Recently, the Princess asked me what “ggu..nn.ess” meant? “Where did you see it?” I asked. “Everywhere,” she said. “Ah, I think you must mean Guinness”. “Oh, the black beer with white on top?” “Well, Guinness isn’t the only black beer with white on top, its called stout and in Cork they make two kinds of stout : Murphy’s and Beamish. In fact, your great, great uncle Tommy, your Cork Grandad’s uncle worked in the Murphy’s factory in Cork”. I’m doing my best here but I feel that I’m fighting an uphill battle.
Dublin
Socialising
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.
Yoof
I met some young people the other day. I don’t really meet many teenagers. They were pleasant but slightly alarming. I don’t think I was at all as confident and articulate at 16.
R (16) told me about his motorbike and showed me a picture on his phone. Someone on his estate died in a motorbike accident last week: “he wasn’t wearing a helmet, it happens”.
R is the product of a brief union. He has five step-brothers and sisters from his mother’s second marriage and several more from his father’s first marriage. He also has a baby sister from his father’s third marriage to a woman from Cameroon. Modern Ireland in microcosm. When he leaves school he wants to join the British army. Not the Irish army because they only go on peacekeeping missions.
R’s friend H asked me what I was going to do about teenage pregnancy rates. “Nothing” I said and then ventured “actually, I think that Ireland has a quite a low rate for teenage pregnancy“. “Not in my school” she said whipping out her mobile phone to show me her 15 year old friend’s scan.
I feel very middle aged now, I can tell you.
Things that happen to you when you are over 40
I have spent the last number of evenings alphabetising our book collection. This is disturbingly entertaining. I may be going insane. In a dull meeting today, I found my mind wandering longingly to the four shelves that then remained to be tackled.
I have a burst blood vessel in my eyeball. It is not an attractive look.
Ireland won the rugby Grand Slam. Alarmingly, I remember when we won the Triple Crown in 1982. Last Sunday afternoon we saw the bus bearing the victorious players and pieces of plate go by while we were stopped at traffic lights. If the children become international rugby stars, we will remind them of this moment – my brother is working hard on their skills, only this evening he had them all practising doing a scrum together.
I am cycling to work and finding that the world of cycling in Dublin is very macho. It’s all men in lycra with high visibility vests and sporting helmets. I miss Brussels where there was a gender mix in the cycling population and all the competitive macho cycling took place deep in Flanders.
I discover that my writing style has started to resemble that of a a TV critic, desperately trying to knit together disparate elements under an unlikely unifying theme.
You will remember that I turn 40 this day week
A young Filippina woman offered me her seat on the bus. I demurred. She insisted.
Do I look pregnant or elderly?
Which is worse?
Exciting neighbourhood
My brother, driving me home from dinner, said “I know you’re a great believer in the classless society and all that but, for the sake of the kids, would you not move somewhere more normal?”
It’s not rough here, it’s just very…urban.