"Yaaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaa-aaaaaaa-aaaaa-ay!" cry the kids in Scoil Carmel this morning as 11.00 o'clock break lets them out of the classroom for a few minutes.
They're running around the school yard as I step off the 75 bus in the sunshine and I feel like shouting something "Yaaaaah!-like" as well.
Called into my father's house this morning with the intention of maybe spending a morning with him. But no, true to his Lazarus nature he's off to prune a rose bush with his pal, Peter.
He proceeded to tell me how my brother brought him out the other day up to Wicklow and how the pub food wasn't to his liking and how the roads made his bones ache.
This is the brother who took several days off work in London to come over especially to visit him. He tells me:
"I phoned Dad and said I'd be visiting. He said:
""That's great. But try to drop in a couple of times while you're here.""
So I wasn't surprised when the father says to me today:
"You never got me my razor blades."
The generic blades he bought for the you-must-have-this-go-faster-boy-racer-advertised-on-the-telly razor do strange things to his beard, he says. So I got a packet in the pharmacy he won;t go into becaue he had a fight with someone over a penny or something. The girl was very helpful, and went through all the packets because the Super-Dooper razors I was picking out were different from the Super-Dooper-Turbo razors I'd been asked to get.
Next door, the locum doctor looked warily at me in the surgery.
"Just need my presciption renewed," I said. "And as I've not been here in a while, I need my bloodpressure checked."
She peered over the glasses.
"Shall I take off the jumper?" I asked, helpfully.
She hooked me up to an electronic gizmo that huffed and puffed and squeezed the life out of my arm.
"I'll just do that again," she said, as I was obviously about to go blue in the face and this was probably affecting the reading.
"Me again," I said to the girl in the pharmacy.
"Are you the Willie Walsh that's causing the strike in British Airways?" chuckled the pharmacist, handing me the tablets.
"No," I said. "And I'm not the bishop either."
I get asked one or other of those at least once a week.
Fun.
All those points in his Leaving Cert too.
An young African woman on the 77A bus was troubled that it wasn't going to the hospital.
"It goes around," said a man. He helpfully made a large circle in the air, makey-up sign-language stylee.
"Is it... far?" asked the woman.
"Five minutes."
She looked at him blankly. Possibly only in Ireland is distance measured in minutes rather than miles.
"You should have got the 77. This is the 77A. The 77 goes straight..." He made a straight line in the air. "The 77A goes around."
At the 75 stop a girl in too tight tights with legs like a capital X looked at the timetable. A young gay chappie with a twitch in his neck nearly jumped into my arms when an ambulance siren went off on his blindside. I was already halfway up the bus shelter with the fright.
I was the only one not listening to a music player. I wondered how many only had my cheeful non-trendy model in a pocket and were spoofing the outside world with expensive ear phones.
"Tsssh, tsssh, tsssh..." whispered a girl on my left, to the tinny noise overflowing from the sides of her head.
The sky was blue and full of magpies trying to bully each other.
