Me: Oh Dan, the back of your neck is sunburnt, here let me put on some aftersun.
Him (peering at the bottle): Will it hurt?
Me: No, not at all.
Him (peering further at the bottle): It says 24 hour moisture.
Me: Yes, and?
Him: I don’t want to be moist for 24 hours.
Me: Hilarious, witty quip.
Herself: Is that a joke?
Me: Of course, it’s a joke, it’s hilarious.
Her: No, it’s just sometimes hard to tell whether you’re being funny or going senile.
School is well over at this stage. The end of year activities were suitably frantic. Michael got a prize for best all-round student in his class and he was pleased. The school reports were fine.
The summer is the usual hodge podge of cobbled together activities. Herself and Daniel had many things organised (Zambia, France, a three week course on law and politics and robotics respectively) and the couple of weeks they have nothing on, I am more than happy for them to hang around the house. While Dan was in Paris, Michael did a drama camp which, frankly, he did not love. Daniel and Michael did a couple of things together – the sports course with French exchange N and a week in Cork with my brother.
I sent the boys to Cork to bond with their Cork relatives. My brother insisted that they bring their bikes and, despite some reservations on my part, I duly complied. My sister collected them from the station and as she cycled into town she chatted to Michael. She said, “It was his voice but your words.” Apparently he admired the segregated cycling infrastructure.
My brother who is the stubbornest person I know, took them on a 15 km cycle to Cobh. They were multi modal and in the course of their travels around Cork they also got the ferry and the train. They seemed to like it. I was impressed despite myself.
They also visited my mother and I was so glad that she got to see them one last time.
Next week, all three children are at home with no plans which I think will probably be ok but from the week after, Michael will be at home alone as the other two are at their camp and his parents are at work. An attempt to sign him up for a sailing course with his cousins has been resisted with extreme vigour. What on earth will he do?
You know how you read about women who say, “My husband just left it out for me to sign and I didn’t read it.” I used to be scornful and think it was a poor excuse for fraud or insider dealing or whatever the husband was accused of and the wife dragged into but now I am not so sure.
After our skiing holiday we needed to put in an insurance claim for the lost skis. Mr. Waffle kindly did the paperwork and I signed and signed. I came into the kitchen one evening and saw yet more paperwork and picked up a pen and signed. As I was half way through, Mr. Waffle came into the kitchen and said, “Why are you signing the recipe I’ve printed out for tonight’s dinner?” It turns out a combination of shortsightedness and inattention is sufficient to trap the unwary.
One of the boys’ set textbooks for school is an Irish language novel called “Dúnmharú ar an Dart”. We were talking about it at dinner one evening and Michael volunteered, “It’s actually a really good book, even though it’s in Irish.” The author would be gratified to know, I am sure.
As covered previously we’ve had my French friend’s son, N, staying with us all week. N and Dan got on really well. They both love sport and playing fantasy card games so Daniel, Michael and N have spent the week on this sports course which Daniel and N loved and even Michael said wasn’t too bad. In the evenings they play cards. It involves relatively low levels of effort on my part when the boys get on so well.
One morning at breakfast I smiled fondly on Dan and N and said, “I’m so pleased to see you get on so well.” They nodded warily. “You know,” I said to them, “that N’s mother and I are friends from when we lived together in Brussels and we agreed that if we had children one day, we would exchange them?” They nodded wearily, this is a story that N’s mother and I have covered in some detail. “Well, do you think if someday you have children, you might swap them too?” There was a long pause and then Daniel said, “Mum, Mum, we’re thirteen.”