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Archives for June 2025

A Project


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland, Mr. Waffle, Siblings, Twins, Youngest Child

We have a lot of books. I was lamenting my book overload problems and commenting on my long term plan to get built in bookshelves in the dining room (v long term – about 12 years at that point) to my sister and she pointed out that her friend is married to a carpenter and perhaps he could do it for us. I seized the day.

We began decanting books from the existing bookshelves on May 10. This was exhausting. My sister commented when she saw the piles “bookshelves are a really good storage system”. She is obsessed with storage systems but she wasn’t wrong.

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Will we just have a look at that again from another angle?

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It’s not like we hadn’t selected any books to give away but I would have to concede that progress on that front was pretty poor. I note from inspection of the picture below that the giving away pile initially included “A Town like Alice” which I subsequently rescued. Not a huge success.

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Then we had to move the existing bookshelves out of the room. We moved them upstairs. Some of them we repurposed but some we needed to give away. I placed ads on various “things to give away” websites. We had some interest but not as much as I would have hoped and, indeed, one bookshelf that I want to lose remains squatting upstairs.

As always when dealing with the public, one is surprised by people’s unreliability and how little people take in of what one writes. One young woman turned up with a granny shopping trolled to take away a set of bookshelves and seemed disappointed when shelves which I had specified in the ad needed a van to take away would not fit. A number of people believed that the shelves could be dismounted but found as I had specified in the ad that they could not (Habitat glued them as well as screwed them together, I don’t know why but they were pretty sturdy). Two young Latin American women (one from Chile, one from Mexico – we had a chance to chat later) turned up at 11 at night to collect a smaller (but still heavy) bookshelf and proposed to carry it to their accommodation about a mile away; they could barely carry it down the stairs with our help. I drove them home with the shelf in the boot for which I will doubtless get my reward in heaven.

The desk where I compose this deathless prose was removed also. That’s why there hasn’t been deathless prose for a while. I do not enjoy typing on the phone.

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We also removed from the room a Victorian pod table (this link shows the kind of table which I note was for auction; was in better condition than mine and was cheaper than my repair estimate, we move on) which used to belong to my Nana and which, sadly, lists. Having moved it out along with the vast stock of photographs which used to sit on it, I bit the bullet and called an antique furniture restorer to come and have a look at it. Ages for him to come. Ages for him to send the estimate (“I’m on holidays at the moment, text me again in 10 days”) and within 20 minutes of him sending the estimate, I got a contrite call from Mr. Waffle telling me he had broken the leg off the table while trying to put it back together. I nearly cried. In the end, you will be relieved to hear, the restorer said that his estimate was already so vast that fixing the leg made no difference; he didn’t put it in those terms but that was the implication. When can he collect it you wonder? “Text me after the weekend and we’ll agree a date.” Of course.

John the carpenter made the shelves in the room. He looks after the children at home so he could only work 10-2 (after dropping the children to school and before picking them up). It took a good while but it was an excellent job. He left us for a well-earned family holiday on May 27 (and returned after the holiday to fix a number of other items around the house which had been bothering me for some time and which I had raised with him during his time with us – honestly my marriage to Mr. Waffle united the two unhandiest people of our generation).

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Then nothing happened until June 11 when the painter was finally free to come. Based on progress on day 1, I thought this would be a quick job.

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Well that was stupid of me.

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The painter left us on June 18 and then the paint had to dry. Finally, on Sunday June 22 we began putting books back on the shelves. It certainly felt like the longest day of the year. Our relationship nearly broke down over the categorisation of memoir and biography. I wanted a separate historic biography section but it was not to be and now Bruce Springsteen is beside George III and if you think that’s right, you’re wrong. My legs have only just recovered from climbing up and down the ladder.

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We did find some more books to give away with great reluctance. Our selection of coffee table books about Brussels, for example, took a bit of a hit.

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I said to Mr. Waffle, “This feels like Swedish death cleaning”. “Don’t worry,” said he, “there’s still a huge selection of 90s novels for the children to throw out after we die.” It is true that 90s novels feature strongly as those were formative years for us and also, now we are much more likely to borrow from the library than to buy a book. I also have a huge collection of very heavy art books which I have not had access to in years. Quite excited to see these and also a bit nervous that the shelves will not bear their weight. But behold the finished product.

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My brother came to stay last night and I made him admire the bookshelves. He had to admire because they are admirable and I made him. “But why do you need so many books?” he asked, spoiling for a fight. “You will never read them all again,” he said pointing out the blindingly obvious. “Well, they’re to show people how clever we are as well,” I said. “In that case, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ by Stieg Larsson isn’t doing a lot of heavy lifting.” Unanswerable.

I could honestly do with fewer tradesmen in the house after our epic bookshelf project but earlier in the summer we met a solar panel salesman. Our neighbour had got them and we went with the same crowd. The salesman made it sound amazing and pain free. It has not been amazing and pain free. Among the elements not covered by the salesman but articulated by the engineer who came some weeks later in the salesman’s wake was that we would need to get our own electrician to link the hot water tank in the utility room to the fuse box beside the hall door (surely there was already some link?). Anyway the electrician came and said we would need to get rid of all of our under stairs shelves to fit the wires; next day John the carpenter came back, talked to the electrician and took everything out (all the contents of under the stairs are now in the utility room, thanks for asking) and the electrician is going to come back on Friday. And I am hoping John who, I suspect, is regretting that he ever came near us, will come and put them back next week. And we still haven’t actually got the solar panels. More on this story as it develops.

Michael has taken to singing this song around the house.

Update – Religious


Posted in: Family, Hodge, Middle Child, Mr. Waffle, Twins, Youngest Child

I went to see the comedian David O’Doherty. I would recommend. Quite funny. He is the product of what used to be called in Ireland a “mixed marriage”. In other words, his mother’s a Protestant and his father’s a Catholic. This is not really an expression in common currency any longer but I had explained it previously to the children as I sometimes humorously refer to myself and Mr. Waffle as having a mixed marriage (I’m from Cork, he’s from Dublin, I know, I’m hilarious). Anyway it transpired that the children thought I was joking about the expression and did not believe it was actually a thing which led one of them to say to a college classmate who said he had a Protestant mother and Catholic father – “Ah mixed marriage” to which the friend put jazz hands in the air and said, “That’s me.” My mortified child then said, “What, that’s actually a real thing?” Truly the past is another country.

Anyhow David O’Doherty covered this extensively in his gig including the line that his mother played tennis (or possibly hockey) for Ireland, “It’s not as impressive as it sounds, all the Protestants got a go then.” Got a good laugh for him.

I know I am going back a bit here but we had a two hour mass for the Easter Saturday vigil and I am still not the better of it. For the first time that I ever remember there were actual baptisms during the mass. There were real converts; three of them. I was astounded. One of these was a Spanish man called Jesus and I am really baffled by this development. I mean how did a Spaniard called Jesus not get brought up Catholic almost by default? A mystery. The service contains this line, “This is our faith and we are proud to profess it.” Honestly, I’d never really thought about this line one way or another before but it was surprisingly moving in the context of the converts. I guess it’s a bit like when you see how pleased people are to become Irish citizens at the citizenship ceremonies and you think, “Maybe it is kind of good to be Irish.”

As we entered the church at the start of what was going to be the longest mass any of us had ever attended (giving the Orthodox Catholics a run for their money), the trainee deacon fell upon us like the wolf on the fold and said he needed someone to do a reading. On the one hand, this is a very reading rich service, on the other hand it is the highlight of the liturgical year and you’d think someone would already have been selected. Herself nobly volunteered to fill the gap. She was told to go and find Joan who was organising. She could not find Joan; one of the choir said, “Tch, Joan, she’s very disorganised.” Not words to inspire confidence. We never did find Joan and herself went off to join the other readers with some trepidation.

We ended up sitting behind a pillar which was annoying as I did not get to see herself reading to the unusually full church but I did get to hear her so there’s that. Afterwards she said that there had been a very nice Mauritian woman who had explained everything to her and stayed with her throughout. We went up to thank this heroine and it turned out that she was one of the nurses from Mr. Waffle’s mother’s nursing home so that was nice.

On Easter Sunday we had Mr. Waffle’s sister and her husband and daughter for lunch which was broadly successful though we had far too much food. My husband’s family have bird like appetites. For the occasion, I was wearing a dress which I got in Cos; a shop much loved by middle aged women. It’s the home of the shapeless garment and like the rest of my tribe, I love it. My lovely green dress is sort of a-line in shape and my heartless family promptly nicknamed it “the sail”. As I was rushing from one room to the next on Easter Sunday morning, it caught on the door handle, “Sail caught in the rigging?” asked one of the family wags instantly. I truly have a lot to put up with.

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Our cat’s water and food bowl live in the utility room. Keeping us all on our toes, they move about the room. The water bowl is always full of water and I have overturned it more times than I can say. In rushing around on Easter Sunday morning, needless to say, I kicked it over soaking myself and the floor. As I cursed in the utility room, I heard sniggering in the kitchen. “What?” I said grumpily. “Your nemesis is a bowl of water on the floor.”

We push on through further religious services. We had the feast of the Holy Trinity. The priest repeated what he described as an old joke but it was new to me. Stay with me here. Back in the day, the bishop would come and examine you on your catechism before you were cleared to make your confirmation. In retrospect, I am unsure that anyone was barred from the ceremony on the basis of ignorance but our primary teachers had us drilled in the Bishop Lucey catechism. My strong memory is that the catechism was written by Bishop Lucey and I distinctly remember a yellow and brown book but the internet seems unaware of this. Maybe the force of his grace’s personality was such that I believed that he had drafted the catechism although he had not. Anyway, we learnt it off by heart, he examined us with much less thoroughness than our teachers had led us to expect and that was that. Ok the joke is coming now: A bishop went into a school to examine the confirmation candidates and he asked one boy what the Holy Trinity was. The child, having learnt off the answer responded at great speed. The bishop was unable to follow his answer and said politely, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” The child replied smartly, “You’re not supposed to understand, it’s a mystery.” I enjoyed; you may feel that it was not worth the build up.

Last Sunday was Corpus Christi except the priest called it the festival of the body and blood of Christ and I was genuinely sitting there thinking, “What is this? I’ve never heard of this in my life.” Which just proves how ancient I am. Also does not reflect well on my general intelligence levels. I got there in the end. Slightly related, would you like to see a medal from the Eucharistic congress in Dublin in 1932 which I found in my jewellery box earlier today; I have literally no idea where on earth it came from. A mystery as the young man said to the bishop.

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A final religious news item: I found my father’s (I think it must be but how did it get here?) missal in the great shelf reoganisation. I expressed some surprise. “Look your grandad’s missal,” said I to middle child. “Oh,” light dawning over rugged country, “I’ve never heard the word missal before, is that why the leaflet in mass is called the missalette?”