This event is likely to send me to an early grave. I was trapped into joining the organising committee and I am just not cut out for this kind of thing. It’s like a continuation of work by other means. At the lengthy meetings we usually fail to reach conclusions and all of the real work seems to be done elsewhere [how much have I enjoyed dropping in requests for funding, cakes and spot prizes to struggling local businesses?]. The parish priest keeps coming in and being anxious about insurance. We can’t have a stage, lest someone should fall. We will have to know the provenance of all cakes for insurance reasons. I can’t for the life of me see why. He says we can take names and phone numbers of the little old ladies who make cakes and if anyone gets ill we can show we made reasonable efforts. The parish priest and I had words on this point. I was tempted to say that this will make us “data controllers” but wiser counsels prevailed. He also insisted that no unaccompanied children under 18 should be allowed to attend. How we are supposed to police this is beyond me.

Worst of all though, I had to make an announcement at mass about the forthcoming excitement. This did not seem particularly challenging. Doesn’t my 10 year old daughter go on to the altar every Sunday and read a prayer of the faithful? Am I not used to making presentations at work? All I had to do was read out the printed text in front of me. I am good at reading. I bounded up on to the altar and surveyed the church. Do you know what, those Victoian gothic churches are built on massive lines. It was the largest space I had ever addressed. And although congregations are falling I thought, as I surveyed the large numbers looking up at me, they could do with falling a bit further. I started to read. I was quavery and short of breath. It was terrifying. I returned to my pew, absolutely mortified. Herself hissed at me, “You were terrible!” Worse, the little old lady beside me said, “You did fine.” After mass, I said to Mr. Waffle, “Tell me honestly, how bad was it?” “Well,” he said, “remember everyone has forgotten about it now except you.” Pause. “It was just the way you sounded like you were going to cry and that the announcement was really sad when you were talking about a party; that was a bit unfortunate.” Oh the mortification. And, of course, I have to go back and see the same people every Sunday forever. Oh horrors. I think I will cry now.

We have been in the new house for ages now. It still seems extraordinary that it belongs to us. It is so lovely. The Princess and I went back to inspect the old house, the other day and she shed a few tears. It is hard to move and it still feels a little bit strange.

But I hope that we will all settle in well in our new house. The neighbours have been in with wine, champagne and scented candles and have children of appropriate ages who are company for our lot. The mirror has been hung up over the fireplace. The cat is settled. She has managed to lose her collar and magnetic yoke to open the cat flap. We have taped over the magnetic bits of the cat flap so that she can come in anyhow. A strange cat has taken advantage of these new arrangements and wandered up to the landing to have a look around. Michael spotted the strange cat and shouted loudly, and unhelpfully, “Cat!” Nevertheless, cat collar difficulties aside, all seems very promising.

For the Princess’s birthday, I took her and two friends to Milano’s in Temple Bar for pizza. I might digress here and say that I quite like Temple Bar, it’s always full of tourists being cheerful and it feels a bit like being on holidays as there are never any Irish people there. Mr. Waffle and most Dubliners avoid it like the plague. Mr. Waffle always refers to it as “Dublin’s cultural quarter” in sardonic tones. And though, I concede that it is a bit pub heavy for a cultural quarter, I quite like it. So, if you are ever in Temple Bar and meet a real live Irish person it will be me because I am the only one who ever ventures in there.

That was a digression. I just wanted to record my unluckiness in choosing to go there on the day when all of Europe’s finance ministers were meeting in Dublin castle (just adjacent), when an anniversary performance of Handel’s Messiah was taking place around the corner on the site of the original performance (Messiah, first performed in Dublin, you know) and concerned citizens were marching against the new property tax (protest unavailing, it seems to be here to stay). It was bedlam. Alas.

I went into town with herself and we had a look at the National Gallery and then we got back into the car and drove to the Queen of Tarts. Just as we were settling down, my work mobile started to ring. I looked at it balefully. Unknown number. I answered coldly. The caller asked my name. I told him, with increasing coldness. “It’s just that I’ve found your purse on the road and your card is in it.” The saintly finder dropped it into the local Garda station and I was able to go and pick it up (everything still there) even before I had realised it was lost. It is quite true what my mother says, “People are mostly very nice.”

The problem with moving around the corner from where you lived before is that you don’t necessarily feel the need to move everything all at once.

A week after moving we are still going down to the old house to pick up stuff. The attic and the sheds haven’t been touched. This reminds me of when we moved into the old house and Mr. Waffle kept bringing stuff from storage and I couldn’t believe that there was more. “Still drawing?” asked my father. “Eh?” “From the well of possessions.”

There is more. Even though the new house is twice the size of the old house there still doesn’t seem to be enough room. Alas. I see another IKEA Billy in our future.

We were supposed to spend last Monday packing to move house on Tuesday. Alas, the carpet fitter who arrived on Saturday arrived with one carpet too few. After some anguish, we put the move off to this Friday. On the plus side, I’m really hoping that varnish downstairs will be dry.

Unfortunately, the Princess had already boxed up all her books and she spent the weekend pacing the house in a state of considerable bitterness. Re-opening of the library on Tuesday was greeted with ecstasy. Meanwhile, the boys have fallen out over who owns what as, for the first time, they have to separate their worldly goods into two rooms.

Wish us luck for tomorrow.

Herself is learning about the famine in school. She had a great time doing a dramatisation where she got to play the lady from the big house increasing the rents of misfortunate tenants who had made improvements and then tossing them out. Another day, they made a coffin ship.

One night, she had a couple of questions for homework, the first of which was – “Why were the Irish so poor at the time of the Famine?” “Why were they so poor?” she asked me. “Well, lots of reasons: landholdings tended to be small as they were divided up between families; landlord and tenant law was unsatisfactory in a number of ways [insert digression on land league]; there were, of course, absentee landlords and unfair agents [digression here to cover Captain Boycott]; then remember that the Catholics had been disenfranchised for a long time and there was the legacy of the Act of Union in 1801 and the penal laws…” I began. “Does this go back to William of Orange and James II?” she asked. “Well, yes, even before that, I suppose it is the nature of history that it is informed and shaped by the past.” And so on.

I checked her homework later. In response to the question, “Why were the Irish so poor at the time of the Famine?” she had written: “Because the English were not very nice.”

Is it any wonder that her aunt has vetoed all talk of the Famine when she marries her English man in London at the weekend?