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Archives for July 2009

Martine goes incognito


Posted in: Reading etc.

Martine features in an iconic series of French children’s books. Sometimes she gets to hang out with Jean-lou and Sophie. The pictures in the books are very recognisable.

The other day, in the parents-in-law’s house, I saw Martine or possibly some of her friends lurking at the bottom of a pile of children’s books. This was unsurprising as their house is filled with classic French children’s books which belonged to my husband and his siblings when they were little. What I expected to see was something like this:

Jean-Lou et Sophie découvrent la mer

What I actually saw was:

Liam agus Brídín cois farraige

I’m hoping that someone else out there will find this as odd as I do. My mother-in-law used also pick up a lot of books for her children from the Irish language publishers “An Gúm”. Apparently the Irish rights for translating foreign language publications were cheap. I still find it hard to believe that anyone was convinced that the scene below was typical of an Irish beach in summer:

Typical Irish beach scene

If you want more Martine and friends in Irish, you need only say the word but I fear it may be a minority interest.

Outings


Posted in: Dublin, Family, Ireland

Often our excursions with the children are unsuccessful (see, for example, our trip to Leinster House recently) but last week we went to the Dead Zoo at large and it was excellent. The Natural History Museum has been shut for a number of years following the spectacular collapse of its staircase (nobody injured but a number of attendants and tourists were shocked). It’s a great museum. It has cabinets filled with excitingly posed stuffed animals; things in bottles; insects on pins. It’s all very 19th century. Pending its re-opening (works clearly approved before the economy fell over a cliff), a part of the collection is being housed in another museum. We went to visit. It was wholly successful. The factors were as follows:

1. What we wanted to see was right inside the door. How many times have I been to places where the children have used up all their energies on the wrong thing and I have had to drag them away from the amphora at the entrance to see the enchanting puppet show. They have then spent the remainder of the time whinging that they want to go back to playing hide and seek with the amphora.

2. The (large) space was enclosed with only one exit.

3. The attendants were pleasant, chatty, helpful and tolerant of running children.

4. The exhibition was fantastic. Nothing like an enormous crystallised slug with spikes to appeal to the under 7s.

On a very wet Sunday, in a brief interval between showers we took ourselves to Play Day in Merrion Square. It was billed as a chance for children to play with normal, cheap, easily available things. The children absolutely loved it. The rain continued with enthusiasm all afternoon. They couldn’t have cared less. There were army tents filled with clothes for dressing up, puppet theatres, tea sets, drums made from saucepans and chopsticks to bang them. There was a large piece of cloth which the children could run under (remember running under sheets when they were being folded – like that only on a grander scale); there were bubble blowers the size of sieves (apparently glycerine in the water makes for superior bubbles); there were footballs and large inflatable yokes you could roll down the hill on; there was plasticene (made gooier and better by the driving rain), there was a cornflour/water/food colouring mix which had a bizarre and deeply satisfying consistency; there were pillow fights; there was a microphone where Michael sang several verses of “London Bridge is falling down” with great confidence and verve. There were no sweets on sale anywhere but they were giving out free fruit. I found it an enormous relief not to have to spend my afternoon fending off requests for ice cream, sweets and crisps. I spoke to one of the organisers and he told me that the previous year, it had been standing room only. The advantage of the rain was, I suppose, that our children had unimpeded access to the blue goo.

Not so homogenous as all that


Posted in: Cork, Ireland

By default, I tend to think of Ireland as a country with a very homogenous population until the recent wave of immigration. A recent conversation with my parents made me rethink a little.

They were talking about Hadji Bey’s Turkish delight (a Cork speciality) and it occurred to me that it was unlikely to have been the brainchild of an Irish native. They moved on to talking about a family (from Iran) with whom my father’s family had been friendly. They spoke about the “old lady” who spoke broken English and the children who became fully integrated (always a particular challenge in Cork).

Then there were all the Lithuanians in Cork (which my husband says boasts some of the most unusual surnames in Ireland). They were going to America but stopped off in Cork for reasons which are unclear to me and probably to them too. And then there were the Dutch butter merchants from the 18th century. And come to think of it, my mother is probably a Palatine (her grandmother’s maiden name was very germanic and a bit odd). There were Hungarian refugees in my mother’s class in school and one of them subsequently had a very handsome son who was a couple of years ahead of my brother in school. There were Vards the furriers who were very exotic, probably Jewish, I reckon (my mother remembers one of them in college arguing strongly against going to fight the communists in Hungary – he felt there was no point and thus the Hungarian uprising of ’56 was denied the assistance of a bunch of UCC students).

Perhaps, immigration is not the recent phenomenon we’ve been led to believe.

Party organiser


Posted in: Princess, Twins, Youngest Child

The other morning, Michael asked could he bring a bag into Montessori school. He and his sister had been whispering about this earlier in some excitement. In a moment of weakness, I said that he could and in he trotted with a pink poodle bag strapped to his back.

When he got in, he could contain his excitement no longer; he opened up the bag and, to my intense astonishment, began distributing envelopes. “We’re having a party,” he announced to his classmates. I managed to get one of the invitations from one of the other children. It said, in his sister’s handwriting “We are having a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ party”. It gave a date (aha her request for a calendar explained), time and address and included a drawing of Thomas.

Invitation

I was impressed by her organisational powers. She had said that she wanted to hold a party for the boys and I had fobbed her off saying that we would have something for their birthday in September and we couldn’t afford to throw parties at the drop of a hat. She was undaunted and said that she only wanted a party for playing games not for food which might, she could see, be expensive. I resorted to the grown-ups’ favourite phrase and help in ages past “We’ll see.” Clearly, she felt that she needed to take matters into her own hands. The teacher rescued all the invitations from the boys’ classmates and the Princess and I had a discussion about the power of the written word.

Stereotyped at 3


Posted in: Middle Child, Twins, Youngest Child

Me: Worry, worry, school, boys, blah etc.
Husband: Don’t worry.
Me: But I do worry, school, big children etc.
Him: Look,they’ll be all right, Daniel is clever and Michael, Michael has street smarts.

Please note: 1. They are both clever (of course they are, my children etc. etc.), 2. Neither of them has street smarts (they’re three).

Reminiscing


Posted in: Family

My favourite aunt turned 80 recently and we had dinner to celebrate. We considered a bit what the world was like in 1929 when she was born. Obviously, she was able to contribute little to this conversation from personal experience but my father, who was 4 at the time had some further contributions to make. My aunt was born in South Pasadena where her parents had emigrated a couple of years earlier (some unhappiness for my grandfather at home in the wake of the civil war, I understand).

My father remembers that they had to turn off the lights for 5 minutes after Edison died (1931) to see what it was like without electricity (dark, he reports). There were talkies and cars (but also horses) . There was an ice man. My father remembers nothing of the Wall Street Crash and both of them felt that my grandfather had not frequented speakeasies despite my brother’s hopeful assertions that he surely had. They did remember, though, small bottles of whiskey being sent from home wrapped in newspapers and my grandfather brewing his own stout (terrifying thought). My father remembers that when my aunt was about 2 she was rescued from drowning by a Californian lifeguard (turned upside down and patted on the back while howling). If you knew my father and my aunt and how entirely from Cork they are, you would find this startling.