The weekend before last we climbed the Sugar Loaf again. The children ran up and down. I struggled behind them as best I could. I was still stiff on Wednesday. Views from the top are still lovely though.
Family
Miscellaneous Cork News
I went to Cork for my parents’ anniversary. I was alone. Very exciting. My mother and I went for a walk in Kinsale. The weather was beautiful.
We had a family dinner where my aunt told us about how, as a young woman, she and a friend went to Torquay on holidays. They were desperate to see the News of the World which was not then available in Ireland. They promptly went the newsagent’s and bought the News of the World, the Observer and the Catholic Herald. As the newsagent said, that’s not a combination you see very often.
We bought my parents an iPad for their anniversary. So far they seem wary but broadly positive.
I decided to bring my Great Aunt Cecelia’s Persian rug back to Dublin with me as my parents have taken it up to stop themselves tripping over it and killing themselves. Given my reputation my mother said anxiously, “You can have it, but you’re not to throw it out.” I promised not. I imagined it transforming my room, a bit like in “The Little Princess”:
This is what she saw. In the grate there was a glowing, blazing fire; on the hob was a little brass kettle hissing and boiling; spread upon the floor was a thick, warm crimson rug; before the fire a folding-chair, unfolded, and with cushions on it; by the chair a small folding-table, unfolded, covered with a white cloth, and upon it spread small covered dishes, a cup, a saucer, a teapot; on the bed were new warm coverings and a satin-covered down quilt; at the foot a curious wadded silk robe, a pair of quilted slippers, and some books. The room of her dream seemed changed into fairyland– and it was flooded with warm light, for a bright lamp stood on the table covered with a rosy shade.
It didn’t quite meet those, admittedly stringent, criteria but I like it as does the cat:
That is all.
Busy Day
Today is:
Google’s 14th birthday;
The feast day of Saint Vincent de Paul;
And of Saint Michael;
The feast of the French Community of Belgium (for details, I refer you here);
My parents’ 45th wedding anniversary;
And Daniel and Michael’s 7th birthday.
Update – 24 October
And I finally got around to writing a birthday note.
Washout
Sunday, July 15
We arrived in Cork to lashing rain. I forced my family and my brother and sister down to the park to see the World Street Performing championships. It was damp. I was wearing sandals and only successfully got the mud out of my feet by mid-week. The children whined. It was an inauspicious beginning. I was, however, proved right because, although the street performers did not hold the children’s attention there were ancillary excitements.
Like this:
And a zip line over the pond:
Say what you like about the rain, it makes for short queues. Also, the sun shone, very briefly. After our mud stop in Cork we said goodbye to the grandparents and drove to Garryvoe in East Cork. My saintly friends M and R have a house there and we have stayed there many times. It’s a lovely house, very close to the beach and a relatively easy drive into Cork city. Even though the weather was not terrific, the children were very pleased to see the beach.
It was only when we got to Garryvoe that we discovered that the purchase of an e-reader for her had made little difference to the Princess’s packing habits:
The Longest Day of the Year
Today is my favourite aunt’s birthday [or possibly not, this was a matter of some dispute between the American authorities and my grandmother; to be fair, you would think she would know]. When I was forced at age 11 to move from a larger house to a smaller one, the only comfort was that my aunt lived next door. And she still does and now when we visit Cork, my children wander into her house and eat her food, watch her television and play her piano just like my brother and sister and I have been doing for 30 years. I had better not tell the children that in summer she played soccer with us in the back garden until it got dark.
Busy
Things the Waffles did last weekend: we had my sister to stay; I went out with her on Friday night; Daniel played football on Saturday morning; simultaneously, herself and her father cycled into town so that she could participate with the school choir in the first communion excitement; we took in a cousin for a sleepover and handed over herself in exchange; on Sunday the boys played in a tennis tournament in the afternoon in a difficult to find and inconveniently located tennis club; on Sunday evening we reversed the exchange. In a dreadful moment, we thought we had lost the cousin’s DS but after 24 painful hours, it turned up under the passenger seat of our car.