That is how my son Daniel now says, “I did that”. He has a very good ear for languages and for music as well. While the others still sound broadly the same, Daniel has now completely adopted the demotic lingua franca of the playground. I had no idea that bringing up my children in Dublin was going to mean kissing goodbye to grammar.
Dublin
Rough?
My brother tackled me last weekend about where we live. He has concerns that my children will end up wearing track suits all day every day and on remand in the district court. We had a robust discussion on the influence of parents versus that of peers, the nature of the local peers in what I would call a mixed area and whether it was fair to visit your social notions on your children which ended with one of us flouncing out of the room and banging the door. Isn’t it great the way when you are at your parents’ house you can revert to behaviour that was last given an airing in your teens?
Still, it all gave me pause for further thought. Our parish newsletter this week led with “The Gospel to the Gangland” which didn’t help. Then I went to a local park where F often takes the children. There were a bunch of Slovakian children there who seemed to know mine well. They were nice children and my boys were clearly delighted to see them. They were accompanied by a pleasant man (you know, not let out on their own running wild or anything) but I couldn’t help noticing that he had a tattoo on his neck. Did I not read somewhere that this is an invariable sign of gang membership? Or is it just a sign of a fondness for pain? In short, I feel that I am in territory where my mother never had to venture.
Give me a boy at seven
New acquaintance: And where did your husband go to school?
Me: Jesuit School X.
New acquaintance: Oh lovely, clever, sensitive boys.
I understand that Mr. Waffle’s school produced many chess champions but that they failed to star in rugby.
Grim
Our cleaner, A, is from Latvia. The other day he commented on how well herself spoke French. “We used to live in Belgium,” I explained. “How many languages do you speak?” I asked. “Russian and Latvian; I studied German at university but I have nearly forgotten it all now.”
The OECD economic survey of Ireland in 2008 found that “[m]ost migrants are young, well educated and work, but are often in basic jobs.” They’re not kidding.
FURTHER AND BETTER VERMIN
The house is overrun with animals. Not nice ones. Despite forking out €243 to Mr. Rentokil, we seem to have an above average number of houseflies. So appealing in any property. This did, however, give my loving husband an opportunity to kill a fly in a most satisfactory manner. He was chasing a fly on the landing with our can of useless spray (this is the problem with everything being safe, it’s also useless) and the fly was lolling about in the air soaking up the aromas with no apparent ill effects. The fly was, however, scared of the folded Irish Times that Mr. Waffle was using to supplement the fly spray (“Help, help, the liberal Dublin media, the organ of record is coming to get me with its tales of traffic chaos in the capital”) and flew blindly into a spider’s web and was trapped. Mr. Waffle noted with satisfaction, the spider efficiently bundling up its prey – one fly down. Mr. Waffle had only recently been complaining that the huge number of spiders we have on the payroll had been failing to deliver in terms of fly catching figures and that, going forward, in the absence of improved catching capacity we might have to look at overall spider numbers with a view to effecting savings in the current economic conditions. The memo obviously leaked to the spiders and they are on their mettle.
Meanwhile, we are also fighting a rear-guard action on operation wasp. Despite laying down powder, spraying, putting out a glass of coke for them to drown in and blocking up access to their nest with a highly sophisticated barrier (a combination of an old baby’s bib and tinfoil, since you ask). They are still coming. They buzz around outside hopefully (“They used to live here, they’d never have moved without telling us…call the rest of the gang”) and, increasingly and distressingly, they also buzz around inside the house. Our reluctant conclusion is that there must be some other form of access to the nest from inside the house.
And last, but by no means least, my blog is beset by spammers. At least they can’t sting me, I suppose.
Recommendation
Some time ago we acquired the Pevsner guide to Dublin. It has, obviously, come into its own since our return to the empire’s second city. The author, Christine Casey, is a fantastic writer. She deftly, accurately and sometimes wittily describes the buildings between Dublin’s canals.
Recently we noticed a large mansion in a very run down part of Dublin.
Pevsner told us it was Aldborough House and Dr. Casey introduced it thus: “Above the portico the thoroughly misleading motto Otium cum Dignitate (Leisure with Dignity). This grandiose and yet remarkably dull house is a testament to the inveterate vanity of Edward Augustus Stratford, 2nd Earl of Aldborough.” In describing the house, she says witheringly “The main facade is a traditional Palladian composition in all but proportion.” She includes an “oft quoted but indispensable [contemporary] account by Lady Hardwicke”: “The staircase is richly adorned with paintings. Let one be in your idea a model for the rest. Imagine a large panel occupied by the “Triumph of Amphitrite”personified by Lady Aldborough in a riding habit with Minervas’s helmet, sitting on the knee of Lord Aldborough [then aged 57] in a complete suit of regimentals, Neptune having politely resingned his seat in the car to his Lordship, and contenting himself with the office of coachman to the six well fed tritons. The whole corps of sea-nymphs attend the car in the dress of Nereids! But each, instead of a vocal shell bears in hand a medallion with picture (the head and shoulders as large as life) of and admiral’s wigs, bald heads, crops etc. Think of a whole mansion decorated in theis way.”
See what I mean? Within 20 years of its completion, it was being used as a school (by a Luxemburger – extraordinary no?) and now it is, apparently, very delapidated offices having put in some considerable time as a store house. Which, for all its lack of merit, does seem rather sad.
