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Winning the Howth Head Rally

"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Nothing ventured..." was the reply.
I looked, dubiously, at the temperature gauge on the dash.
"Well, if you think it will make it..."

We were in Herself's bockity Nissan Micra Collette, an impulse-buy, "this-one-will-do" kind of thing which transaction must have gladdened the second-hand dealer's heart. Its engine wasn't properly attached, for one thing and it had a distressing tendency to emit loud "Boing!" noises when power was applied.

"Howth is a long way from home to break down," I tried.

She steered up the hill and started working the gears.

"Do you smell something?" I asked, sniffing the air.
"Hmmm?"
"Something burning?"
"It's your imagination. You worry too much."

Horns started to sound behind us. I looked around.

"Was it foggy when we started out?"

Plumes of white smoke obscured the rear view.

"I think we're on fire!"
"Nonsense! She's just burning a bit of oil."

A muffled crash and tinkling of broken glass sounded from back down the hill where an unsuspecting fellow motorist has lost his way in the smokescreen and careered off the road and into Dublin Bay. Screeching brakes sounded briefly and were cut off abruptly as we rounded another bend.

"We can probably be arrested for this, you know?"
"She'll make it."

And she did, crawling at 15 m.p.h. up the roadway to Howth Head on a hot summer day, we felt the car almost physically flop when it reached the car-park overlooking the view of the sea.

"At least it's downhill from here."

We walked across the Headland, listening to the silence of victory.

When feeling low, march about to this song

If you go down to the woods today,
You're sure of a big surprise
If you go down to the woods today,
You'd better go in disguise.
For ev'ry bear that ever there was,
Will gather there for certain, because
Today's the day the Teddy Bears have their picnic.

Ev'ry Teddy Bear who's been good,
Is sure of a treat today.
There's lots of marvellous things to eat,
And wonderful games to play
Beneath the trees where nobody sees,
They'll hide and seek as long as they please
'Cause that's the way the Teddy Bears have their picnic

If you go down to the woods today,
You'd better not go alone
It's lovely down in the woods today,
But safer to stay at home.
For ev'ry bear that ever there was,
Will gather there for certain, because
Today's the day the Teddy Bears have their picnic.

Picnic time for Teddy Bears,
The little Teddy Bears are having a lovely time today
Watch them, catch them unawares,
And see them picnic on their holiday.
See them gaily gad about,
They love to play and shout;
They never have any cares;
At six o'clock their Mummies and Daddies,
Will take them home to bed,
Because they're tired little Teddy Bears.

Picnic time for Teddy Bears,
The little Teddy Bears are having a lovely time today
Watch them, catch them unawares,
And see them picnic on their holiday.
See them gaily gad about,
They love to play and shout;
They never have any cares;
At six o'clock their Mummies and Daddies,
Will take them home to bed,
Because they're tired little Teddy Bears.

World War Whatever

"Okay you're with me."
"I want to be with him."
"Okay you're with him and he's with me instead."
"Okay."
"When you're shot, you're dead."
"And you have to fall wherever you are."
"That means even in thistles."
"I'm not falling in thistles!"
"You have to. That's the rules."
"That's stew-pa!'"
"It's not stew-pa. I can do it. Look."
Pause while I fall dramatically onto thistle.
"See."
"I'm still not doing it."
"If you don't you're out."
"That's not fair!"
"Yes it is. If you don't fall wherever you are, you're out of it."
"I'll fall in thistles then. But I'm not falling in shi'."
We consider. Even I who'll fall in thistles won't fall in shi'.
"No-one has to fall in shi'. Only you have to fall near the shi'. "
"Okay."
"Now, we're after youse."
"No. We'll be after youse."
"I have the real gun. Youse only have sticks. So we're after youse."
"Alright then. But you have to count to fifty. No. A hundred."
"We'll count to a hundred then. One. Two. Three..."

The day is punctuated with boys shouting: "Dar! Dar! Dar!" and clouds of thistle seed blowing by on the breeze. No-one fell in shi'.

Which came first: the surly post-mistress or the rude customer?

My brother is hitting the Hawaii-Five-Oh mark this week (snigger!) and so I trundled up to our local sub-post office this morning to put something present-like into the post.

I'm never unastonished by the quality of customer care in shops or places where money is exchanged. Not only have you disturbed the person from whatever the mental quivalent of cud-chewing is, but you also want to spend money in their establishment! It really is the limit.

I've had the suspicious looks from the post master before and put these down to one drug-starved raider too many, but yer woman today (whoever she is) took the kibble.

"I'd like to send this by registered post," said a man in the queue in front of me.

She swiped the packet from him and completed the three-second process of registering it. Then she peered over her glasses at him.

"Is there any value in this?"

Like me, the man was probably considering the Zen-like quality of the question. He might be wondering if indeed his business transaction had any meaning in the broader context of financial dealings on a national level. Perhaps the balance of trade deficits would be tipped precariously by the addition of €4.85 into the black part of the ledger book. On the other hand, perhaps she referred to the contents of his packet. Would anything change -- I mean really change -- if the recipient got his hands on what was inside? Maybe she was asking a much bigger question. Would the karma of the sender be increased by the sending? Would his time inside the great wheel be increased or decreased by the transaction? Or was it all an illusion, without meaning?

"Two hundred Euro," he said.

She scribbled the value onto a sheet of paper.

"In a bank draft," he added. Unnecessarily, as it turned out, because she gave him a look reserved for the snail that unexpectedly crunches underfoot as you go out to fetch in the washing on a dark morning. Obviously, once the value of the item was written down, the nature of the item was completely superfluous. Tsk!

The man paid his fee, bowed deeply, and walked slowly backwards out of The Presence.

An African woman was next in the queue. She slapped a payment card onto the drawer and it was pulled inside the counter wordlessly. A docket was produced and slapped down on the drawer with a pen and pushed out to her in silence. She signed and pushed it back.

"Fifty, one-hundred, fifty, two, hundred, and one, two, three, four, seventy-eight."

The money was dropped like hot rocks into the well of the drawer and the cover pulled back.

I was ready when I reached the counter.

"I'd like to send this packet by registered post, please."

She swiped up the list of registered post packets, weighed and franked the envelope, scribbled the address illegibly on the paper, then asked the universal constant:

"Is there value in this?"

I indicated the value. She looked at me. I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of telling her what was in it just so she could indicate she didn't care. A second passed, a sigh, and she wrote the value on her list.

For the hell of it, I paid with a €50 note.

"Five eighty and twenty makes six and four is ten and forty," she said, throwing the cash in the drawer.

I picked it up with my receipt and walked silently out the door before my nerve broke.

"You know," she'll tell the post master later, "Some people have no manners."

Tea and a Relaxing Drive with Carmel

In our work canteen they swapped over some months ago from a large, smouldering tea urn, which produced a brown, lava-like substance to what seemed at the time to be an elegant substitute -- individual stainless steel teapots and a nice, new hot water boiler. It was self-service all the way and if Mary wanted tea like cabbage-water and Willie wanted tea like tar, then so be it. Everyone was now responsible for their own.

Theory is fine, but practice proved different to expectations. No-one seems capable of finding the optimum filling level in the miniature teapots and several forests worth of napkins have been sacrificed moping up spillages. It's like trying to pour tea through six spouts at once. No matter which way you tilt the cup or half-fill the pot, this golden fountain spews forth onto the saucer, the tabletop, your work colleagues, the floor. It's just one more nerve-brittling part of a stressful day and we seem to have come to accept it as we have irate customers and irrational orders from on high. Why shouldn't every tray be wet and dripping when first picked up from the pile? Hasn't it always been that way?

It was therefore with a certain amount of astonishment that I found that things didn't work that way in our sub-office in Clondalkin, where the smaller staffing levels mean a full-time canteen staff is not warranted. The calm of the Clondalkin office canteen is perhaps due to the fact that they use teabags the old-fashioned way, straight into the cup and out again using a real spoon.

I found this out on a training visit there in 2005 when several staff were updating their computer skills. Carmel Smith, one of the teabreak mafia I like to join in with at head office, was there and though I didn't suspect it at the time, was going to play a great part in getting my memory cells working later in the day. I don't mean in the "Do you remember when?" kind of way. Rather it was more "My life is passing in front of my eyes."

Carmel has recently learned the art of driving a mechanically-propelled vehicle, in her case a small, pale blue Fiant Panda. It still had learner plates on it when I climbed into the cockpit as navigator on the way back to HQ after the training session ended.

"You'll have to show me where to drive," was Carmel's first remark. Now, while I understood that the one-way system in Clondalkin Village is a little intricate, the fact that I don't know how to drive seemed to have been overlooked by Carmel. The blind were going to lead the blind in one of the busiest traffic snarlups in South Dublin County.

I started to worry when I saw Carmel mouthing a prayer to St. Christopher before checking the mirror. If we needed intercession with the divine already, it didn't bode well. I double-checked my seatbelt.

We took off at a sedate pace and were soon wending our way through the hurried crowds. Carmel was surprisingly calm, although she interspersed her concentration on things automotive by telling me she actually wasn't very calm. In fact, she said, she was very nervous. She was glad I was along. An extra pair of eyes to watch out for danger.

I remember rosary beads. There were several incomplete sets in the kitchen drawer back in the day. By coincidence, one even had quite a nice St Christopher medal on its broken chain.

Carmel's small blue Fiant Panda is about the size and temperament of a large bee and Carmel drove it that way, buzzing about the traffic, peering into wing mirrors and watching all around her. I was reminded of one of those World War I movies, maybe The Blue Max, where the hero with the stiff upper lip, leather flying helmet and goggles scours the sky for enemies.

We trundled back and forth between traffic lights and I advised on lane changes and signalling. I peered out the passenger window, watching for biplanes sweeping down out of the sun. We checked our position on the compass a few times, but the mission was going smoothly. At last, sweeping over the Belgard Road, we went hard over to the right and landed with a slight bump back at HQ. The engine was switched off and silence reigned. I unclenched. All in all it was a creditable performance. Carmel's training days were nearly over.

We heard that Carmel was taking the driving test a few weeks later. Funnily enough, there was a full complement in the safety of the staff canteen for the hour that she was absent, reversing around corners and doing three-point turns. A somewhat stunned Carmel returned with a pass and we all breathed sighs of relief.

The wee blue car is still on the go, despite a scrape or two. It had a luggage box added last week which whistles.

"It's like a fecking ceili band!" someone complained. Carmel, of course, just laughed.

More power to you Carmel!

Especially at the traffic lights.

Let's get on with the siege then

There's always one. He's the sneery kid that has just enough cunning (let's not call it intelligence) to get the dumbest kid on the road to do something he's not supposed to, then he isn't around when the second kid is getting caught.

"I'm turning into my father," I forlornly told Herself on Saturday night, when, instead of being able to sit comfortably in front of Doctor Who I was craning my neck to see what a little fecker nine-year-old in a green Republic of Ireland soccer shirt was up to outside.

A tennis ball had clunked against the window twenty minutes before. Nothing unusual in this, other than it was the fourth time in twenty minutes that it had clunked. Accidents can happen, fair enough. But we were being targetted.

I immediately pulled on my bullet-proof vest and kevlar helmet, cocking the belt-fed 2,000-round-per-minute fully automatic tripod-mounted machinegun, while Herself piled sandbags at vulnerable points on the back of the sofa.

Herself rushed out.

For reasons best known to themselves, Greensleeves and his blondy pal abandoned their bikes and ran like hell for the corner. When they're 15 and doing Post Office raids, I hope they remember why they came by car.

Naturally, Herself stole one of the bike. As you do.

The following conversation was conducted at a gap of 80 yards between the participants.

"She has me f**kin' bike!"

"You're not getting it back until you apologise."

The quavering voice of the blondy one: "I did nuttin'. It was him. It was an accident."

Greensleeves started to smirk. I don't like smirky kids. Face it, I actively hate this little greensleeved brat and I only know him 30 seconds.

A woman passing by looked briefly about. Herself nodded to her.

"They're not getting it back until they apologise."

The woman looked past Herself's left ear and hurried on. After all, they were nine-years-of-age! Anything could happen!

They got the bike back when Doctor Who started. No-one can keep a Mexican standoff going when the opening scenes of Doctor Who are playing.

Next day, there was an unmerciful thump as another ball hit the front door. This time I went out.

Being intelligent little chaps, they walked back from around the corner, hurleys in hand, to see if anyone had appeared.

"Come here, you two!" I roared.

They stopped where they were.

Smirky split his face. About now I think I'm going to make a Greensleeves popcicle, if only I can lay hands on him and his hurley stick.

The weak link crumbles again:

"I didn't know it was your house. I was just hitting the ball to my friend," says Blond Features.

"If I see either of you up here again with a ball I'll call round to your parents."

Stand-up comedy isn't my thing, but judging by the reaction of the pair of them to this diresome threat, I should start a club and make some money.

I could conclude this tale by saying things about parenting these days and respect and all that, but I won't. We've heard all that crap before. What I will say is: Greensleeves didn't lick it up off the road. I bet his old man has the same fetching sneer.

Wonder if his Momma is a blond?

Pic from Lavender Pillow

Football crazy

All this World Cup stuff has the kids out on the green space opposite the house kicking footballs up and down into a fold-up plastic goal from the Argos catalogue. It even has a net.

When the Ryder Cup is on the telly, golfballs will be whizzing by the windows night and day.

We did the exact same as kids, other than the fact that money was scarce, so the luxury of a "real goal" with a net wasn't an option. Instead the goals were marked with either two or four piles of jumpers or coats. Arguments raged over high shots being "over", as there was no crossbar, but I don't remember many rows over balls hitting the imaginary posts.

There were usallly two of three of the "big boys" who were better at soccer skills (or who thought they were) and so these naturally were the team captains who would pick the teams. My skill at football amounted to owning a ball and writing all over it and little more, so I tended to be in the bottom league of choice picks, usually last or second last. I didn't mind. I would infuriuate everyone by "hatching" almost in the goalie's pocket so that if the ball came remotely near me I'd have a good chance of scoring. This was considered unsportsmanlike conduct, but was only ever brught up by the team scored against, not by my team-mates.

As Edmondstown National School gradually lost children in the late 1970s the number of playmates dwindled until every boy, regardless of the class he was in or whether he knew how to tie shoelaces yet was drafted into the daily game. As many of the pupils had defected to the modern Scoil Mhuire in Ballyboden, we started an after-school game: Edmondstown vs Scoil Mhuire. It was a daily drubbing on the soccer field for Edmondstown, I'm afraid. I think we may have managed a draw once, by some miracle.

A brother from the Augustinian College would occasionally act as a real impartial referee when it got to the stage where we couldn't be trusted to keep the rules ourselves. Until then, any disagreement was referred to the final arbitration of a short wresting match between the captains. We tended to lose at that as well, so the introduction of a referee was a positive step.

I've seen a few professional players at the World Cup kicking the air and falling flat on their faces as nerves get the better of them on this high occasion. Glad to see my skill sets are not unique.

I Spy

Were you the girl with last year's suede boots shuffling onto the bus? Maybe you were the tall Polish young man given the brush off by the red-haired Chinese girl expecting to be joined by her boyfriend? Were you the man with the long black hair dressed in a white shirt reaching into his car? Which one were you of the couple in white hoodies sitting far away on a bench overlooking the river: the one with his hood up, or the one with his hood down? Were you the young cat with one black sleeve that rolled joyously in the freshly-weeded topsoil of the garden of a house on Old Bawn Road? Were you sitting peacefully with a fishing rod on a rock as a dog on a leash looked on from the bank and swallows dipped in and out of the trees? Were you one of the three Traveller boys growing up so fast? Were you the woman hitting a tennis ball with a racket for a ginger dog to catch and fetch? Perhaps you were the youth whose shoe went as far as the football you kicked in Firhouse? Was it you? Was it you?

I saw you.

Balloon Elder

This slightly shrivelled specimen is what old age looks like in the balloon world. Normally balloons live short, exciting lives that end abruptly, explosively, on a holly-leaf, a cigarette, or on someone's fingernails. The non-partying balloons we have kept in captivity for the past 44 days have, I hope, lived full lives. They have done the television thing, and the chasing the cats thing, the standing in the corner thing, and the swaying to music thing. Some of them have stayed together in pairs, while other lived a bachelor life. A few followed their own interests on their own.

The last thing that comes to balloons of a certain age is the shrinking. It starts with the symptoms you can see in our picture. It won't be many days now, I think, but hopefully we can keep our friend in relative comfort as we await the end. I steadfastly refuse the suggestion of euthanasia.

Water, the village pump and progress

I was in Edmondstown last week on business and took a few minutes to reacquaint myself with the Owendoher river, still in its relatively wild state before it enters the concrete viaduct by the school.

This picture was taken at the bend by Mrs Kavanagh's old cottage, where a branch of it disappears in a tunnel under the Edmondstown Road to re-emerge on the western side by Rathfarnham Golf Course. The entrance to the "Kilmashogue Cemetery" passes over it.

Owendoher is the anglicised version of the Irish, Abhainn Dór, or River of Gold, which as you can possibly make out from the picture, describes the golden sand and gravel in its streambed.

"You wouldn't drink from a well these days," Mary Keating said in the staff restaurant a few days ago. "All the cows and everything now..."

Carmel disagreed with her.

"Sure the spring water bubbles up and drives out anything."

I was surprised to find a picture of a village pump which is almost identical to the one that used to be in Edmondstown before the worry about nitrates and ecoli and the rest made the Council take it away and connect a smaller pump into the water main. It was described on the Internet as a "19th-Century Village Water Pump" and was for sale on a U.K. garden antiques site along with other relics of our shared histories. In the picture (right) you can see the hook on the nozzle on which a bucket would be hung. Our pump differed in that a hole had been made in the hook such that it made a water fountain for drinking from if the main spout was blocked up by the heel of your hand.

The pump only failed once as far as I can remember. In the 1970s a summer drought made water very scarce, and the pump went dry for a time. We were forced to rely on the spring well at my grandmother's, which never seemed to fail. Even then, I think my mother was becoming concerned about pollutants, and the open-topped well with its stream that bubbled up out of the bank wasn't her natural choice for drinking water. The houses in the area tended to rely on dry toilets or septic tanks which could easily percolate into the waters.

Our national pastime of littering extends to waters as well, of course. As far back as the 1930s, my father slashed the sole of his foot in the Owendoher when paddling. The culprit was a broken bottle.

Some weeks back a customer rang me to complain that someone had emptied the contents of a septic tank into the Owendoher. Being biased by my own childhood playing in its waters, I was horrified at the notion, but colleagues who work in the area of water pollution said it was very common. I suppose the incident was probably a mark of our "development" since the 1930s. A rare broken bottle once containing a ha'penny's worth of pop is now replaced with a frequent tankful of cess sucked up at a million-euro bungalow by a cowboy too busy to cross the city traffic to dispose of it properly. How far we've come since the village pump.

Barbeque and beer - must be a sunny day in Dublin

Yep, it must be a sunny day in Dublin because I am as full as a fat girl's socks on barbequed food, belching gassy lager fumes, and possibly suffering third degree sunburn.

Long weekends don't come very often, we're told. Neither do ones which happen to co-incide with a blue sky unaccompanied by frost. But the stars were right and every house up and down the road is empty except for the back gardens which are now inhabited by lobser-looking people dining on the lawn or patio or muddy puddle.

In keeping with tradition, any doctor's surgery which opens on the Bank Holiday Monday shall be full to bursting with the food-or alcohol poisoned, the sun-struck and those who have gone mildly insane from the lack of Sunday-before-back-to-work Monday stress. I shall not be one of them, I hope.

Image from www.allposters.com

The staff of life

If milkmen avoided free-range cows, then it was no surprise that breadmen wouldn't set foot in the field at all, possibly for fear of an attack by die-hard cereals. So three times a week my parents placed our green, enamelled breadbin onto a nook on a stone wall half-way up the lane. Coming home after school at 3 o'clock, I'd pause beside it in the laneway, open its lid a crack and gaze in at the beautiful white turnover loaves that would be nestling inside, their newly baked smell wafting out deliciously. Occasionally I'd succumb to the sin of greed and take a large pinch of white bread out of the side and pop it into my mouth. Wonderful!

Then I struggled the breadbin with its far-too-small carrying handles up the lane, through the middle gate, across the field and into my mother's kitchen.

"I think," she said to me one day, "we'll we'll have to stop putting the breadbin down the lane."

"Why?" I asked.

She lowered her voice, conspiratorialy:

"A rat or something is getting into it and eating a hole in the bread."

Oh-oh. I'd been rumbled. Apart from anything else, my suddenly big red face was a dead giveaway. I had to confess. My mother took it well enough, but made sure I knew if I wanted any more bread it would have to be cut with a knife in the kitchen, and not pinched in the lane.

When the priest came round on Wednesday to the school to hear confessions, I went into him in the spare classroom and knelt down.

"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It's two weeks since my last confession. Here are my sins. I was cursing. I was telling lies. I pinched bread from the bin in the lane..."

"You did what, my son?"

"The lane, father."

"What about it?"

"We have our breadbin in the lane, and I took bread out of it."

There was a pause, as the priest considered our domestic arrangements.

"The breadbin is in the lane?"

"Yes, father."

The priest was probably vaguely aware that such things as breadbins existed. Likely in the Augustinian college where he stayed, an underling would appear in the evening with a serving of a thickly-sliced piece of buttered turnover that must have come from somewhere. But probably not a lane. Obviously, he'd have to follow this one up later.

When the rest of the class had filed in and received absolution one by one, he came in to speak with Miss Egan. They whispered away and he nodded towards me. She shook her head. Then they both shrugged. I suppose he was asking her if I lived in a hedge or something. Anything peculiar in the family? Does he ever say strange things in class? Health Board ever involved?

I was in a fancy home-interiors store a couple of weeks ago and I saw a new enamel breadbin for sale. It was almost the same size as our old one (long since lost in a house move, to my regret), but cream in colour rather than green. I'm still trying to decide if maybe a new, cream-coloured one might go well in the kitchen we're building. At the moment, our plastic-packaged supermarket breads are stuck on a shelf in a cupboard. I miss the opening up and peering into an enamel breadbin, the smell of bread, trapped inside, wafting out, and the sound the lid made when it was dropped back on.

Maybe I'll speak with Herself about it.

Bodily functions that get old and leathery

My eyesight was once so good that my parents would call me to ask whether or not there was someone standing at the so-called middle gate to our tenant farmhouse. The post and milk would be left there, about 100 metres from the house, which was built in a fenced-off compound in the middle of a field of grazing cows.

Milkmen tend to avoid free roaming cows, ironically enough. Postmen do too. So my father fixed a recycled metal electricity meter box to a pole and we'd quite literally meet them halfway. The cavernous box would contain either milk bottles or post or bottles of milk, depending on the time of day.

The fact that the lane it lived in was haunted by one of the several spirits that lived in or near the house didn't help, because it tended to form into a man shape and trick the eye. So I'd be called in to settle the argument. Was that a man? If so, trundle down and get the mail or the milk. If not, back to playing Begger My Neighbour by the fire.

By the 1980s, I was fairly blind. Not in a clinical sense, I suppose, but my myopia meant that I could only tell the number on a bus at about fifty feet. People would think I was being standoffish when while passing on the other side of the road I wouldn't even say hello. Truth was, I couldn't see them well enough to recognise them.

My father, in his old age, was and is quite hard of hearing, like his mother before him. I persuaded him once that he could get a hearing aid on the Social Welfare and he did so, because the thing was for free.

"It's not that you're deaf," the sour nurse in the clinic shouted at him. "It's because people don't speak properly, isn't it?"

My father agreed as if someone finally understood. Of course, he hadn't worked out that the cow was taking the piss out of him. People like that shouldn't work in professions. I've had a lifetime of smarmy teachers and bastards with a little power over a queue of people. Fuckers.

Anyhow, now that I can see again (provided I wear the specs, which I do, rather than fall into unseen holes in the ground, etc), I've tried to make use of my father's aural experience with my artificially-enhanced eyesight, with mixed results. Take lip-reading, for instance. I can make out a few syllables if I try, and presumably that's how lip-reading is learned anyhow. Watch the lips and make out what's being said.

On the 75 bus the other day, our African driver was a little over-enthusiastic at the Tallaght Hospital roundabout and cut off a car driver who was exiting towards the Whitestown direction. I had a clear view through the car driver's windscreen as he braked, leaned heavily on the car horn and shouted something. To my shaky lip-reading it looked like:

"Black mustard."

When the first batteries wore out in my father's hearing aid, he put the thing away as a bad job. We were back to loud televisions and shouting at him.

Maybe he was right. It's not a great idea to expect too much.

Then, just when all seems lost....

...it becomes the season once again for this!

"I think I will go find a quiet, deep part of the river....

"On the other hand, I could have an ice-cream first.

"Just a little one."