Further to my recent post on the birth announcements – you may recall the arrival of “caddies for Daddy” – I saw the following in last weekend’s Irish Times:
SURNAME – Father, Mother… and big brother .. are thrilled to announce the safe arrival of (perfectly pleasant name)…..That completes our crew for Grandad’s boat!
What next we ask ourselves? You may make your suggestions below, if you feel so inspired.
I heard a fascinating programme about Thalidomide on radio 4 as I was driving to work a while ago (it was too wet to cycle – please note defensive tone) and I ended up sitting in the car park to listen to the end of it and scuttling in late to my desk. While I did know about Thalidomide and its effects, it was much more immediate and shocking to hear the people who had been involved and the archive radio material on this. Really interesting stuff and well worth a listen.
Recently, at the end of two announcements where boys were given relatively innocuous names (well, Riley and Zach, if you must know, my standards are slipping) the children’s thrilled etc. parents have seen fit to finish the announcements as follows: “A caddy for Daddy!!” In both cases, two exclamation marks were called for. What is this new and sinister development? Is it in some way related to the fact that you can now play straight through Ireland from North to South given that the greater part of the island of Ireland is now made up of golf courses?
Many years ago, I used to drive from Dublin to Cork at Christmas with my friend M. When we were within sniffing distance of Cork city within the county bounds, in fact, he would insist on stopping for several hours in a college friend’s house. I see from the paper that said college friend’s firm is now sponsoring the Trevor/Bowen Literary Summer School. I wish now that I’d asked the friend about his reading habits rather than spending all my time there glumly nursing a cup of tea and desperate to get away. There’s a moral for young people there somewhere but I’m too tired to draw it.
“Our house in the middle of the web”. In the Irish Times, Debbie Orme was concerned about Google street view. You may read her concerns here, if that’s your kind of thing. How does this sentence make your correspondent feel:
It would be lovely to think that our children could be featured on the internet and we could log on to share images with our friends. But we all know that we don’t live in a world like that.
Um, unnerved. That’s how.
John Butler, in the Irish Times, hit the nail on the head with the following: “As time presses on, and the genetic prophecy is fulfilled, it feels as if we become more like our parents than our own selves, or the self-determined third person we thought we had been building all along.”
Regrettably accurate.