Nice (slightly elderly) Garda: You can’t put your bicycle there. Put it across the road instead.
Me: OK.
Him: That’s a lovely bike.
Me: Thank you. I’m really enjoying cycling in the fine weather. Usually, I’m very unlucky and my bike is stolen at the start of the spring and I don’t get around to buying a new one until autumn.
Him: I have the same bike for 32 years.
Me: Really?
Him: Yes.
Me: How come it was never stolen? What’s your secret?
Him: It’s 32 years old.
Dublin
Bring on the oil crisis
The weather was spectacular this weekend. It was undoubtedly the finest June bank holiday weekend I can remember. It’s going to be a heatwave summer again. Like 1977! I certainly hope so as we will be holidaying in Ireland this year and Ireland in the rain is glum though sadly typical.
This weekend, things went our way. We went to the Dublin docklands festival. We arrived at the right time and we didn’t have to queue for anything, even ice cream. We investigated the Jeanie Johnston, the world’s most expensive replica ship for which every man, woman and child in the country will have to make a contribution ad infinitem. We also looked over the Loth Lorien (no sniggering, the owner’s other ship is called the J.R.R. Tolkien) from Amsterdam where I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in 20 years (“the man with three children and the strong Cork accent” guessed Mr. Waffle).
Me: Bernard, how are you, it’s Anne.
Princess: Can we go up here?
B: Anne, how lovely to see you.
One of his small children legs it for the rigging.
Me: Are these all your children?
Princess: Can we go up here NOW?
B: Rescues small child from rigging, admonishes another says yes.
Me: What are you doing now?
Princess: I AM climbing up here.
Him: In the bank. And you?
Me: Get down and wait one minute.
Him: Flails after small children.
Me: Well, nice to see you.
Him: Yes, lovely to see you too.
I suppose having small children does fill in those gaps in conversation that inevitably arise when you meet old acquaintances.
Following my mother’s slightly puritanical but ultimately rewarding rule, we left when we were enjoying ourselves most and were able to look back on a very successful outing.
Then on Monday, we took ourselves off to Brittas Bay for the day. The last time I went to an Irish beach, it was all Irish people. The migrant population has certainly made us look less like a nation of milk bottles. It was extraordinary. Firstly, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I don’t think I have ever seen this in Ireland before. In fact, when I went on holidays with my parents, my mother used to drive my father insane by pining for cloudy skies “Don’t you get tired of these endless blue skies,” she would lament. Secondly, the beach was heaving. You had to step around people. I have never seen an Irish beach so crowded in my life. Thirdly, everyone in Ireland seems to boast a tattoo. Fourthly, almost everyone in Ireland is overweight. All very pleasant all the same. We bought ice cream in the car park and the man in the ice cream van told me that they had run out 5 times the day before and that the following day, he would be buying himself a porsche (people need fuel to keep up their bulk, you know).
The children enjoyed themselves as did we though, despite the hot sand and cloudless blue skies, the water was absolutely perishing (some things never change).
Domestic Games
Recently, on Saturday mornings, we have been taking the children to football and hurling training. The boys love it. The Princess stays on the sidelines, solidly (and very annoyingly) refusing to take part. To their enormous delight we dress the boys up in their FC Barcelona and Lions 09 kit (a Christmas present from their uncle) to go to training. And very fetching they looked too.
I did have mild qualms about introducing kit from foreign games but all that is in the past now and I noted that the very patient man training the four year old boys in football was wearing an Irish rugby jersey. After limbering up and working on their ball skills, the four year olds started a match. I was a bit concerned about this as my children had never played a match before. “Never mind” reassured the trainer “wait until you see it, it’s like a flock of sheep milling around a ball.” So indeed, it proved.
The hurling, however, was a different matter. The trainer was from Cork and he took it all very seriously. Ah, well do I remember my primary school days when year after year the hurling team won the All-Irealnd. They would tour the schools, show us the McCarthy cup, and give us all a half day (they won three in a row between 76 and 78 – formative years, I was 7, 8 and 9 and very grateful for the half day). The trainer clearly remembered that too and he was taking no prisoners. Having equipped his 30 four year old with helmets and hurleys, he went down the line “clashing the ash” (essentially walloping their hurleys with his) and he made them all get in the ready position and roar (something that works well for the NZ rugby team). There was some confusion with his instructions. “Is the ready position holding the hurley on our heads?” roared the trainer. Some of the young men thought it was and held their hurleys over their heads. The match itself was more like a real match than I had at all anticipated following the football. Poor Daniel came trailing over to me saying that no one was giving him the ball and I explained to him that he had to go and get it. I then had to wade on to the pitch and separate him out from another little boy who had taken the ball from him. Aside from this minor off the ball incident and despite the fact that 30 little boys were given sticks and told to swing them, there were no injuries.
In encouraging the Princess to play (in vain), I picked up a hurley myself for the first time in my life. My previous experience had only been in hockey and a hurley has a much bigger head, so it is much easier to dribble the ball. I was delighted with myself as I zoomed around the little markers until I heard an English accented voice say “that looks like a back stick to me.” These migrants are clearly mingling well. After confirming that I was indeed playing a different game (with his hurley as it turned out), he encouraged me to go again. I was happily zooming round the obstacles (the Princess lolling disinterestedly by the fence) when a six year old came up and with a sweeping wallop of her hurley took the ball out from under me. This is indeed a very different game, maybe I should stick to what I know.
When relating all of this to my mother-in-law the next day, she told me that her father-in-law, my children’s great-grandfather, had played senior hurling for Tipperary. This is information which was hitherto unknown to me and very impressive indeed, trumping the information I already had that my father-in-law had played minor football for Dublin. I see a great future for my children, particularly, if I ever succeed in actually getting the Princess on the pitch.
Cultural Hegemony
Recently, the Princess asked me what “ggu..nn.ess” meant? “Where did you see it?” I asked. “Everywhere,” she said. “Ah, I think you must mean Guinness”. “Oh, the black beer with white on top?” “Well, Guinness isn’t the only black beer with white on top, its called stout and in Cork they make two kinds of stout : Murphy’s and Beamish. In fact, your great, great uncle Tommy, your Cork Grandad’s uncle worked in the Murphy’s factory in Cork”. I’m doing my best here but I feel that I’m fighting an uphill battle.
Socialising
Last weekend, the Princess went to a birthday party in one of Dublin’s more exciting suburbs. It boasts horses in front gardens (this is not a good thing in Dublin, you’ll have to trust me here) and, if you type this suburb + shooting into Google, then you get 26,100 results. However, she emerged unscathed.
That evening her father and I went to dinner at the houses of friends who live in a rather different Dublin suburb. For the hell of it, I typed “much nicer suburb + shooting” into Google and it reproachfully asked me whether I meant “much nicer suburb + shopping”.
Meanwhile, Mr. Waffle got a call from the childminder asking whether she could take the children to a party at the house of a little (francophone, North African) boy they regularly played with in the park. He said yes and I probably would have too but I had some qualms subsequently. This is the problem with having two working parents. While I was perfectly happy to drop the Princess off to gangland shooting suburb as the birthday girl was a classmate whom I had met, I was uneasy about them all going to a strange house where I didn’t know the child or his mother even though their childminder stayed with them the entire time. Sigh.
We also got invited to lunch by friends – she is French and he is Irish and her parents (who do not speak a great deal of English) were staying for a week and I think that they felt that it might be useful to have some other French speakers and French speaking children about. All very pleasant – they are French farmers from deepest darkest Brittany and I was fascinated to hear that his parents were native Breton speakers and hers spoke a local dialect but, of course, they all learnt French French at school. While both our friend’s parents understand dialect and Breton respectively, our friend understands neither. It has to be said that the policy of the French state seems to be a little hostile to languages other than French within its borders. My husband, who knows everything, told me that as recently as the first world war only one in five Frenchmen spoke French. Well, they’ve fixed that then.
Yoof
I met some young people the other day. I don’t really meet many teenagers. They were pleasant but slightly alarming. I don’t think I was at all as confident and articulate at 16.
R (16) told me about his motorbike and showed me a picture on his phone. Someone on his estate died in a motorbike accident last week: “he wasn’t wearing a helmet, it happens”.
R is the product of a brief union. He has five step-brothers and sisters from his mother’s second marriage and several more from his father’s first marriage. He also has a baby sister from his father’s third marriage to a woman from Cameroon. Modern Ireland in microcosm. When he leaves school he wants to join the British army. Not the Irish army because they only go on peacekeeping missions.
R’s friend H asked me what I was going to do about teenage pregnancy rates. “Nothing” I said and then ventured “actually, I think that Ireland has a quite a low rate for teenage pregnancy“. “Not in my school” she said whipping out her mobile phone to show me her 15 year old friend’s scan.
I feel very middle aged now, I can tell you.
