Daniel sent a message into the family group chat the other morning after going through the back garden to get his bike from the shed. It read: Hodge vom garden
Mr. Waffle took a look and said, “Ah the well-known German count.” Honestly, I thought it was hilarious. This is the kind of content I married him for. Also, he cleaned up the cat vomit.
I have been to the Lavinia Fontana exhibition in the National Gallery and to a talk on her by an interesting English art historian.
Lavinia Fontana is not really a name to conjure with. She’s not particularly well known but the art historian argues that she should be. She’s a mannerist artist from Bologna and the first woman to do a lot of things. The exhibition is terrific and worth your time should you be in Dublin. Sadly, it does not include this picture which I would really like to see in the flesh. Fontana is brilliant at painting children. The art historian said that part of the reason Fontana is not better known is that museums leave her work in storage instead of displaying it and that this is a fate which befalls many female artists which is a depressing thought.
Speaking of unjustly neglected female artists, I also went to a talk by the novelist Mary Morrissy on Una Watters. I had never heard of Watters and her work is lovely. Mary Morrissy has been working to resurrect her from obscurity and has a website championing her work. Apparently one of Watters’s paintings – The People’s Gardens – is in storage in the Hugh Lane gallery and I, for one, will be heading in to see if I can get them to dig it out and let me have a look. You should too.
Mr. Waffle and I did another walking tour with Dublin decoded. These tours are so good – it is pretty unusual to get a tour in the city where you live and learn lots of new things. Did you know that for a while Heuston Station had the largest span of railway sheds in the world? That the crowns were taken off King’s Bridge when it was renamed Heuston bridge but you can still see the cast iron cushions where they used to sit? The tour is full of quirky layers of detail after detail and the guide full of ebullient enthusiasm for his subject. A delight.
Back in April, when my blog was technologically challenged, we celebrated ten years in our new house. God, I love this house and I almost daily give thanks that we were lucky enough to get it. We bought when the property market was at a low point (not through cunning but because we were desperate to get out of our tiny house with three small children) and we could not have afforded to buy it at any other time before or since. I remember the day we saw it. We had seen so many houses. We had a spread sheet and everything. I remember standing in the utility room (sadly largely unchanged – needs work) with Mr. Waffle and the two of us just beaming at each other because we knew it was the perfect house for us.
As I am shallow – or maybe human? – my house has always been really important to me. Thorough readers with very long memories will recall that at the age of 11, I had to leave the house I most loved – a very large square four floor house with a large garden with half a dozen apple trees – think of it as the pre-lapsarian years. I have had some good houses since then, I loved all the places I lived in Brussels and I eventually grew to love the Edwardian semi-detatched house my parents moved us into when we left paradise but this is undoubtedly the best place I have lived in my adult life. I feel so pleased that my children grew up in such a nice place. I will NEVER move out. It is perfect in every way. Even though it doesn’t have a side passage.
I had a busy, busy day yesterday. I began by making breakfast for my husband (in isolation) and packing lunches for my children. I left my misfortunate husband a couple of sandwiches for lunch and went out. He’s still positive, thanks for asking.
I was going for my first swim of the season with a friend. She is an all year round swimmer. I am not. Although I did swim in October and now in May, so I suppose that’s something? After our invigorating swim we had a lovely lunch and I was delighted with myself until we got back to her house and I realised that I had managed to lose my headphones. I cycled on home, picked up the car and drove back to Howth to look for them (not handy) but did not find them. Alas. They were a present and a little bit pricey. Double alas. All this driving around in traffic made me late to take Daniel to his match (near the airport on a Wednesday night, the GAA, I love it).
When I got home from dropping Dan, I made dinner, dropped Mr Waffle up a tray and sat down with Michael while leaving food for Dan warming in the oven. I hadn’t seen much of Michael that evening and he looked a bit flushed. “Are you ok?” I asked. “I’ve had a headache all day,” he said. I instructed him to go upstairs and give himself a Covid test after dinner and rushed back out to the airport to pick up Dan (they won, a win). Michael texted me his test result. He has finally succumbed. How very 2022 of us.
As mentioned, Mr. Waffle got my cold. He decided to take a Covid test. He has Covid.
And we’re back.
I fear it did not even occur to me to take a Covid test when I was sick last week. I took one now and I am negative. Is that any good? As I said to Mr. Waffle, “It’s just that I was basically at home and cancelled all social events, so I didn’t think to take a test as I would have if I had been going out.” “Except for the 20,000 people you were in a field with on Friday night,” said he. Oh yeah, except for those. Tony Holohan was clearly right not to trust us.
Michael is planning to study history in college and he went for a chat with a neighbour who is a history lecturer. Mr. Waffle ran into the neighbour and thanked him for his time and asked what his own 18 year old daughter is thinking of doing. “She doesn’t know,” said her father, “She’s probably going to take a year off. This generation are all going to live until they’re 90 and work until they’re 70, so they might as well have some fun now.”
In other news, Mr Waffle has got my cold. He’s sick as a dog.
