Herself (who has been elected to a national student body and is talking about a workshop): One of the boys in my group was a bit mean about Irish.
Mr. Waffle: How?
Her: He said that it was a dead language and why did we bother learning through it.
Mr. Waffle: What did you say?
Her: I said that they studied Latin at his school and it was a lot more dead and he didn’t seem to have a problem with that.
Mr. Waffle: Incendiat.
Princess
Increases in the Cost of Living
The Princess is very pleased with her new phone but it is not without its drawbacks.
We passed an advertisement on the street and she said bitterly “Vodafone 4g is not bringing me closer to Irish rugby it’s bringing me closer to bankruptcy.” It’s all good preparation for the woes of adulthood.
Nervous
I had lunch with a friend yesterday and she asked me how I had told my children about the Trump presidency. “I kind of let them draw their own conclusions,” I said.
But on foot of that I was talking to them this evening and asked them what they thought. They started to sing “Duck and Cover“. This is a song which we heard when we visited the war museum in Caen a couple of years ago and it has stayed with us for its hilarious understatement of the effects of a nuclear bomb. It’s from a US public safety video from the 1950s. Herself stopped singing and said, “But now we know that hiding under school desks is not going to save us from the nuclear bomb.”
“Well,” I said, “remember [very tall Dutch friend] who works inspecting nuclear power generators?” “Yeah,” she said, “sitting under the desk is definitely not going to work for him.” “No, no, it’s just that he said that radiation goes for the thyroid and the most serious damage is done straight after the blast. If you take iodine tablets straight away, then your chances of survival are pretty good.”
Reassuring. I thought you would like to know. I think I was right that the children had drawn their own conclusions about the Trump presidency though.
Bitter, Bitter, Bitter
The boys found the classic “Owl Babies” on the bookshelf. It’s the story of three baby owls waiting for their mother to come home. Looking through it, Daniel said “They’re like us; an older girl, a middle boy and a younger boy.” They looked nostalgically at the illustrations for a while, then Michael piped up, “Not really, because the eldest owl isn’t playing on her mobile phone.”
The Princess got a phone as an early Christmas present from her uncle and aunt and we have not determined what the rules are about usage and into this vacuum has seeped 24 hour usage by herself and an ocean of bitterness on the part of her brothers. Not our finest parenting hour, something will have to be done. Sigh.
Learning OpportunitiesÂ
Herself: We are doing the renaissance in history.
Me: Oh yes?
Her: I know loads of renaissance sculptors and painters but I never get to mention them.
Me: And why is that?
Her: Because whenever the history teacher asks us to name renaissance artists, she says, “Remember the turtles!”
Raifteirà Prepares to Hand Over the Reins
Herself has won a poetry prize. She wrote a 1916 poem in Irish for a school competition and the teacher asked me if she could submit it to a national competition. I said that she could and herself won second prize. She was very pleased. There was an awards ceremony in Killarney last week but it was beyond us to get her down there; as she said dolefully, “This is what happens to the children of working parents.” However, they are going to send the cheque for €100 in the post. As I pointed out to her, I am sure that actual Irish language poets would regard that as a substantial part of their annual income. I am perhaps stereotyping the profession of Irish language poet as one that is not particularly well remunerated.
The boys are consumed with envy.