Her: Was Shaquille O’Neill president of France?
Me: Jacques Chirac?
Princess
They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait
So we ran mass today. The woman from the parish council who normally does it was off in Siena on holidays. We had the intro (me), the prayers of the faithful (all the children) and the second reading (Herself).
She read beautifully. As she was reading, “There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self effacing. Always consider the other person to be better than yourself..”, I was whispering to her father, “She’s so good at this, she really is superb at reading aloud much better than anyone else.” So very much taking the message of the reading to heart, then.
They all did fine for their prayers of the faithful but after delivering his, Michael went to the back of the altar where he appeared to believe he was invisible and began rotating in circles.
But what, you ask of my couple of lines of introduction, well, I went into the sacristy and told the parish priest that I would be doing the introduction. “Fine, fine,” said he. When mass actually started, I was surprised to see that someone else entirely was saying mass but I assumed that the parish priest had passed on the message. I went up to the altar and stood at the lectern opposite the priest. The elderly priest opened mass with a welcome. Then he pressed on completely ignoring me. I stood there opening my mouth like a landed fish and failing to get a word in edgeways. Eventually I slunk off the altar without saying anything still completely unnoticed by the priest who was well into his stride at this point. Why do these things always happen to me? Predictably, the children thought it was hilarious
Consequences
Herself: If Scotland votes yes to independence can I get a Scottish passport?
Me: No, why would you be entitled to a Scottish passport; you weren’t born there, you haven’t ever even visited Scotland and you have no Scottish relatives.
Her: I thought maybe because we were all rebels against England together.
Soft
My father often used to say to us when we were children “you are brought up too soft”. You might imagine that on this basis he himself was brought up in conditions of penury and hardship and went barefoot to school but in fact, he grew up in a large house at the bottom of the road where my parents’ house is now. As far as I know, he had access to shoes at all times. So, given my father’s relative affluence, I felt his tendency to assert that we were too soft was inappropriate.
The other day, herself wanted to squeeze some lemon juice. The electric juicer was in the dishwasher so I hauled out the manual juicer from the back of the press. She looked at it a bit dubiously. I went back to reading the paper. After a while she said plaintively, “How does this work?” I looked and she was holding the lemon daintily on top of the squeezer waiting for the squeezer to work its magic. “You have to twist it down.” “What?!” Brought up too soft.
Old, but not that Old
A couple of weeks ago, I was coming up from Cork on the train with the children and to show them how near they were to Dublin, I wanted to point out the Wellington monument in Phoenix Park. “Look, look,” I said, “who can see Nelson’s Pillar?” Pause. Then herself said, “Mum, I think it was blown up in 1966.” Which it was.
Drama Queen
The Princess did an acting course last week and absolutely loved it. Mid-way through, she mentioned “Macbeth” and then did a quick twirl. “What did you do that for?” “If you mention ‘the Scottish play’ it brings bad luck and we have our performance at the end of the week. The performance was great fun and she is now full of enthusiasm for drama.
Will this end well?
