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Archives for May 2009

Startling

10 May, 2009
Posted in: Cork, Ireland

I was at mass with my mother in Cork last week. The local catholic church, in a touching display of ecumenicism which I am sure would be crushed by the catholic hierarchy had they the faintest idea that it was happening, invites a protestant vicar to attend mass every week.

Last Sunday, the vicar read the Gospel and gave the sermon. I had by this point accustomed myself to his presence but since he kicked off with the words “My wife and I..” he succeeded in jolting his catholic congregation wide awake. These are not words you hear from a catholic priest.

It was vocation Sunday (the irony of having a Protestant vicar preach to a catholic congregation on vocation Sunday might not, I suspect appeal to the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but let us draw a veil over that) so there was a lot of talk of good shepherds.

The vicar told us of his former parish in West Cork and his parishioner, Trevor. Trevor was a good shepherd. He loved his cows. OK, sorry, a good dairy farmer. One day he saw one of the hired hands belting a cow and he fired the hired hand on the spot. Clear analogy, we are with you vicar, your words are only slightly undermined by the visible amusement of your catholic counterpart who had until that story been sitting nodding sagely as you told us of the wisdom of Billy Graham.

At the end of mass, the priest stood up to say a couple of words. Firstly, he thanked the spectacular choir who had come in from the Cork choral festival; secondly he told us that the church was 3 million in the red as the trustees had put all their money in AIB shares and this faith in capitalism turned out to be misplaced hence the need for a collection basked; finally he remarked that we might have seen him laughing during the sermon. He explained that he was a farmer’s son from West Cork. “And,” said he, “Protestant cows and Catholic cows are clearly treated very differently in that part of the world; we’d often give a cow an old belt to move it along.” I don’t know whether this ecumenicism lark will ever really take off.

Socialising

11 May, 2009
Posted in: Boys, Daniel, Dublin, Ireland, Michael, Princess

Last weekend, the Princess went to a birthday party in one of Dublin’s more exciting suburbs. It boasts horses in front gardens (this is not a good thing in Dublin, you’ll have to trust me here) and, if you type this suburb + shooting into Google, then you get 26,100 results. However, she emerged unscathed.

That evening her father and I went to dinner at the houses of friends who live in a rather different Dublin suburb. For the hell of it, I typed “much nicer suburb + shooting” into Google and it reproachfully asked me whether I meant “much nicer suburb + shopping”.

Meanwhile, Mr. Waffle got a call from the childminder asking whether she could take the children to a party at the house of a little (francophone, North African) boy they regularly played with in the park. He said yes and I probably would have too but I had some qualms subsequently. This is the problem with having two working parents. While I was perfectly happy to drop the Princess off to gangland shooting suburb as the birthday girl was a classmate whom I had met, I was uneasy about them all going to a strange house where I didn’t know the child or his mother even though their childminder stayed with them the entire time. Sigh.

We also got invited to lunch by friends – she is French and he is Irish and her parents (who do not speak a great deal of English) were staying for a week and I think that they felt that it might be useful to have some other French speakers and French speaking children about. All very pleasant – they are French farmers from deepest darkest Brittany and I was fascinated to hear that his parents were native Breton speakers and hers spoke a local dialect but, of course, they all learnt French French at school. While both our friend’s parents understand dialect and Breton respectively, our friend understands neither. It has to be said that the policy of the French state seems to be a little hostile to languages other than French within its borders. My husband, who knows everything, told me that as recently as the first world war only one in five Frenchmen spoke French. Well, they’ve fixed that then.

Thoughts on growing-up

12 May, 2009
Posted in: Reading etc.

John Butler, in the Irish Times, hit the nail on the head with the following: “As time presses on, and the genetic prophecy is fulfilled, it feels as if we become more like our parents than our own selves, or the self-determined third person we thought we had been building all along.”

Regrettably accurate.

Guilt 2.0

13 May, 2009
Posted in: Reading etc.

“Our house in the middle of the web”. In the Irish Times, Debbie Orme was concerned about Google street view. You may read her concerns here, if that’s your kind of thing. How does this sentence make your correspondent feel:

It would be lovely to think that our children could be featured on the internet and we could log on to share images with our friends. But we all know that we don’t live in a world like that.

Um, unnerved. That’s how.

With age, possibly, comes wisdom

14 May, 2009
Posted in: Reading etc.

Many years ago, I used to drive from Dublin to Cork at Christmas with my friend M. When we were within sniffing distance of Cork city within the county bounds, in fact, he would insist on stopping for several hours in a college friend’s house. I see from the paper that said college friend’s firm is now sponsoring the Trevor/Bowen Literary Summer School. I wish now that I’d asked the friend about his reading habits rather than spending all my time there glumly nursing a cup of tea and desperate to get away. There’s a moral for young people there somewhere but I’m too tired to draw it.

More from the birth announcements

15 May, 2009
Posted in: Ireland, Reading etc.

Recently, at the end of two announcements where boys were given relatively innocuous names (well, Riley and Zach, if you must know, my standards are slipping) the children’s thrilled etc. parents have seen fit to finish the announcements as follows: “A caddy for Daddy!!” In both cases, two exclamation marks were called for. What is this new and sinister development? Is it in some way related to the fact that you can now play straight through Ireland from North to South given that the greater part of the island of Ireland is now made up of golf courses?

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