We had meringues after dinner. “Everyone can have a meringue,” I said. “Do I have to?” asked Michael. “I love the way Michael regards a sugary treat with the same level of enthusiasm that other children reserve for boiled cabbage,” said his sister.
Herself has got her hair cut.
The dentist had another look at Daniel’s possibly dead front tooth and is almost certain it’s dead but wants to see us again in a month. Sigh
Herself objects to the school uniform. It is not beautiful, I suppose. It is grey (for boys), blue and navy (for girls) and serviceable and comes with a navy anorak (both sexes). The school uniform policy is strict and parents and children alike are always being reminded of it. Herself is testing the boundaries of the policy in imaginative ways such as by, for example, wearing her own jumper over the uniform and then removing it during that part of the day observed by teachers (almost all of it, I understand). She has an exciting belt which the school authorities objected to. She has been known to wear make up and dangly earrings.
Mr. Waffle feels that the other day, she made her most daring move yet. He drove the children into school as it was raining. He saw them entering the school building. He noted that herself was saying a cheery good morning to the principal while wearing her fake pink fur coat purchased in a second hand shop in Talbot Street. The principal appeared to accept her non-regulation coat without question and she sauntered on. I wonder will she break the Christian Brothers?
I’ve been in book clubs since I was in my late 20s. Always all women. I wouldn’t say that reading books is/was entirely incidental to these groups but I always found it to be secondary to the pleasure of being with a group of friends.
The first one I joined in Brussels was a very sophisticated affair with hard books and a serious focus. I only got in because they wanted some more English speakers. I quite enjoyed it though all of the other members were slightly terrifyingly beautiful (all Dutch and Swedish bar me and my English friend) and had very impressive jobs (our biggest coup was a Dutch MEP – look I was in my 20s we were all a lot more impressionable then). We read worthy books around a theme and if it was your turn to lead debate, then you read the book and wrote up reading notes for the others. Once a year we had a black tie dinner with partners. Yes, really.
When I came back to Ireland in 2000, I missed the camaraderie of the Dutch (really it was basically Dutch – v organised and immensely thorough) book club and set up one with my friends in Dublin. This is still going strong – first Monday of the month for nearly 20 years. We take a relaxed approach to reading the book. Mostly at least one person has not read the book and, on at least one occasion, no one had read the book. It makes me really happy because without this book club I think I would have lost contact with a lot of my friends from that time, just because we’re all busy and lots of us have children. When I came back from my stint in Brussels in 2008, I rejoined seamlessly. I love it. [A parenthesis here – did I set up another book club while I lived in Brussels between 2003 and 2008? I most certainly did.] We have a core group – lots of lawyers – and a revolving cast of members who come and go. Three of our core group are sisters and I am almost certain one of our revolving cast left in horror because she heard them talking to each other without knowing they were sisters. Sister one remarked that sister two’s new coat was not a success and sister three agreed. There was then a discussion of sister one’s new haircut and all three agreed that it was probably a mercy she wore a wig for work. I could see new member thinking that this was a tough school.
And then, eight or nine years ago, a friend of Mr. Waffle’s invited me to join her book club. This was different again – held about once every six weeks on a Sunday afternoon, always in our foundress’s beautiful, beautiful house – this is one where everyone reads the book and we have a very structured discussion about it and then go next door to the dining room and have the most wonderful afternoon tea. In the course of this we discuss weighty political topics and current affairs but also all sorts of gossip. It’s lovely to make a group of new friends in your 40s. Mr. Waffle’s friend (he sometimes says plaintively ‘she is my friend, it’s very unfair that you see so much of her’ – I think of her as a shared resource) is from Limerick so many of the members of the group are from there also and as my mother was from Limerick there’s something about their voices and expressions that remind me of her. They’re a diverse bunch with a couple of media people so they always have excellent gossip. The Sunday before last was the book club’s tenth anniversary and there was a book club quiz (I love a quiz) and a goody bag for each member with a bottle of gin from the Isle of Harris (our foundress’s husband is half Scottish); various cards and bookmarks and a mug. I nearly died of happiness. It was the surprise and the delightful nature of it.
I was reflecting the other day for women and men of my generation our mothers played tennis and golf and bridge but for my children’s generation, their mothers will all have been in book clubs. I wonder whether the days of book clubs are numbered or whether they will be with us forever?
I was up in Belfast last week for the funeral of the mother of a good friend of mine. Mr. Waffle persuaded me that it would be better to take the train than the car and in many ways it was (no parking problems, environmentally sounder, less tiring etc.). It did mean, however, that I was dependent on a Belfast taxi man to get me from the station to the church for 10 am.
A perfectly correctly behaved cyclist went past us and the taxi driver said, “I hate those bloody cyclists; they keep weaving in and out and disobeying the rules of the road.” Could I let it go? I could not. We had a robust exchange of views on the way to the church. In fact we parked outside the church and I could see the hearse being unloaded and still he wouldn’t let me go. I was forced to concede that perhaps we could all learn something in the hopes of getting out before the coffin was carried into the church.
The funeral itself was a nice one. A lovely church (St. Patrick’s, Donegall Street); nice music and readings; and the parish priest knew the dead lady well and is a close friend of her son’s so gave a really good homily pointing out that she had been baptised in the very same church in 1930 and gone there all her life. The priest was also careful to welcome people of all faiths and none which we never bother with in the South. The fact that the deceased had brought up six children through the Troubles was also touched on. My friend does have some slightly hair-raising stories like when he was a little boy, he ran to get his ball from under a car and everyone started roaring at him and a soldier ran over and grabbed him – there was a bomb, apparently, or at least, a bomb scare.
I then went for a brief wander about Belfast before heading home on the train. It struck me as pretty depressed (although I suppose nowhere is at its best on a rainy Tuesday in November) and a lot less busy than Dublin or even Cork, and quite pricey too. I don’t quite know why that should be – is it the Brexit uncertainty, the absence of an Assembly, the collapse of industry or just maybe November rain? Poor Belfast.
I was in Cork at the weekend with herself. Nothing really happened but here we are in November and I have committed to posting every day. It’s only the 11th and I’m exhausted already.
I took herself to the cemetery to see my mother’s grave and almost missed it because the enormous overgrown hydrangea bush nearby, which is a handy marker, had been chopped down by somebody in an excess of enthusiasm. We went at dusk and it was quite beautiful. I couldn’t help feeling that had she known, my mother would have been delighted to be interred in such an interesting cemetery.
My father and my aunt were pretty remarkably perky. I made herself consult with my father for his live take on the rise of fascism for her history essay but as he was only 15 in 1940, it was a bit underwhelming – he just summarised what we knew already – but he did comment that his views were formed in part by the papers his aunts and uncles took: the Daily Mail and, oh God, the Express. I can only rejoice, I suppose, that he himself is a Daily Telegraph reader.
We went out on Friday night for my sister’s birthday which was a bit disastrous as both she and my brother were quite ill and herself was exhausted. We ate our way around Cork over the weekend. After our ill-fated dinner on Friday night, herself and myself had a satisfactory breakfast in the Crawford, then picked up lunch ingredients in the Market and in the evening she had chips and Tanora from Jackie Lennox’s; the following morning we had breakfast in the Nano Nagle cafe (aside, is it too early for the return of Hanora as a girl’s name?). All in all a culinary tour de force.
How was your own weekend? Much food?
Mr. Waffle and I went to see a one man show called “The Fetch Wilson”. It wasn’t bad. It was in a new arts space which turned out to be a slightly damp room above a pub. To be fair, it was upstairs from a much nicer room which was showing “Kissing the Witch” and you could buy tickets for a double bill but I didn’t feel able for two and a half hours of theatre, an hour and a half of which was a staging of an Emma Donoghue short story. Admirable, I’m sure but I plumped for the “darkly comic” one man show. It had its moments and it was, to be fair, far, far better than “The Bluffer’s Guide to Suburbia” which is unlikely to be bested in the worst play of 2019 competition.
The woman on the door told me that this theatre company are doing a Christmas special and I think I might force Mr. Waffle and the children to go. Something to look forward to.