clock news? Voluntarily and of his own free will? He did, sometimes.
Of an evening now, I find myself actively looking forward to nine o’clock when the children are finally in bed and Mr. Waffle and I sit down in front of the nine o’clock news with a cup of tea. The soothing tones of Eileen Dunne giving out more information about the snow represent a definite highlight of my evening. Then, the other night after the news, I watched a documentary on TG4 about Máire Geoghan-Quinn. I found it interesting.
I was chatting to a friend the other day about how there is never anything on the television. Our conversation went as follows:
Me: There’s never anything on television
Friend: We have one of these boxes that records programmes for you and it’s really great.
Me: Oh, like that tivo thing?
Her: Yeah, we’ve just finished watching an excellent series.
Me: What?
Her: No, no, I’m too embarrassed to say.
Me (thinking “Bad cosmetic surgery”?): Ah go on, do, do, do tell.
Her: No, I can’t.
Me (thinking “what could it be?”): Ah do.
Her (defensively): Alright, it’s really good actually. It’s “A History of Christianity”
So tell me, what mortifyingly worthy things do you like to watch?
Morning has broken
I see that Finslippy has trouble getting out the door in the morning. So do we. Part of this is because I am a late person and Mr. Waffle is a punctual person. Part of this is because the children move at the speed of flies caught in treacle and we often have to dress all three of them to try to hurry them up and get them out the door.
Take a random morning, at 7.45 Michael came into me screaming. He had dreamt that I had gone to Cork on the train and left him behind. No persuasion of mine (including my presence) could persuade him that I had not committed this sin. I am slightly hoist by my own petard here as I have very vivid dreams myself and can be quite cross with my loving husband for transgressions of which I have only dreamed. Michael continued to scream from 7.45 until we bundled him into the car at 8.45. Daniel was initially cross but calmed down and the Princess was largely good.
When we got into school, the Princess insisted that I accompany her to her classroom on the 4th floor. I panted up. Since I had gone all that way, I decided I might as well check something with the teacher. The other night the Princess came home asking for a dictionary for school. She was unclear as to what kind of dictionary it was. Was it an Irish/English dictionary or an English dictionary or an Irish dictionary? Also, there was no dictionary on her booklist. Was there some approved kiddie dictionary that I should buy? When I asked the teacher about this, it turned out that they were not using dictionaries at all. It was pure fantasy. She sounded so convincing though. She was absolutely mortified by my conversation with the teacher and turned tail and fled back down the four flights of stairs and out to the front door where her father was waiting for me. Between us we bullied and cajoled her back up the four flights of stairs and into the classroom. I really felt for her. I remember myself, the occasional awful juddering moment when school and home and truth and fantasy collided. Oh well.
Is it any wonder I’m exhausted when I get to work?
The Romantic at Work
Me: Listen to the seagulls.
Colleague: Yes, they are very excitable today.
Me: Imagine, before this building was here, centuries ago when the Vikings were here, even before that when there was no Dublin at all, the same seagulls were screeching around the sky on this very site.
Colleague: Well, hardly the same seagulls.
Me: OK, not exactly the same seagulls…
You’d think that the genetic code would have better things to do
Me (singing): Free, free, set them free, if you love someone set them free.
Princess: No, Mummy, if you love someone, set him or her free.
