Cork

I went down to Cork for the weekend. When I left Dublin on Friday lunch time, it was warm and sunny. Like a fool, I decided it was warm enough to go to Cork without my coat. Honestly, am I nine or forty nine? Normally, I get lifts all the time but for a variety of dull reasons, I had to get myself around without lifts this weekend. This is relevant.

When I got to Cork on Friday evening it was lashing. I cycled glumly to my parents’ house on a Cork bike. My parents’ house is so warm that I had more or less steam dried in about an hour which was just as well as I only had a solitary pair of trousers with me.

The next morning I woke up with a pain in my tooth. This was doubly annoying as I was at the dentist last week. It wasn’t super painful but more numb like when you get an injection. Over the course of the day it spread all around my top teeth in a slightly disturbing development.

On Saturday morning I cycled in to town. Obviously, I could have taken a coat out from my parents’ house but I decided that the weather would hold. I don’t know why I would have decided that and with a certain inevitability I got soaked again on the way back to my parents’ house. As my general mouth pain spread, I began to wonder whether I had given myself Bell’s palsy by recklessly cycling around in the rain without a coat. But it got better over the course of the day and was on both sides so, I decided probably not.

I visited my mother in the nursing home. She was awake and I knew that she recognised me because she looked at me and said, “Your hair is lovely.” This is literally all she said in the hour I was there. This is a long-standing fault line between us. She loves my hair long and I like it to be short; in fact, I think it really needs a cut. I’m glad she’s still in there somewhere in dementia land although the comment annoyed me as it invariably did when she was well, so some patterns seem to survive a great deal of change.

On Saturday night, my sister and I went to the cinema. We drove. Say what you like about the car, it’s good at keeping you dry.

I came back to Dublin early on Sunday morning. I cycled to the station in Cork and got soaked. I dried on the train. Then, I cycled home from the station and got soaked all over again. The rain in Dublin was considerably chillier than the rain in Cork. I arrived home freezing and damp to find that the builders had cut a power line and the heating. Unsatisfactory. Herself filled me a hot water bottle. On the plus side, my tooth pain completely disappeared. I suppose this is what this blog is going to be from now on as I move to my 50s: a litany of mysterious symptoms which come and go with no rhyme or reason.

On Sunday afternoon we went to inspect Dublin’s newest tourist attraction, the Vaults which was ok but more aimed at tourists than locals and probably for a younger crowd. We went off to a mild afternoon birthday celebration for Uncle A where Mr. Waffle dimmed the lights to blow out the candles causing unspeakable terror to my little niece, S. Is it bad that I found that mildly amusing? Herself babysat for them last night and as she went home, her aunt pressed a packet of Marietta biscuits into her hand, “Take these, please, we have to get rid of them, they’re like crack cocaine for S.”

When we got home we lit fires to try to keep us warm. It snowed outside. Overall, damp and chilly.

Michael is now taller than me as well. I suppose it’s only a question of time before Herself passes me out.

And how was your own weekend?