Mr. Waffle and I have been married for 23 years. Today! How could I forget? Worse, how could I forget and he remember? Still married which is the important thing, right?
Also, it is jam season.
Happy Anniversary
I am Surprised
My oldest friend was talking about her next door neighbours from when she was growing up and what they are up to now. I knew them a bit as well. I remember their dog. “Yes,” said my friend, “the boys were obsessed with World War II and that’s why they called the dog Rommel.” Until that very moment I had believed Rommel to be a perfectly normal name for a dog. It’s not like I hadn’t heard of Rommel the Desert Fox but until then, these two things had lived in different corners of my brain. I would say, I knew Rommel the dog first.
Things
My sister has been cleaning out the attic of my parents’ house. A vast undertaking. My experience in the house where I grew up has made me very wary of acquiring too many things in my own. My mother always said that she was not part of the throwaway generation (note the old implied insult there, I loved my mother but she was still my mother, if you know what I mean). She meant it. They kept everything, the useful mixed in with the emphatically useless: carpet cut offs; boxes of paperbacks; silverware; children’s toys; old photos; my grandmothers’ hats and kid gloves; pots and pans; broken furniture; old correspondence; copybooks from the 30s, and 40s; you name it, it was there. To be fair to my parents, they did grow up at a time when Ireland was poor and people did keep things which we would not today. But even allowing for this, I think they were big keepers. I suppose they weren’t helped either by moving from a very large house to an Edwardian semi-D.
I feel my sister is so much more cheerful now that she has sorted through this mountain of things and – epic achievement – emptied the attic. I, unlike my parents, am always giving things away and encouraging my children to do likewise. I have discovered through Olio, that there appears to be someone who wants everything, although the effort required to get it to them can be considerable. Daniel and Michael spent a weekend in Cork helping their aunt with the attic clearance and I was gratified to hear Daniel say that I was quite right to be constantly disposing of stuff. He was horrified by the volume of things.
The most impressive thing that I ever encountered was an English woman I met in Brussels who was moving home to London. Her flat in Brussels had been large and her flat in London was much smaller. Instead of trying to repurpose her Belgian furniture and possessions, she sold or gave them all away (I still have two of her prints framed on my landing) and just kept a couple of souvenir items. “It’s a different place, it needs different things,” she explained. While I don’t know that I could ever do that, I think it is an admirable attitude. I gave my daughter some of my mother’s rings. Seeing the Princess wear them and remembering my mother wearing them makes me very happy and brings me more joy than all of the contents of the attic. I suppose I must caveat this by saying I have no idea what all the contents of the attic are.
The older I get the more I think people can be weighed down by things. My sister says that she heard an older woman say to a young woman in a shop once that there is a time for acquiring and a time for disposing and perhaps this is also true. I like to think that I was always restrained in my acquiring and by nature a disposer but how then to explain my posters of Venice from the 90s which my sister found in the attic?
P.S. Happy Belgian National Day
Family Holiday or Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth 2
As the children get older, the whole family holiday thing is getting a bit more complex. We’re going to the Baltics in August and people will be coming and going and the planning and organising has nearly killed us all.
I thought Argentina last summer would be our last full family holiday but I’m not entirely sure that this will be the case. Argentina was great when we were there (though a little tiring and perhaps not all members of the group were equally enthusiastic all the time) and since we came home we have often spoken of it. I pointed out to my loving family that it has had the bonding effect I had been hoping for. Michael said, “Have you heard of trauma bonding Mum?”
Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth etc.
Mr. Waffle is a great fact checker on the internet. He’s probably one of the only people who uses it properly.
One night Daniel and I were at home alone together and we watched a film. “Who’s that?” I said pointing to a vaguely familiar actor. Daniel didn’t know. “What else has he been in, can you look it up?” I asked him, missing Mr. Waffle’s instant response time.
From his perch lying on the sofa, Daniel said “I’m not your Wikipedia lapdog.”
What news?
I am very much enjoying the shop window display for the new perfume from Cloon Keen. It’s called Báinín which is a kind of knitted jumper. Mr. Waffle buys me their Castaña for Christmas and I am a big fan. Cannot really speak for Báinín but worth a try, I would say. Look at her little hooves!
Herself having played Trivial Pursuit while on holidays in France asked whether we had it. Well, this was the moment I had been waiting for, I had rescued it from my parents’ house in Cork. The questions were perhaps a bit dated but it worked all the same. We also found (unopened), what the young people would call an expansion pack. A set of questions (in French – obviously bought by my parents with pedagogical intent) from 1993 still pristine in their cellophane. “Perhaps they are worth money! ” I said. Available for €6 on the internet, in case you are interested.
We also played a game called poetry for Neanderthals. It relies heavily on you knowing whether a word has more than one syllable. I am quite terrible at it (nobody wanted to be on my team) but I found it enjoyable all the same as you get to hit fellow players on the head with an inflated rubber club.
Every year, July is a disastrous month for Mr. Waffle. It is consistently his busiest month. I did not know that this would happen when I elected to get married on July 28. Every year our anniversary celebrations are a little fraught.
Mostly poor Mr. Waffle has been working all weekend but he did take last Sunday off to cycle out to Howth which was pleasant and where, miraculously, we missed the rain.
Now, stay with me here. A colleague of mine went to a funeral last week. This being Ireland, one of the sons of the deceased actually lives across the road from me. My colleague realised this and said to the son, “Actually, my colleague lives across the road from you” and mentioned me by name. He (the colleague) knows my road because his aunt lives there – are you still with me? Anyway, the colleague said, no sooner had he uttered my name than – much to his surprise – the elderly woman who had been introduced to him as the deceased’s next door neighbour, grabbed his arm and said, “Her mother was my best friend from college”. He thought she was crazy, but, she most definitely was not.
So anyhow, having had her rather surprisingly brought to mind, I felt I should go and visit my mother’s best friend which I did yesterday. She’s broadly fine, thanks for asking. She told me she had met a colleague of mine at her next door neighbour’s funeral. Colour me unsurprised. She grows rhubarb and, at her urging, I took her remaining supply which she felt she would be unable to use (jam season is upon us, I have just made my first batch of plum jam, rhubarb to follow).
She lives near the seaside so I went for a quick swim before heading home. My first of the year. Chilly. A very robust elderly gentlemen jumped in while I stood on the steps contemplating my options making me feel very inadequate but I got in eventually and, of course, it was lovely once you were down etc.
Today Mr. Waffle and I had a low key adventure cycling to Chapelizod along the river. Pleasant in a mild way. God, I am really looking forward to my summer holidays though. I am contemplating my return to the salt mines tomorrow with low levels of enthusiasm. I trust you had an enjoyable weekend yourself.
