belgianwaffle

Ireland

Geographical Inaccuracy


Posted in: Ireland

I was having a peaceful cup of tea in a cafe yesterday while waiting for Michael to emerge from drama. Sitting beside me was an Irish woman in her early to mid 20s with two tourists. The Irish woman was offering them tips about what to do in Ireland in general and Dublin in particular. I thought that she gave broadly good advice; though quite loud (let those of us who were not loud in our twenties cast the first stone etc.).

They talked about their own lives and the Irish woman explained that she had studied German in college and lived in Germany for a bit. She’d also spent a year working in Cork and loved it. So, you know, a well informed and discerning guide.

Then the tourists asked her about Irish airports. “Well,” she said, “there’s Dublin and Cork. And Galway I think. Oh yes, and Shannon.” “Where is Shannon?” asked the tourists. “It’s in the middle,” she said. “Hmm,” I thought, “it’s kind of in the middle of the west coast but I suppose that’s enough for tourists.” “What county is it in?” asked the tourists. “Good question,” said the Irish guide, “I’m not sure, maybe Roscommon*, I think?”

Goodness gracious me.

*For non-Irish readers, it’s really not.

Durchhalten


Posted in: Dublin, Family, Ireland

Honestly, I can’t remember when I have had a more miserable January. At least 3 of us had the flu and we were all sick. I am only really better now. Poor Mr. Waffle is still going around coughing pathetically. His recovery was not, I imagine, in any way advanced by a shower of hail while he stood on the side of a GAA pitch this afternoon cheering Daniel on to a miserable defeat.

The works in the kitchen have been quite hideous. The house continues to be almost always filled with builders and dust. The temporary kitchen set up in the utility room is as hideous as you might imagine. We had many freezing weeks without a wall. The temperature in the temporary kitchen fell to as low as 8 degrees celsius and the olive oil solidified. For one hideous wet, rainy, cold miserable night we had to go out in the back garden to get to and from the temporary kitchen.

We enjoyed about a week of an earth floor in the kitchen which as depressing as it sounds. Particularly, when you see the cat eyeing it speculatively as a vast indoor toilet facility. Our tiles in the kitchen were laid on earth by the Victorians and, as Mr. Waffle said, there were worms there sticking their heads into the air for the first time since the build up to the Boer War. British worms.

There were several dates for delivery of windows to make the kitchen weatherproof. This was even more important as doors between the kitchen and the rest of the house had to be removed. Two of the delivery dates were missed to no one’s real surprise but the windows and glass doors were delivered on February 4 and although the door doesn’t open and the bathroom window is not the colour we ordered, we are inclined to regard this as a definite step forward.

Meanwhile, like a fool, I am doing a course which required an assignment to be submitted by February 7. It had to be done in the course of January. You would think we were suffering enough but I enjoyed putting myself through that extra layer of misery. I am never doing another degree, diploma or anything unless it is for my own entertainment and maybe not even then.

My poor 93 year old father also got the flu and I was ringing him for daily updates on his condition. He’s almost recovered, thanks for asking. As I rang to hear his litany of woe and he sympathetically listened to mine, he would say, “there is only one thing for it ‘durchhalten'”.

I think the worst might be over. But it might not.

Failing to Keep Up with the Joneses


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland

When we went to Cork for a week our next door neighbours minded our cat, then when they were in France last week we fed their chickens. They came back at the weekend and we exchanged token gifts in return for neighbourly services.

Our token gift: a packet of artisan marshmallow picked up at a food fair in Cork

Their token gift: two large bars of chocolate, a jar of foie gras, a jar of onion confit, an enormous amount of Tomme and some other mountainy cheese.

I feel bad but I had some of the foie gras this evening and, God knows, we need some cheering in the midst of illness and renovations, and I was cheered. Also, Mr. Waffle tells me that he put out their bins and took them in again so there’s that. As against that, we got four eggs from the hens during our period of responsibility.

Changing Mores or an Unexpected Caller


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland

Over Christmas Mr. Waffle and I went for a walk along the South Bull Wall which is a wall with a lighthouse at the end of it that sticks out into Dublin bay. Half of Dublin was there (including a child from the boys’ class whose parents had forced him out while we left ours plugged in to the mainframe). The guilt.

They missed the great views out to Wicklow across the bay but they were unmoved when we told them.

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Anyhow, this is all by the by. The story I am wending my way gradually towards concerns a couple who were walking towards us. The woman was speaking with great vehemence, “I mean, she’s a monster, unbearable, who even does that?” I listened with interest to hear what the sin was and, apparently, the monster dropped in on them without notice. That was it, that was her sin. Sadly, only my friends M & R do that to us but I love an unexpected drop in. Is it now gone the way of the dodo? My sister tells me that a woman who was in her class in school has a sign up in her driveway saying, “Please respect our privacy and do not call to the door.” This just strikes me as rude. Am I out of touch? What do the young people do?

Cork Round-Up


Posted in: Cork, Family, Ireland, Travel

We drove down to Cork on January 1. We had to pick herself up from Kildare where she stayed overnight at a friend’s house following a New Year’s Eve party. Personally, I was tucked up in my bed at midnight and it was fantastic. I don’t know why I didn’t start doing this years ago. Did I mention that I turn 50 this year?

It was only when we stopped in Cashel for lunch that herself noticed that her carefully packed bag had been left behind in Dublin by her mother who faithfully promised to put it in the car and then completely forgot. “You have your overnight bag,” I pointed out, not entirely hopefully. That remark was treated with the contempt that it deserved.

We were coming to a family in Cork which was a bit laid low. My father had a fall last week and although he appeared to have sustained no serious injury he had a most spectacular bruise covering all one side of his face. Meanwhile my brother had contracted flu and my sister had sprained her ankle. Not propitious. We called in to my parents’ house to distribute and receive presents and inspect the various invalids before travelling on to our friends’ house in East Cork where we were staying. They seemed alright and they improved over the course of the week.

Our friends’ M and R had just vacated their premises in Garryvoe before we arrived and it was delightfully warm (normally their fancy energy efficient Scandi heating requires a day to heat up). We unpacked. Mr. Waffle came downstairs, “Is something wrong with the toilet in the ensuite?” “Yes,” I said, “remember they told us when we met for lunch and when they texted that they were leaving. ” “They met you for lunch and texted you, but you did not pass this on,” he said with understandable bitterness. His first new year’s google search was for dealing with a used broken toilet. In view of the audible unhappiness attendant on this issue, I was not going to fall for it the next day when Daniel said to me, “I used the broken toilet.” Sadly, it was all too true. Later in the week I stumbled blearily from bed to the en suite bathroom and would have fallen into the common error but Mr. Waffle was ready for the lot of us and the toilet bowl was sealed with sellotape and there was a sticker on the lid saying “Out of Order”. Truly, he is a prince among husbands.

We made a 500 piece jigsaw and failed to make a 1,000 piece one. Valuable lesson there for us.

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The Princess and I spent two hours shopping in Cork for a replacement wardrobe for her. I have to tell you that it nearly broke my spirit. I’m not able for the young people’s shops with their absence of places to sit. We bought a pair of cords for her which I quite liked. “Do I look like Frodo of the Shire?” she asked. I assured her not. Big shout out to the lovely waitress in Barry’s, Douglas who spontaneously admired them. Actually, I found the service in shops and cafes in Cork uniformly lovely. Even though they probably despise my family as non-Corkonians, they concealed it really well.

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Frodo or not Frodo?

My sister took the children and me to dinner in Milano’s. Later in the week herself went for breakfast with me in the Crawford (where we had a look at the lovely Harry Clarke exhibition) lunch with her aunt and wandered around town like the Dublin sophisticate she is. Daniel and I went on the Ferris Wheel on the Grand Parade which was surprisingly pleasant.

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In the absence of wifi in Garryvoe, Daniel and Michael took to doing the crossword.

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In a very mild way we went for a walk on the beach and in the forest.

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Herself showed a gratifying level of interest in old family photos which are all stored in three drawers under one side of the old bookcase (bought by my Nana from the Canon in Kilmallock and designed for a much larger house). On the plus side they are all together. On the minus side, they are not particularly well labeled or, really, at all. There’s one I quite like of my mother and her classmates doing calisthenics on the front lawn of their rural Limerick boarding school in the 1940s (to impress parents? who took the picture? so many questions which are now unanswerable). Herself was able to unerringly identify her Nana in the photos. Others were trickier. There’s some young man in a Free State army uniform with his Lee Enfield rifle. Who is he? My father doesn’t know and also, doesn’t care. I didn’t think that either side of the family were big fans of the Free State so I am a bit baffled. On the plus side there was a picture of my father’s grandfather which my father instantly recognised. His intervention was unnecessary as my mother had written all his details on the back. “Born 1848, died 1938” I read out. “Look,” I said, “born just after the famine, the year of the Young Irelander uprising and your Grandad sitting just over there knew him well, lived with him, talked with him, look at how close you are to the middle of the the 19th century.” Both she and her grandfather were unmoved by this but studying the picture she said irately, “He has the same bags under his eyes that you, Grandad and Aunty Pat have, and they’ve passed on to me.” She neglected to mention that they are also the bags my Granny had but, they were. Notwithstanding this unfortunate genetic inheritance, I think he looks very kindly and my father says he was lovely. Great genes as well as eye baggy ones, he lived to be 90 as I pointed out to herself.

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We came back to Dublin today. The builders are supposed to be coming to start work on Monday. We have put off clearing out the kitchen and under the stairs until tomorrow. Oh dear. And I still have my assignment for my course to do (deadline end January, loads of time, right?) and it’s back to school and work on Monday. Alas, alack.




Middle Aged Concerns


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland

We have a lane behind our house. It’s a clean lane and, as lanes go, it’s a nice lane. There is nowhere to sit in the lane except just opposite the door into our garage where an old boarded up door into the convent which used to be behind us has a handy step for sitting on.

This tended to attract older men who would sit and drink there in the fine weather. I did not love this but they were always quiet and polite and left their beer cans in a plastic bag which I would dispose of with a tch sound.

The convent is now being replaced by apartments and the building work has made the lane (and indeed our back garden) a much less pleasant place to be. Our older gentlemen drinkers have moved on.

I was deeply displeased on coming home in the middle of the day to see that their place had been taken by two drug users. My neighbour from up the road was cycling past with his granddaughter on the front of his bike and he gave them the evil eye and waited for me to let myself in to the shed with my bike. They were very skinny with bad teeth and clearly about to inject something so the man’s assurance to us that they were “only smoking a joint” was unconvincing.

I didn’t even bother calling the guards but my neighbour up the road did but, as he observed bitterly, they didn’t come. I suppose they are busy.

I feel sorry for these people who have fallen through the cracks and are stuck drinking or even drug taking in our lane but I do not want my children coming home from school and having to wrestle their bikes into the shed while people are shooting up beside them. I had made my peace with our drinkers but I think intravenous drug use is probably where I draw the line. When our builders start in January, I am going to ask them to block up the step with breeze blocks which are somehow a bit better than those vile pigeon spike things.

I suppose we’ll make another attempt to get everyone to agree on gates for the lane – a project which has been in gestation for at least ten years. I note that there are new neighbours at the top of the road who will have to be persuaded. According to their older neighbours whom I know, they are lovely. She is a surgeon and has already diagnosed one of their ailments. I’m not sure whether that will make the new neighbours feel more neighbourly and inclined to agree to an electric gate and then, of course, jointly funding it. The last objector to gates in any way shape or form has died (naturally of old age, I hasten to add) but a number of people won’t go for electronic gates which they see as excessive and over the top but which are insisted upon by the people with the fancy car which they park in the garage accessed by the lane. Everyone has to agree or it can’t be done. Honestly, I can see this running for another ten years.