Cork

Did you know we went to East Cork to stay in our friends’ house? We have excellent friends; a lifetime of careful choosing.

So, in a very 1950s way, Mr. Waffle worked in Dublin and came down at the weekends and I stayed in Cork with the children. The weather was quite outstanding. This did not overcome Michael’s permanent objection to going to the beach but we forced him there; an exercise that requires more enthusiasm on the part of a parent than you might imagine.

The children spread their wings in a mild way. I went for a swim and left them in the house. The three of them went to the nearby playground together, played and came back. They quite enjoyed being out without their loving parents and I am quite pleased with how responsible herself is becoming. Regrettably, she is getting a bit sophisticated for playgrounds.

We made our annual pilgrimage to Leahy’s fun farm which, as usual, delivered the goods. My cousin, who is a farmer’s son and father of three small children, is underwhelmed by Leahy’s but then he has to go and milk cows whenever his brother goes off golfing, so he and his family are more jaded when it comes to farm animals.

There was a climbing thingy:

There was a snake:

There were (new this), mice to put in your hair:

The Princess made friends with a little French girl and the pair of them ran around together. As ever, her parents were utterly unimpressed by an Irish child who spoke good French. There is a reason why sang froid is a French expression. In an effort to keep her French up over the summer, I have offered to pay her €8.25 [a figure subject to intense negotiation] if she reads one of the Harry Potter books in French. She got to page 87 when the e-reader died. What are we to make of this? Insights thus far: “you-know-who” in French is “tu-sais-qui” when speaking to children and “vous-savez-qui” for adults. Watch this space for more exciting updates. We’ve just purchased a new e-reader. Sigh.

My brother and mother came to visit us for the day. My mother has not been well and it was lovely to get her out of the city. The loveliness was somewhat compromised by my father calling to say that my aunt and two of my cousins had come to visit my mother. He had been peacefully reading the Telegraph when they arrived and although he was happy to welcome them, he was even happier when I said that they should come to us. Meanwhile, my brother had taken the children and the house key to the beach and turned off his mobile phone. So my mother and I sat in the rather toasty car contemplating breaking in. I mulled on the state of disorder which would greet my cousins and aunt. Eventually the sandy ones returned with a very melted packet of chocolate fingers. It all passed off peacefully but I retired to bed with a migraine at 9. Visitors are tiring.

We have been to East Cork many times but never to Cloyne so I forced the children to visit. It is full of interesting things. Despite this photo, they did not like it and they did not find it interesting:

But look, it has a round tower:

An effigy of Bishop Berkeley who spent nearly 20 years here (though he died elsewhere):

It also has a rather fancy marble stone memorial to the man who was a leading light in the British and Foreign Bible Society:

But no, they remained resolutely unimpressed. Can you take more of this tomorrow?

Before she broke her hip, my mother was going through old letters. She rang me and asked whether I wanted to keep my letters to her. “Nope,” I said, “I didn’t even know you still had them, throw them out.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my parents’ house since then and I found the big black bag of letters in the dining room waiting to be sent for recycling. I started to leaf through them. The first thing that astonished me was that there were so many of them. I wrote a lot of letters from airports. And then from when I lived in Brussels and before that in Rome. I seemed to spend every spare minute I had writing letters [and I know that I wrote to friends as well – I was clearly a writing machine]. They had, I regret to say, no great literary merit but thematically they seemed to cover: looking for jobs; asking for money and thanking my parents for money already received. I was certainly reminded of the extent to which my loving parents had bankrolled my early years in the work place. No wonder they were so relieved when I finally managed to get properly paid employment as opposed to my time doing traineeships and internships.

I let the letters go into the bin. I suppose they stopped when email got going, sometime between 1995 and 1998. Imagine, I am from the last generation of people who routinely put pen to paper to share news. Who would have thought?