Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible
Well, that’s it then. A final post before I pack up my pooter and get ready for the movers to appear. Not sure when I’ll be back up and running but no doubt I’ll find an internet cafe somewhere.
Until then, kiddies, play nice.
Mwah xx
Princess Pain in the Patella
It’s not often I get the urge to beat a grown man around the head with a French stick but yesterday was one of those days. I’ve already whinged on about the amount of kids I see every day sucking on bottles of Coke, lollies (aarrrgghhh!) and chicken nuggets off the deli counter (yes, they do chicken nuggets and hot dogs at the deli!) at ten in the morning, but yesterday took the proverbial biscuit. I was standing in the queue in Tesco with my trolley, and in front of me were a dad and his little girl. The child must have been about…oooh, two or three, but the seed has been sown for an arch little manipulator. The conversation went something like this:
Child (finishing a fun-sized pack of Maltesers and throwing the wrapper at her father): ‘MORE!’
Dad: ‘No, that’s enough for now, you’ve had two packs’
Child: ‘I want more!’
Dad: ‘No, sweetheart, you’ve had two’
Child (starting to cry): ‘But I want another one!!!’
Dad (stroking child’s hair): ‘Well, maybe if you’re a good girl, you can have one in the car’
Me (raising eyes to heaven and silently congratulating child on spectacular feat of father-training): ‘tsk’
Child (sneaking sidelong glance at my exasperated face whilst raising volume and producing real tears): ‘I want one now!!!’
Dad (opening third pack and passing to child): ‘Here you are then, sweetheart, just one more then’.
Child (sneaking triumphant look in my direction): ‘good’.
Not, ‘thanks, Daddy’, you notice, just ‘good’. And he didn’t press the point, either, just continued to stroke his little princess’ head while she shovelled chocolate into her mouth.
I mean, bloody hell, just WHO exactly is the boss in this relationship? Can you imagine when she’s twelve and swanning out the door in heels and full make-up? ‘Dad, get the car out, I need you to drop me down the town, oh and I’ll need a twenty’. I wanted to shake him and say ‘what are you doing, don’t you know you’re turning your child into a monster? And a fat one at that!!’.
The funny thing is, this always makes me paranoid about my own offspring’s manners and in turn, transforms me into Attila the Hun when I get home. My own children, shooting me worried looks across the dinner table, were reminded to say please and thank you, not chew with their mouths open, get their elbows off the table, offer to wash up and basically grow up to be nice, polite young men OR ELSE! All because Princess Pain in the Patella had Daddy wound around her teeny little pinky.
Grrrrrr.
Unreal
Good God. Hubby and I watched Sky News in horror last night. I don’t know whether you saw the poor parents of Rhys Jones, the little lad shot dead in Croxteth, Liverpool yesterday, but it’ll haunt me for years. Rhys had gone off to football training when his football coach came knocking on his Mum’s door to tell her that her son had been shot in the street. Can you even imagine cradling your eleven year old son in your arms as he dies from a gunshot wound? Rhys’s Dad was on his way to work when he received the phone call to tell him that Rhys had been shot and arrived at the hospital to find staff desperately trying to resuscitate him. He described coming home after Rhys’s death and looking into his bedroom: school clothes still on their hangers and new packs of pens and pencils all ready for his first year at secondary school.
Quite apart from the fact that a parent should never have to bury a child, how horrendous is it that an eleven year old youngster can be shot in broad daylight in a Liverpool street? When I kissed my sleeping, but usually noisy, silly, annoying, cuddly, affectionate, daft, sometimes naughty, often cheeky boys last night, inhaling the smell of mud, dog, straw, toothpaste and, well, little boy, I thanked my lucky stars for every second I have with them.
Baling out
And what will our children take away from their Irish childhood? Moments like this, I hope.
Harvested
Yesterday, then, we finally waved goodbye to the wheat. The combine harvesters churned all day in the sunshine (yes, it really was hot – the first day this bloody summer) then later the balers bumbled round like mammoth beetles depositing gargantuan chunks of compressed straw all round the place. As ex-townies, we thought this was fabulous, and certainly the most excitement that’s come our way for a while. The farmers, on the other hand, were obviously a bit perplexed at their over-enthusiastic audience, and looked a bit worried when we started taking pictures too.
Later, when all the machinery had gone, we went outside to inspect our newly manufactured patch of stubble. If you’ve never seen a newly harvested field, you probably wouldn’t know that there’s an awful lot of ‘roadkill’ involved. The bottom field, especially, looked like the aftermath of some kind of frog versus field mouse Battle of the Somme, with bits of bodies strewn everywhere.
Bertie thought it was all fantastic, and made it his mission to sniff each dismembered body and pee on every single bale before sunset, which was, by the way, the most beautiful, purple-stained sky you’ve ever seen. Yep, we’re going to miss this place.
Bahamas
So once again, the time has come for us to up sticks and move house. It’s T minus 7 days and counting. God, I hate moving. I’ve tied Hubby down (keep it clean, people) and forced him to promise that this is our last move EVER and that we’re allowed to stay in the next one until they take us out in a recyclable low-ozone sustainable cardboard coffin. I’ve also ordered the ‘complete packing service’ (ooer), which means that they pack everything and you don’t have to lift a finger (‘she’s just had her nails done’, said smirky Hubby to the removal man. Grrrr). Hopefully this way we won’t have to relive the moment when one of the delivery men did a perfectly executed double back somersault over the front step and we all stood, holding our breath, while the large box-load of my very badly packed Waterford Crystal flew through the air and came to a very hard standstill on the tile floor with an ominous crash. Apparently if you pack it yourself you’re asking for trouble. Well, that’s my excuse.
Eircom, keeping to their usual miserable standards, have promised me that I can have a phone line in my new house in: ‘ooh’ (sucks teeth), ‘about a month I’d say…’ so I may well be banished back to the Internet Café I frequented after my last move. Still, things are looking up according to an email I received today and I shall soon be leaving all this behind for a private island in the Bahamas.
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Woohoo! Read it and weep, losers.
(oh, and by the way, this photo was taken back in January when the wheat was just shooting)
Oh dear…
… the score was Meath 0-9, Cork 1-16. I listened to it as I was driving down to Tipperary to pick #1 up from his mate’s house (don’t ever do this, by the way, it’s a bloody long drive). Poor old Big Jim and his mates will be gutted. Ah well, ’tis not the winning but the taking part as me Mam always says…
Hurleys, handball and keepy uppy
We had a late night visit from Big Jim the other night. Always happy to see him (especially now it doesn’t involve him digging up the cesspit or cutting tiles in the hall), we caught up on anything and everything. Of course, the biggest ‘anything’ going on in Jim’s life is the ‘Gaaaa’ (think of the noise you make at the doctors when he sticks that lolly stick thing in your mouth), which is the GAA, and the fact that Meath, truthfully the underdogs, beat Tyrone and are today due to meet mighty Cork in the semis (oh, and the fact that his setter bit him, but we’ll skim over that bit). Hubby, a sportaholic, has embraced the whole GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) thing and is now glued to every game, just like he is with Premiership football, American football, La Liga and, well, everything else really. GAA, if you don’t know, is one of Ireland’s native games. There’s the Hurling: with those sticks, or ‘hurleys’ that look a bit like hockey sticks squashed at the end, and a ball that looks hard enough to give you a nasty concussion, and there’s also rounders, handball and some other ones I think. Then there’s the Gaelic Football, which is what’s going on today. This all leads up to the big All Ireland Final which is held at Croke Park in September, along with the finals of all the other GAA sports, like Camogie, which I think is women’s hurling and the under 18, Minor finals as well.
Here, then, is my current understanding of Gaelic Football. You’ll like this: so the football is kind of like Association Football (which, I shall henceforth call soccer) only you can hold the ball (similar but slightly heavier I gather), and bounce it, and this other thing called ‘soloing’ which is where you kind of ‘keepy uppy’ it back into your own hands. There’s a kind of rugby goal thing with a soccer net underneath it, and you can score either by kicking the ball over the crossbar (a point) or into the goal (three points for that one). The score is shown divided into how many goals you got then how many points, ie 1-11 (which would equal 14 points total: 1 x 3 + 11 = 14, yes?). It’s very fast moving and exciting (and a teensy bit rougher than soccer, seeing as how you’re allowed to wallop into your opponent and grab the ball off them). So, everybody clear on that, then? Good. I’ll let you know how Meath get on.
Disclaimer:
Oh, and by the way, I’d just like to say that if I’ve got any of this wrong, it’s entirely my own doing and not a reflection of the idiocy of the English ex-pat community in Ireland at this time.
The Bourbonator
Well, we had a nice day today. We took the dog for a walk, then took me Mam on a little sightseeing tour around Cavan. The kids debated whether it really did have 365 lakes and who had bothered counting them, then we drove home to find a rather huffy and red-faced Hubby pacing crossly about.
It turns out that the dog, who was lying in a bony beached-whale kind of way on his bed looking rather guilty (dodgy windscreen-wiper eyebrow action giving him away) and burping a lot, had found the new packs of biscuits that I’d left on the kitchen table (this bit was my fault, apparently) and eaten the bloody lot. Yep, a family pack of Bourbon biscuits, a family pack of custard creams, and a pretty good stab at the entire pack of Salt and Pepper Tuc biscuits too, the fat sod.
Needless to say he got very little sympathy. Well, he shouldn’t be such a pig and we really like Bourbons. In fact, my sum compassionate act has been to walk past him a couple of times as he’s groaning on his bed to make sure he doesn’t puke. ‘I’m not cleaning it up if you do’, I told the remote control eyebrows. ‘So there’.
Now before you start emailing me, yes I know that chocolate can be toxic to dogs, but how much chocolate can there possibly be in Tesco Value Bourbon? Not a lot, I would guess. But just in case, I sent a quick text to C, the oracle on all things greyhoundish, just to check. ‘Ah sure’, came the reply, ‘he’ll be grand. He’ll have a fat day tomorrow but he’ll feel like the cat that’s got the cream. Or the dog that’s got the biscuits’. Indeed.
I’ll tell her where she can stick her umberella ella ella
Hubby and I were having a chat about weather today, whilst trudging round the wheat field, half of which is completely under water. We were shooting the breeze with K the Postie this morning, who told us that out of the three weeks he spent on holiday in Brittany, approximately 17 days were cold and miserable. I mean, what’s going on with the world when the usually beautiful Brittany gets 4 sunny days in three weeks? We’ve spent many a happy summer holiday in France and the weather has always been fantastic. On the radio today they said it’s rained every day here for the last 80 days. They actually blame it on that awful ‘Umbrella’ song by Rihanna, which has been in the charts for the entire length of our rainy spell. There’s even been a vote for the song to be banned so that our good weather will return (ah, we love a witch hunt here in Ireland). I personally want it to be banned just because it’s poo. All that ‘umber-ella….ella….ella…’ waffle gets on my bloody nerves. If I ever meet her, I might even be tempted to give her some creative suggestions for where she can stick her umber-ella ella ella.
I thought global warming was supposed to do just that, not make everything depressingly wintry. I mean, what good is rain in August? It’s about as much use as a one legged man in an arse-kicking competition (as the Disreputable Dad would say). And I bet you that as soon as the kids go back to school and everyone’s home from their holliers, the sun’ll shine once more, just to bloody annoy everyone. Still, looking on the bright side, me Mam’s coming over later today, so I won’t notice because I’ll be too busy shopping, eating, drinking, talking and … er… drinking. Yay!
