When Mr. Waffle was in France recently, he found himself reading an article in some French mag with tips from female reporters. He says it was very odd, all about how to keep your hair looking good in a war zone (hairspray apparently). Does this happen in magazines in other countries? Discuss.
Mr. Waffle
A Tale of Love and Home Improvements
We are getting new windows. I know, just as we are thinking of moving. Don’t be at me. They were scheduled to come early in the morning. I had a meeting first thing and my loving husband was on duty. Inevitably, as I sat in my meeting my phone rang.
Send text to unknown number: Am in mtg.
Have a thought, send follow-up text: Are you windows? If yes, call my husband.
Sit thinking that, if not windows, text will be unfortunate. Phone bleeps.
Message from windows: Sorry its R from [company]. alarming going off.wondering do u have code. cheers.
Reply: Sorry. No idea. We never use it. Try husband.
Message from windows: Cheers he’s here now.
Me to husband: Code might be in house file.
Husband to me: I was able to remember it from 2008. Glad you married me?
Me: Yes.
Incident
The childminder took the children to the park yesterday. Some big bold boys ran after them, tried to kick them, shouted at them and called them names. The childminder departed with the children in tow and the bullies following. They only left when the children got on the bus home. The Princess is particularly upset, pointing out that they tried to kick Daniel she said, “I can do that, but no one else is allowed to.” They were all a bit shaken up. Later in the evening, Daniel said to me, “Mummy, the mean boys in the park called me [insert nasty racist epithet here] what does that mean?” Lovely. Proof that racists are stupid, I suppose. Mr. Waffle said to them, that these were children who weren’t looked after properly and taught properly and they probably wouldn’t have very happy lives. I was much less inclined to go with the wishy-washy liberal approach than usual and just said that they were nasty children [looks like it’s true – a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged].
Did you wonder what I did for the weekend? Wonder no longer.
I took the children to Cork from Friday to Monday. All in all it passed off pretty peacefully. The children were pacified by watching 5 hours of television a day and eating all the junk food they could get their hands on. We picked up the Princess’s baptismal certificate in the church where she was baptised in Cork so that she can now make her communion – though I fear she is turning against organised religion.
Anecdotes for your delectation:
The Princess found one of my old dolls. She fashioned an outfit for it including a sash. I peered at the sash expecting to see “Rose of Tralee” or “Miss World” but in fact it said, “Votes for Women”. A proud moment owing something to the intervention of Mrs. Banks.
On Sunday, I decided I would take the children for a walk in Farran Woods just outside the city. I spent 30 minutes, putting on the children’s shoes, coats and gloves and prising them away from the television. My mother accompanied us. We got hopelessly lost. “How can you not find the way to somewhere you drove to every Sunday for 20 years?” I asked my mother in exasperation as the troops battered each other in the back seat. “How can you not find the way to somewhere you were driven to every Sunday for 20 years?” she replied tartly. After a long hour and a half we arrived. It was 4 in the afternoon, cold and about to get dark. The signs were not propitious. Nevertheless, we began our walk. After 5 minutes, the children announced en masse “I want to do a wee.” I let them off into the bushes on their own which turned out to be a spectacular error of judgement. One of them (name concealed to protect the guilty) emerged soaked to skin with every piece of clothing from the waist down wringing wet. It was quite a spectacular accomplishment and one which was quite difficult to achieve, I would have thought.* There was nothing for it but to pack everyone back into the car and go home. On the plus side, the return journey only took half an hour.
I had planned to return to Dublin early on Monday afternoon. Unfortunately, no sooner had I pulled out of my parents’ driveway than the car started flashing a red warning light at me. I drove back, redeposited the children in front of the television and rang my husband, some 250kms away, who couldn’t talk. As I pointed out to him, I could have been on the side of the motorway in desperation. As he pointed out to me, he could hear my family in the background so he knew, I wasn’t. So, my mother supervised the children; I perused the car manual (unhelpfully, only available in French); my sister inquired of the internet what the problem might be and my poor father, recovering from routine surgery (but still, you know, surgery) emerged from his armchair where he had been quietly reading the paper and hovered over the bonnet. “Ring Canty’s” he suggested. May I take this opportunity to endorse Mr. Canty’s operation should you ever find yourself in need of a garage in Cork. I rang the garage and described my problem. “Throw in a pint of water,” said the mechanic. “Where?” I asked. “There are only three places you could put it: where the oil goes, where the brake fluid goes and where the coolant goes.” “How do I know which is which,” I asked anxiously. He laughed and said, “Whatever you do, don’t put it where the oil or the brake fluid go and drop down to us and we’ll take a look at it.” My father indicated the correct spot and I drove to the garage with my poor sister as moral support. The warning light disappeared. The nice mechanic checked it over and said it was fine while opining that Peugeots are dreadful cars for mechanics. “We have a rule here that we never take more than 2 French cars in a day, as it could tip us over the edge.” If you care, he said that the best cars to fix are Toyotas. And he didn’t charge me. But it all took two hours which made for a late arrival home. Poor Mr. Waffle was working away on the home front and for reasons which I still don’t fully understand had not one but two dinners prepared for us. I think I might try it again when we have all recovered from the excitement.
* Please note example of elegant variation as despised by Fowler and other great stylists.
When Speed is not of the Essence
I subscribed to the Economist for Mr. Waffle for Christmas. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, you’re right. What can I say, he’s hard to buy for.
I ordered it the other day and they said it would take three weeks to arrive. I was therefore, understandably, mildly peeved when this evening he waved a copy in front of me and said, “This arrived today for me – is it my Christmas present?”
“Happy Christmas”.
In completely unrelated news, I am inexplicably fascinated by the deeply offensive Horse Outside. Maybe it’s because I’m half Limerick myself.
Another Country
Are you curious about our weekend in Edinburgh? Last weekend? Go on, you are dying to know. Well, what with the snow we decided not to go. Desperate to get away and completely snowed in, we decided to get the train to Belfast. Despite my mother’s concerns about our safety (she is not really a believer in the peace dividend) the most exciting thing that happened was when someone threw a snowball at the restaurant window on Saturday night and everyone in the restaurant jumped and stopped talking. More so than they would have in Dublin, I think.
Growing up in Cork, I never met anyone from Northern Ireland except my mother’s friend from round the corner who was so integrated that I thought she was from Cork (a real achievement that). I thought that people from Northern Ireland were nasty, difficult people who either berated you for not caring about the North or berated you for having an opinion because “the Southern State was founded on violence”.
I remember when the Good Friday agreement was signed, I was working in Brussels. A Spanish colleague left a rose on another Irish colleague’s desk with the message “For peace in your beautiful country.” We both thought that this was mildly hilarious. Me particularly because I didn’t even think of it as my country.
And then over the years, I started to meet and make friends with people from Northern Ireland and my views tilted alarmingly. They were the only properly friendly Irish people left – the Celtic Tiger had ruined any Irish friendliness south of the border and it was only now available in the North. I still believe that a bit though [lengthy aside coming] a recent trip to Athlone in the midlands made me feel slightly differently as people were very friendly. Alarmingly so. In a deserted but very glossy shopping centre (almost certainly owned by NAMA), I think everybody I passed made a point of talking to me. It also allowed me to have the following conversation on the phone with my sister:
Me: I’m in Tommy Hilfiger in Athlone looking for a present for our esteemed brother, any thoughts?
Her: Hysterical laughter. Tommy Hilfiger IN ATHLONE? That’s where the boom went out of control, right there.
Anyway, never mind that. Belfast. The train journey up was uneventful. Belfast had that weirdness that all of Northern Ireland has for me. Irish: the weather; the people; the landscape; the accent. Foreign: the post boxes; the post office; the car number plates; the money.
So, anyhow, because of the snow and the anxiety to get away, we had booked ourselves into the last room in the rather pricey Merchant hotel in Belfast city centre. I felt slightly guilty and have promised myself that the children will get new wind proof windows in their rooms before we go away again. On Friday, I had lunch with a friend from Belfast who was giving me sightseeing tips and, as it turned out, the men at the table behind us were also from Belfast – a rather exciting part of the city – and weighed in, utterly unintelligibly to me, with further advice. When they asked where I was staying, I told them and their jaws dropped and they said words to the effect that I must have more money than sense (alas, no longer true).
So, the hotel was to be the jewel in the crown of our stay. And it was very nice. But the heating in our room did not work. We complained. We were told that there was a problem in all of the Victorian part of the hotel. We went for afternoon tea in our hotel. We went to the Christmas Market. We went for a cocktail (I am not a drinker, I had one cocktail and a nasty headache for the next 24 hours, alas, I am never touching alcohol again). We went for dinner. The nice concierge got us a booking in a nice restaurant for the following night and all was well with the world. But when we went to bed, the heat was still not working. Under the blankets, it was toasty but outside it was freezing. The corridor was warmer. At 12.30 and 1 am the alarm went off and at 6 am a steady dripping sound as of water entering a radiator woke us up. We were unhappy. We made further complaints. A bottle of champagne came (useless to me as I will never touch alcohol again) but the room was still cold. Even the information, imparted by the Irish Times over breakfast, that the Merchant hotel was the place to go in Belfast, although making us feel pleasantly zeitgeisty, failed to win us over completely.
After a trip to the delightful Linen Hall Library, Mr. Waffle returned to the hotel to tackle a man from maintenance and I went shopping. The man from maintenance arrived. He noticed the radiator filling noise. There were no radiators he pointed out sagely. He then pointed to the ceiling where an ominous bulge hung over our bed. Then, the hotel went into overdrive. We were moved to another, larger, room (apparently the hotel was no longer full) and told that we wouldn’t be charged for our stay. Can I tell you how delighted I was? The children can still have new windows.
On Sunday, before returning home, we went to mass in Saint Malachy’s church and I was completely charmed by the interior which was recently restored and beautifully bright. Not normally a feature of Irish churches.
To summarise: Visit Belfast. Stay at the Merchant. For a budget option, try to get a room where the heat isn’t working.
Inevitably, our flights to Edinburgh did in fact go out and come home on time. Oh well.
