My brother, driving me home from dinner, said “I know you’re a great believer in the classless society and all that but, for the sake of the kids, would you not move somewhere more normal?”
It’s not rough here, it’s just very…urban.
Travel
Christmas round-up
Did you miss me? I have been spending the Christmas season with my family. Christmas Day passed off peacefully; everyone was good, everyone liked the presents offered by kind benevolent Santa Claus and generous relatives.
We drove down to Cork on the 27th. I haven’t driven that road in nearly 10 years. It’s improved a lot. True, the boom may be gone but they can’t take our roads away from us. Cork was peaceful and presentful. The children did not disgrace us in the presence of my relatives.
My father told a story of the joys of living in a small city. When my father was a little boy, a barber used to come to the house to trim his grandfather’s beard (a man who was born during the famine, fancy that). My father emigrated to Britain and when he came back to Cork several years later, he went to the barber on the Western Road who had trimmed his grandfather’s beard. As he walked in the door, the barber instantly said, “Master Dan!”
As is traditional when we visit Cork at Christmas, we took the children to Fota wildlife park.  As is equally traditional the parents enjoyed it and the children did not.  Matters began inauspiciously with the Princess announcing that she hated animals. We ignored this unhelpful intervention and tried to jolly her along. Once we got there, Michael and Daniel joined in the revolt. About half way around, Daniel stopped moving and stood in the path with his arms folded.  “What’s the matter, sweetheart?†“I am displeased,†he said without further explanation.  Anxious to avoid one of his spectacular temper tantrums (one night before Christmas he rampaged around the house naked – he did not wish to put on his pyjamas – and screaming for a significant length of time; he is the most empathic of my children but when he loses his temper the consequences are terrifying) we carried him the rest of the way.  Michael was far more articulate about his concerns. He started to cry in a nasty petulant kind of way.  “What’s wrong, sweetheart?â€Â He ticked his grievances off on his tiny fingers, “one, I am frozen, two I am tired, three I am sick, four I want to do a wee.† We carried him the rest of the way too. The Princess trailed along behind whining that nobody was carrying her and NO she did not want to see the cheetahs.  At one point she leaned her head on a fence and a monkey ran over it.  This piqued her interest for a moment and she asked me belligerently whether I had got a photo.  Needless to say, I had not. Not 43 euros worth of unalloyed pleasure then.
We drove back to Dublin on New Year’s Eve, blithely informing the aghast Cork relatives that we would be back shortly.  I went to the supermarket and bought some food and a half bottle of Tesco’s special champagne to see in the new year.  Oh yes, it’s all glamour here.
We took the children to see Fossett’s circus (founded 1888 apparently and certainly around when I was a little girl) which I enjoyed very much putting my hands over my eyes for the cage of death which Mr. Waffle and the children were very blasé about.
Tomorrow is the last day of Christmas, alas. We have our memories and a picture of the children with Santa which we stuck on our calendar.
Me (indulgently): Look it’s you and the boys with Santa.
Her: No, it’s us with a random stranger.
Sometimes that child is too smart for her own good.
Happy new year.
Everywhere I have ever lived – 1996
I forgot (I’m old, I’ve lived in a lot of places), for a couple of months in 1996, I lived and worked in Banja Luka in Bosnia overseeing voter registration.  I went expecting a war torn country and it was war torn but at the same time, the war was over and the tennis club was going as was the swimming pool (though I had a very unhappy incident in the pool toilets with an army of cockroaches), the spa (very authentic this, underground and managed by an old and rather grubby man) and many restaurants (heavy emphasis on meat – vegetarians are not well catered for in the Balkan menu).
I was in the Serb held part of Bosnia. I had a student interpreter who had lived elsewhere but been chucked out (it’s hard to see the people you are living among as the badies). Once, when I got the bus to Sarajevo, he asked me to look out for his town and tell me what it was like. I told him that all the lamp posts had been painted green.
Sometimes in the voter registration halls (school gymnasiums, community centres) there would be groups of Muslim women who had come in from the hills where they had stayed throughout the war. Often people came in ponies and traps and there were lots of long dresses and headscarves.
The countryside was very heavily mined and I was always horrified to see young children 9, 10, 11 coming down the mountains with jars of wild strawberries to sell to us rich foreigners; beaming at us hopefully through rows of rotten teeth (dental care really suffered in the war and cigarette sales went through the roof).
A few of us drove down to the Croatian coast one weekend. One of our Serb interpreters came with us a decision which she deeply regretted as she became (understandably in her case, one supposes) paranoid that her accent and the odd different word would out her to the Croats as a Serb. The main difference between Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian is political – it’s very easy to pick up three languages for the price of one.
Living in the Serb held part of Bosnia, one of the things you got a real feel for was that the Croats were the unsung villains of the war in Yugoslavia. At any rate, they did propaganda better than the Serbs. This is not a high standard.
Many of the voter registration people were really very expert on the Balkans and the situation there. It was there that I first met Nicholas who has based a career on being expert on the Balkans. There were many very committed and clever Americans. There was also this (very nice, very pleasant) post-grad student from Georgetown with whom I had the following conversation towards the end of her time in Bosnia.
Ms. G: You should know about this guy, you know, that people talk about.
Interpreter smiles wearily.
Me: Sorry?
Ms. G: Oh I don’t know his name. He’s famous.
Interpreter rolls eyes.
Me: Er. Karadic?
Her: No, no, this guy is dead. (To interpreter) C’mon, you know.
Her: Tito.
This is the problem with international observers, I suppose.
Everywhere I have ever lived – 1993
Once I qualified, I passed over the opportunity to work in an Irish country town and moved to Rome.
I shared a rather nice ground floor flat in Trastevere with two Danish girls and I thought that they were extremely exotic. I was disappointed when they moved out and a Dutch girl moved in – so much less thrilling. However, I had my ancient moped and enjoyed whizzing round Rome on it. I thought that I was fabulous circling the Colosseum – you know, Roman Holiday and all that.
In other news at mass this morning we had this reading from the book of proverbs. Note to self, get busy with wool and flax. Then the gospel was the one about the talents which is the Bible’s clearest endorsement of capitalism. Not, perhaps, a particularly uplifting set of readings though I was glad to be reminded of where one of my favourite lines comes from: the servant who makes nothing gets thrown “out into the dark, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth”. I was also delighted to see, from my internet research, that verses 10-31 of the proverbs reading are “an acrostic, each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.” I knew you would like to know.
Everywhere I have ever lived – 1991
It is distressing but I am a little hazy about the details of when I moved to Dublin to study. I was only there for a couple of months and I thought it was cold, gloomy and dull.
This impression may have been reinforced by my accommodation. My friend and I had inveigled our way into a short term let by assuring the landlord that we were nurses (a profession which he appeared to regard as entirely trustworthy). The place where we were living had been inexpertly divided into flats. We had a main room which boasted a calor heater as its sole source of heat and a carpet as old as time.
We shared a bedroom which had no source of heating at all. It gets quite cold in Dublin in winter. We bought a portable heater. Despite the fact that it got quite warm (I accidentally melted my doc martin’s on it), the room remained arctic.
Our friendship was brought under severe strain by my friend’s chronic lateness. She was not an early riser and she could not get out of bed. We were on the same course and, the organisers, having made a very accurate assessment of the enthusiasm levels of trainee solicitors, kept an attendance register and, if you were late or did not attend, your master would be told and, worse, you would have to travel to Dublin to repeat the day. This made me extremely keen to get there on time. Every morning, F. would get up late as I paced up and down. Then while I stood whining in the doorway, she would painstakingly lace up her 18 hole doc’s. Then we would cycle like the wind and arrive, panting, just in time.
After those months together, I think we might both have liked a break but, unfortunately, we had already bought tickets to go interrailing together for a month which we did with almost no sulking except for that time when we were looking for the pantheon and I took us outside the city walls in Rome based on my expert powers of navigation.
Everywhere I have ever lived – 1990
In 1990 when the Erasmus programme was in its infancy, the law department were looking for a student to go off to Modena to study in the University there. Funnily enough, Irish law students with a grasp of Italian were thin on the ground and I was selected and dispatched with all the funds available which came to a tremendous lot by student standards.
My accommodation was a small, modern bedsit paid for by the Modenese authorities in their first flush of enthusiasm for the programme. Â I learnt a lot in Modena but, alas, relatively little about tax, EU and human rights law – my chosen subjects; my vocabulary in dealing with small children only seeing me so far into the world of third level study.
Still 18 years to go before I move in here and 18 days to go in Nablopomo. Not sure how much longer I can keep this up.
A completely unrelated matter but very important to document, Daniel is now regularly sleeping through the night. Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah.
Also, last night we interviewed a new woman to take over from the one who is off to New York and we now have a new childminder. Hurrah etc.
