Hold on to your hats now.
Look at this vase of flowers all of which I grew myself.
And let us admire the amazingness of the iphone camera which I used to take pictures of this bumble bee on the buddleia in the lane. Yes, I know Apple predictive text isn’t up to much but it has its strengths.
That is all, I’m afraid.
I dragged the guys out to the birthplace of Charles Stewart Parnell. I would say mildly successful. We did the walk through the forest treetops (tame) and the slide (impressive looking but surprisingly tame also). I hadn’t planned to do it myself but the bored teenager at the top told me the youngest person down it was 14 weeks (in a parent’s arms) and the oldest 96 so I reckoned I would be ok.
There was no queue which, honestly, was a big part of the attraction. Generally the queue lasts for hours. Yes, really, like a Disney ride.
The house itself has been lovingly restored and it’s worth a visit but the guided tour was a bit too long.
We got to see Kitty O’Shea’s wedding ring made by the man himself from gold panned in the Avoca river.
Mr. Waffle and I went to see a truly awful film called La Syndicaliste mostly because we heard a really amazing podcast about the story it is based on. It was on the regularly excellent Doc on 1 series. It’s about a trade unionist in France who gets attacked. The main character’s name is Maureen Kearney and she’s Irish. They didn’t change the name or delve into the back story in the film. The main character is played by Isabelle Huppert who has a very French accent when she speaks English which is just weird. In the podcast one of the things that strikes one is that even though this woman is married to a French man, has French children and has lived there for years, she is still a foreigner and that element is obviously lost. It’s not a fatal flaw. The fatal flaw is the script which is a real shame as it’s such a good story. I seriously recommend the podcast.
I took Daniel to a GAA match for the first time in ages.
I was traumatised to discover that it was the exact same place that I had taken him the last time I went to a match with him where I got soaked. Did I get soaked again? Yes, yes I did.
But at least I’m not sporting the same kind of injuries as he is.
When my father came home from work to see that my mother had spent some time wrestling with the hedge he would say regretfully, “Ah, the hedge hating peasantry”. A wonder she didn’t hit him. I have inherited her hedge clippers and did some damage to the hedge myself today. I also cut the wire on the extension lead. Sigh. It tripped the relevant trip switch and obviously the extension lead no longer works but otherwise, mercifully, no harm done. I can’t help wondering whether more modern models might be a bit safer.
The extension lead was not my only victim. My agapanthus has only put up two flowers this year (still buds at this point). One of them was knocked off by a careless family member some weeks ago, the culprit has still not been identified. While I was wielding my clippers of death today, Michael was cutting the grass. When I paused in my labours he said laconically, “You’ve cut your flower.” No agapanthus this year then.
Lest you think Daniel was idle while Michael was mowing, fear not, he was on “pick up the clippings” duty. Herself cut me to the quick (cutting appears to be the theme of today’s piece) by saying recently that one task just conceals another so the reward for completing one task is getting another. This is, sadly, true. So, I sent the boys upstairs to sort out the schoolbooks they no longer want. No sign of this task actually being completed so I can keep it in reserve for emergencies, I guess.
An old friend of mine – a great gardener – once said that every garden has at least one thug. My garden has several but I was resigned to this until I saw something growing like crazy. I became convinced it was Japanese knotweed. I was filled with gloom and despair until Mr. Waffle made me do a google image search and it turns out to be Alpine Enchanter’s Nightshade. Welcome, welcome to your new home remarkably hardy and charmingly named Alpine Enchanter’s Nightshade. No haters please.
Plum season has begun. Shortly we will be in intensive jam production phase.
Until I was 12 or so my family lived in a very big house that came with my father’s job (I have covered elsewhere the trauma of moving from this to a semi-detached Edwardian number). The garden was big. We had a big lawn with a dozen apple trees and a large vegetable garden. There was a gardener who came very regularly but maybe not every day. His name was Michael Lyons and he was genuinely one of the kindest people I have ever met. He worked really hard, I remember him bending down to weed – from the waist, like a tent – and never having a bad word to say to us children as we ran in and out through the potato plants. In retrospect that cannot have been good for them but I remember them being large and providing excellent cover in hide and seek. He came in at lunch time and Cissie (who lived in and minded us and cleaned and tidied and whom we loved – when we moved out, my sister who was small used to say, “I’m going back to my own Cissie” when the rest of us annoyed her, i.e. frequently) made him two perfectly round poached eggs which I was transfixed by. He was unmarried and, naturally, he had a little Jack Russell dog. He was always very quiet and gentle. We used to visit him at home around Christmas and he always seemed pleased to see us – a niggle, was he really? My mother loved sweet peas and he grew masses of them on a fence for her. This year, for the first time, I have grown my own batch of sweet peas. I thought they would remind me of my mother. And they do, of course, but every time I pass them and smell their beautiful summery scent, I think of Michael Lyons.
A friend of mine has not one but two colleagues who are expecting twins. For both women it is a first pregnancy and they both want to breastfeed. She asked me would I meet them and give some advice. I, of course, was utterly delighted to do so – there is nothing I like more than doling out advice. Unfortunately, I retain almost no memory of those first six months of utter exhaustion but, never mind.
My friend (mother of four) came to lunch as well and her colleagues were suitably grateful for her advice and mine. The pregnant women are both professionals in their mid-thirties and they have clearly no idea what is going to hit them despite being thorough researchers with health professionals and, you know, mothers in their families. I offered by way of comfort that I really didn’t think two was a lot harder than one. I did say that one was pretty hard in my experience. One of them said, “I am prepared for breastfeeding to be difficult and painful for the first week.” My friend and I almost laughed. The problem is that it’s really hard to imagine what it’s going to be like until you actually have a baby. One of them said, “My husband will sleep in the spare room as he will have to go out to work and will need his sleep.” My friend and I were firm that her marriage was unlikely to survive this kind of arrangement. Both of us said that it was much easier to go out to work than to stay home with a baby or two and, in fact, she would need any extra sleep that was going. I think she thought that we were crazy.
It really brought me back though to those early miserable days when I was so tired. But, as my friend said to me afterwards, “We got through it and our children are now almost grown ups, we did it!” In fact her youngest is only 12 but I still know what she means and in any event her 12 year old would (in the manner of youngest children) buy and sell the lot of us. My friend said that she gathered her four children together to tell them some good news recently (a promotion) and then had to step outside for a moment before making the announcement. From the hall, she heard her 12 year old confidently inform her older sisters in a stage whisper, “No it can’t be that, she’s definitely started the menopause.”
So what have I been up to? I know you are on the edge of your seat out there. I went to the Dalkey book festival last Saturday. I mentioned it to a friend in the context of not being available for something else and he said, “[Snort] the Dalkey book festival, could you be any more middle class?” Well, I could, in fairness. I could actually live in Dalkey which is a lovely sea side village with the most expensive houses in the country.
I enjoyed my trip to Dalkey. Mr. Waffle and I went to see Lea Ypi whose book I recommend. I found her interesting. Quite angry and still, I think, at heart a communist. You can take the child out of Albania etc. The setting was a Protestant church and I found the seats exquisitely uncomfortable. A former colleague of Mr. Waffle’s was there and she asked a hard question. I was suitably impressed but it disappeared in the deluge of other questions.
The parents of a boy who was in Daniel and Michael’s class in primary school had a party to celebrate their third and final child finishing primary school. In a very real way, we helped them to find the school. The mother met the Princess in the park – aged 5- with her minder and cross-questioned her on the school. She liked what the Princess said and the cut of her jib more generally and decided to send her precious first-born there which is how he ended up in Dan and Michael’s class. I have never before considered how much you have in common with parents of children who went to the same primary school as yours. Even if we didn’t know the parents (and we knew lots of them) we mostly knew them to see. We were all able to admire the school class photos which our hosts had dug out. It was a lovely idea and everyone had a great time. There was even dancing.
Sunday was Fathers’ Day – bit of a quiet day but, you know, grand. Mr. Waffle got a card and a present. And I thought a bit about my own father who was always pretty disapproving of Fathers’ Day; a festival designed by Hallmark, in his view.
No idea what happened on Monday but on Tuesday I was up with the lark, out for a swim, then a cycle in, alas, driving rain which I had not at all planned for.
I then had a very satisfactory long lunch with a friend, cycled up to the school for a last engagement (uniform swap, all of the children’s uniforms have been given away, I am a model of efficiency) and on the way home from school I found a swarm of bees in the lane and got a beekeeper to come and take them away. Your correspondent was exhausted but broadly pleased.
Wednesday was June 21 the longest day of the year and also the day of Dan’s last Leaving Cert exam. It was physics and he was pleased with the paper. In the newspaper a teacher was quoted as saying that it was “a very fair paper”. “That’s teacher code for easy,” said Dan. Herself was pleased with results also so it was a good day all round.
Thursday saw me beating the locked doors of the church with a new father to get in for a baptism prep meeting. The house of the Lord is never closed eh? Anyway, in fairness, the parish priest let us in so new father’s trek from the other side of the city was not in vain (he believes our church to be a half way point between his wife’s family and his, I believe he is mistaken).
And today was Michael’s last exam. It was economics. He had a long time to prepare and he was not enjoying working when Dan was finished but at last the day dawned. He did not like the paper, sadly, so has finished on something of a low. However, it is done and as my father used to say, “students are very poor judges of their own performance”. We all went out to lunch to celebrate. That’s really the very, very end of school. How peculiar.
I do feel sorry for the Joyceans who like to head out in straw boaters on their bicycles today. The fine weather has ended. It is raining. The boys only have one exam each left to do (German was this morning, alright thanks, in preparation we finished watching Dark last night, series 3 nearly killed me, 100% could not recommend). Coincidence? I think not.
I am glad that yesterday, I went out for lunch by the seaside, had a swim and earlier in the week walked to the theatre in sunshine (play about mental asylum a bit harrowing but still bright when we got out). Am I smug? Is this not what you come here for?
