Monthly Archives: December 2012

Live and let die

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As we rounded the gentle curves of Dublin’s M50 this afternoon, death was on the children’s minds. In the abstract, probably because we visited an old graveyard in Waterford two days ago and pottered around reading the interesting headstones in the almost-rain.

(Personally, I liked this one, which went off in a big old name-dropping tangent about her brother who had sailed with Captain Cook, even though he wasn’t buried there at all:

[This Stone was Erected in memory of M[iss] Mary Dinn of Passage E. a mark of her burial ground and in memory of her Father Nicholas, her Mother [indecipherable], her Brother Martin, her Sisters, particularly of her brother William Dinn (alias Doyle) who sailed round the globe with Capt. COOK  and was present at the death of that Great Circumnavigator at [illegible] and who died respected and regretted at Stoke near Devonport in England in June 1840 (?), having spent a long life as a warrant Officer in the Service of his Country.]

)

(Speaking of tangents. Ahem.)

This weekend I travelled the length and breadth of half the small country for bloggy meetups, wherein I was lucky enough to meet some of the Lovely Irish Bloggers (not their real name) and put names to faces and faces to blogs for Musings of a Hostage-Mother , Mind The Baby , Mama.ie , Proper Fud , and the currently-on-hiatus .

As we drove back from today’s assignation, during which my most accommodating spouse had taken the children to IKEA, because why not, it’s like a little home from home with ice cream, we listened to the Bond theme tunes CD I had put on in the car as a tiny nod to his great service to the blogger good. So at the start of each track – or preferably just before the start, since they were playing in film order – he would announce to us all which song it would be and by what artist.

(You know the way some fathers wait impatiently for the day they can show their sons (or daughters) Star Wars? Well, Dash has seen all six Star Wars movies (in original airing order), but what his father is really waiting for is the day when they can both sit down and appreciate the full oevre of Connery through Craig, including Lazenby for completeness.)

In between these public service announcements, the children posed the following tricky questions:

Mabel: How do the dead people get into the coffins?

Dash: So, do people who go to church believe in ghosts except that they all exist in another universe?

The first was more easily answered than the second, which I think we are still working on.

(Edited after first posting to correct the date of death on the gravestone to a much more likely century. Sorry about that.)

Frequent rainbows

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I always have Good Hair in Ireland. My skin feels softer, I wore my contact lenses two days running without my eyes shrivelling up and falling out, and when I made lemon scones for yesterday’s brunch – even though the tablespoon measure I used turned out to be not-a-tablespoon and I had to chuck in a load more flour to soak up the extra milk – the dough was soft and dreamy to work with and the scones turned out perfectly.

No wonder people want to live here, is what I’m saying. Near-constant rain is a small price to pay for eternal youth and forgiving dough. And to be honest, today is the first day of actual soakage, precipitation-wise. A few drops fell when we were at a playground the other day and we started to head for the shops, but I noticed that all the local children didn’t budge, and after a few minutes’ dalliance by the park fountain, the drops had ceased and everyone was back on the swings.

Today, in contrast, is one of those days that just looks grey until you focus on the middle distance as you look out the window and the steady tiny drops resolve themselves like a magic-eye picture and you realise that it’s lashing. It’s the wetting-est rain, this stealth rain – not a torrential downpour as we might get in America, but a constant, fine mist just on the falling side of gravity, sometimes driven sideways by the wind. This qualifies as a filthy day, with no innuendo necessary.

Rain is forecast for the rest of the week, which is about right, since we’re heading down the country (out of town, as you might say) for a little extended-family getaway for a couple of days. I had hoped for walks on the beach, but not in the rain.

And then I went upstairs to find something and got sidetracked by a leftover scone or two, and the rain stopped and a big wodge of blue appeared in the sky and Mabel called me into the bathroom to show me the beautiful rainbow. She’s never seen a rainbow before, because they’re a much rarer phenomenon in the US, and also because when you tell a four-year-old to look over there while you’re driving and you see something interesting, they don’t find the right direction for ten minutes and by then it’s long gone.

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in here somewhere.

Dispatches

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I think we’re finally on Irish time now, after five days in the country.

The night before last was terrible as both children apparently overcorrected and set themselves to some middle-eastern time zone (Afghanistan was my best guess) by getting up for the day at 4am. I spent half an hour or so trying to convince them both to go back to sleep and an uncomfortable hour as the ham in a Dash-and-Mabel-bread sandwich (so I suppose I should say peanut butter) trying to keep them both in bed, but at 5.30 I threw in the towel and sent them to wake their father. Then I went back to bed till nine.

[I decided lately, in some sleep-deprived haze or other, that exceptional people are always challenging as children. My children will clearly be very exceptional when they're done. If I don't do for them first.]

But anyway. This morning they waited till daylight to wake up (and that’s some achievement when day doesn’t break till after 8am), so I’m pronouncing us cured. I expect no more sleep problems for the rest of our trip. (I am also expecting a Rolls Royce and a fully staffed Greek island for Christmas. Yup.)

I have finished my shopping and wrapped all my presents, and they are reposing in the big suitcase they arrived in because I’m afraid to put anything too tempting-looking under the tree. We saw three sets of carol singers today, as well as the live crib (two donkeys, two sheep, and a goat – no actual humans), and have not yet been rained on, though we’ve narrowly avoided it a few times.

After three days, the British (and sometimes Irish) voices on the TV no longer jar to my ears, and now watching an American film ( School of Rock at the moment) I can hear the American accents clearly. When we’re in the US they just blend in to normal, because there’s never any counterpoint. (No wonder you people think everyone else’s accents are cute. You never hear them unless you’re watching Love, Actually .)

Dash refuses to change his watch to Irish time. He informs us at regular intervals what time it is in America. Sometimes he then counts up the extra five hours to tell us what time it is here too. Possibly he’s afraid America won’t still be there to go back to if he insults it by ignoring its time.

Titles are for people who’ve had more sleep

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Jetlag. Bullet points. Two things that go together like jaffa cakes and a cuppa.

  • Irish dishwashers should be made with double the normal capacity on the top shelf, to accommodate all these cups of tea people keep drinking. Or making and forgetting to drink. Somebody get on that, and don’t forget to cut me in on the royalties, ‘kay?
  • We’d hardly been in the country half an hour before Dash asked me “Why does everyone keep saying ‘Thanks a million’? Why does Daddy keep saying it?” He also asked B why he kept calling him Ted. I think someone was returning to his native idioms a bit hastily.
  • I’ll have to explain the Ted thing for 95% of my audience, won’t I? Maybe tomorrow.
  • Travelling was a breeze, except for the A-1 idiot rookie mistake I made of checking the stroller through with our cases. Mabel had been walking the whole time, pulling her little blue butterflies-and-hearts case adorably, and I saw no reason why that should change. (Doh.) As soon as the case went away on the big black conveyer belt of PleaseGetThatBackToMeLater, of course, she turned around to me and said “Pick meeeee uuuuuuup.”
  • We always gate-check the stroller. It’s why we have a stroller. I don’t know what I was thinking. Blame the euphoria of getting to the airport on time in spite of catching our Metro (to the bus to the airport) with literally, I am not being hyperbolic here, seconds to spare. 

[Mabel is playing just out of my line of sight. Every now and then I hear her exclaim "Jesus!"(more like Cheezuz, but whatever), and then I remember that she's playing with the tiny figures in her aunt's crib/creche/nativity that's set up inside the front door. So that's entirely appropriate. At least, until I find out what she's done with the donkey, I suppose.] Ooh, risque Christmas humour. Do I dare?

  • Somehow, I have lost an earring, which is very annoying because I only have the one pair. And now I only have the one. It’s either on the plane, or in an airport, or in any of the three beds I was sleeping in at one point last night, or on the sofa where I was also “sleeping” while Mabel was wide awake at 1am. 
  • The children took turns to be awake last night, which was lovely for them, I’m sure, but not so much for me. Sleep went like this (you probably don’t need this much information, but I have to download it from my brain somewhere):
    - On the plane: 3 hours for Mabel, 2 hours for Dash, about 20 minutes for me, none for B. (He never sleeps on planes.)
    - After we arrived (at 5am local time): Big nap for Mabel, medium-sized nap for me, small nap for B, no nap for Dash, who refused to be tired but got progressively crazier and crazier. High on coke and speed, as his father said. At 3.30 we got into the car and Dash conked out in five minutes. We brought him home and put him to bed, where he stayed …
    - At bedtime: Mabel went to bed at 8pm (very reasonable), I followed not to long afterwards, around 9.30, maybe.
    - In the middle of the night: Mabel woke at midnight, starving. I fed her two pieces of bread with butter and a potato waffle, and after two more trips downstairs, to the bathroom, etc, she finally went back to sleep around 1.30am. Maybe.
    - … and then, what felt like a  moment later, Dash woke up. It was actually 4.30, so I suppose 13 hours of sleep was pretty reasonable, but I was sort of not enthused to see him just then. I fielded him till 5.15 and then handed over to his father and went back to bed until 9am.
  • So things should improve from here, right?

Most people are good

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I think it’s a form of survivor’s guilt that makes it so hard to turn off the coverage of tragedy. We think that perhaps if we steep ourselves in the information, in every tiny gleanable detail, we can take on some of the sorrow, maybe bear some of the brunt for the people who are hurting the most.

Or maybe we’re looking for some detail that will make it turn out to be not so bad as we had thought. Some tiny panacea for our global pain.

Well, this time it was so bad, and no amount of detail is going to fix things. Knowing more about the tragedy is not going to help me deal with it, and trying to imagine how it must have been is not going to improve matters. There’s no common quota of tears – by shedding my own I’m not helping someone else shed less. Everyone is crying.

I’m only looking at the news once or twice a day, and not clicking on a headline unless it really has new information. It was only last night that I saw the names and the ages and the fact that they were first-graders, and as soon as I did, I scrolled quickly on because I couldn’t immerse myself in those details. They were all Dash. They were all my son the first-grader. People keep saying “They were babies,” but because he’s my eldest I know that they were big kids, with new teeth, and bright ideas, and responsibilities, and far more understanding of the world than we give them credit for.

And I’m not going to tell my first-grader about what happened, if I can possibly help it. He’ll say “Could that happen in my school?” and then I’d have to lie and say “No, they have procedures and checks and sign-ins so that people can’t come in if they’re not supposed to.” And then he’d say “Well, didn’t they have those things at that school?”

What can we do? We can demand gun control, we can campaign for better mental health services. And we can turn off the news – not because we don’t care and not because we’re unfeeling, but because life has to go on, where life is there to do it.

Most people are good. Most people are healthy. Most people are sane. We have to keep believing that. It has to be true.

****

I’ll be offline for a while because we’re travelling tomorrow. Back soon with cheerful stories of flying with children and holiday hi-jinks.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged current events , first grade , tragedy on by .

Obligatory

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On a day like this , I don’t really want to blog about it. I don’t have anything original to say. I don’t want to pretend that my feelings are anything special, or that I have words that can help. I don’t. I’m just one more parent scrolling through a Facebook feed that’s filling up with advice on how to talk to your children about tragedy, wishing it would go back to being an ordinary Friday the way it was this morning. But I blog most days – to skip it today seems like shirking, and to talk about something else would be unfeeling. So I have to talk about it.
 
When something bad happens, my instinct is to distance myself from it as much as I can, so that I can believe it would never happen to me. It’s in a different part of the world, a different country, a different area, at a place I would never be, happening to people who couldn’t be me.

I’m pretty sure this is human nature, to convince ourselves that we’re safe even if others aren’t. They weren’t just unlucky, they were in some more inherently risky environment. They live near a volcano, on a fault line, in the tropics, in a place where bad things happen. Not here.

Today’s tragedy didn’t happen here, but my list of reasons why it couldn’t are dwindling. It happened in a nice town near a big city, on this side of the country, not a million miles away. It happened to children in an elementary school; just the sort of elementary school my son attends.

My intitial gut reaction was that we should go back to Ireland. My second was that homeschooling would be the safest option. (I have nothing against the school system. I don’t blame the school, in any way. I just felt that if these things are happening in schools, then I don’t want my kids to be there.)

I have no intention of homeschooling and we’re probably not moving back to Ireland any time soon. Terrible things happen, no matter how much you try to protect your loved ones. I could homeschool my children on Achill Island, and they could fall off a cliff instead.

The people in my town went through a terrifying time ten years ago when the so-called “Beltway sniper” was shooting very close to here. I can’t imagine the stress of bringing your children to school, putting gas in your car, getting off a bus – and knowing that someone doing exactly that had been picked off by a gunman lying in wait, just a few miles away. That went on for weeks. Anyone who lived here then can’t even put up my feeble “It would never happen here” defense – they know better.

I don’t know what an optimist is supposed to say today.

********

But you can go here and shed a few tears for a joyful reason, maybe, and think that the world isn’t so bleak after all.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged current events , tragedy on by .

Chapters

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A few weeks ago I volunteered at the elementary school’s Scholastic book sale, to help the younger children note down which books they wanted their parents to shell out for and stop the older ones making off with the keychain minifigs attached to the front of a few most-sought-after volumes. In between deluges, I perused the small selection of books aimed at the parents and teachers: a slow-cooker cookbook, a multi-columned calendar that claimed to solve all my problems, and some books about how to raise readers.

Mostly, I shun parenting books these days, having had my fill when Dash was a baby and I was still convinced that somebody, somewhere, had had this model before and had helpfully published the manual. Once I figured out that this wasn’t going to happen, I became bitter and cynical and decided to take all my advice from trusted figures and random strangers on the Internet instead, because that seemed much less stressful. But as the kids get older, we’re moving into new territory, and since I really do want to raise readers – after all, I was one, and I thought it was great – I leafed through this particular tome with some amount of interest.

A heading caught my eye – something about why children should be reading (or have read to them) chapter books. Why should they, I wondered? Apparently it’s ideal for helping train their memories to recall what’s gone before and predict what might come after – all the skills they need for analytical reading later on. All righty, then. But I had tried starting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Dash a year or so ago, and he just hadn’t had the attention span. I’d mostly forgotten about it since, and our library haul continued to be a stream of not-too-long, nicely illustrated picture books that would keep the attention of both 6- and 4-year-old, as well as one or two mind-bendingly tedious Dora or Diego books and maybe a Star Wars easy reader to entice Dash to practice.

But most nights now, Mabel goes straight to bed before Dash’s storytime – I try to do some reading with her around lunchtime instead. So keeping the four-year-old’s interest doesn’t really need to be in the mix. And having seen the piece about chapter books, one night a couple of weeks ago when I was doing bedtime by myself, I asked Dash if he’d like us to start Charlotte’s Web .

“Is that the one about the spider?” he asked.
“Yes. Do you know about it?”
“I know what happens. The spider dies at the end. Daddy told me.”

Okay. I’m not sure how, but for some reason the denoument of the children’s classic had slipped out on the way to school one morning. Dash didn’t mind, and was willing to start the book anyway. (I think it’s easier for him if the stress of the unknown is tempered a bit.) I opened the paperback copy that I had picked up second-hand some time in the dim and distant past when I was ten or eleven. (Or younger: I think I remember my Dad reading it to me and doing the voices. So maybe I was seven.) The pages are yellowed and a bit crispy, and the cover has been so creased that it’s smoothly wrinkled all over, but it’s perfectly functional. There are line drawings every few pages, which helps the novice chapter-book reader.

All the same, I was surprised when Dash was still listening at the end of the first chapter, which to my mind was not all that thrilling and contained some puzzling references. I remember being a little mystified by the school bus, since we didn’t have those in Ireland – not that that’s a problem for Dash – and finding the brother’s name, Avery, very odd. The mid-century rural American setting was almost as unfamiliar to Dash’s ears as it had been to my suburban Irish ones thirty years earlier, but he didn’t seem to mind. I quizzed him gently at the end of each part to make sure he was following along, and with some prompting it seemed he had gleaned the main points. So we continued.

I read it for two nights and then his Dad took over. Dash started telling me what was going on in the farmyard every day. From my place beside Mabel, as she dropped off, I could hear B in Dash’s room doing the voices just the way my Dad used to – the goose and the rat and Mister Zuckermann and everyone else.

They finished Charlotte a few nights ago and started straight into Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – the copy I’d had the foresight to bring, with its sequel, from my bedroom bookshelves in Dublin one or two trips ago. (My bedroom remains, for now, just as it always was, and functions as a handy library for my Dad, who picks up some obscure required literature from my English degree every now and then and milks it for every drop of Victorian wisdom. Nobody looks at all the books that are my real treasures: the small shelf of young-adult fiction right beside the bed. I’m keeping them all for Mabel.)

Charlie proved so exciting that B had to read six chapters on the first night. Dash didn’t want to go to sleep that night, begging to find out what was going to happen next:

“Just tell me, Mummy, does he get to go to the chocolate factory?”
“Listen. It’s a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . Do you think it’s all about how a boy called Charlie didn’t get to go to a chocolate factory?”
“Oh. Good point. …. But does he get to go?”

I put his mind at ease on that point and he finally went to bed.

Can you imagine what the suspense will be like when we start with Harry Potter? And how soon can we do that, do you think? I have the box set (UK editions, of course) at home, and I can bring it over any time…

Words per minute

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More times than I should admit to, I sit down here and have no idea what I’m going to end up saying. Sometimes it works out, other times not so much. Sometimes just sitting and typing will trigger a thought that turns into a decent post, and then I go back and delete all the drivel at the top that got me to it, and ta-da! it looks as if I had a plan all along.

If you don’t know what to blog about, but you’re fairly good at typing, I recommend it. (I’m not sure how it would work if I had to hunt and peck for each letter – my brain-to-finger motion is pretty seamless at this point.)

Though really. My mother had 60 words per minute on an old-fashioned typewriter, not even an electric one at first; probably with a sheet of carbon paper underneath and working from shorthand dictation. If I didn’t have a Delete key up there within easy reach of my right little finger, this would be a whole ‘nother ballgame. She was a proper secretary, like the sort they had in Mad Men . (I wonder if she’s ever seen Mad Men ? Must ask her. I bet she’d love the clothes but she’d spend her whole time telling me how it wasn’t like that in The Bank.) (There is more than one bank in the country, but apparently not when you worked there. Everyone, according to my mother – that is, all the unmarried ladies in Dublin – either worked in The Bank or Guinness’s. That’s just how it was in the 60s. They were also all in either the tennis club or the golf club.)

I’ve used one of those old typewriters – my mum still has one at home in its own lovely wooden case. You have to bash down each key with the force of a concert pianist going for broke on Beethoven’s Ninth, and you have to sit up straight and hold up your wrists too. None of this slouching over the kitchen table with my elbows all noodly, like I’m doing now. And I imagine it would be pretty hard to take your typewriter to bed with you and type on your knees, cosily wrapped up in a dressing gown, as I have been known to do. The people who habitually blog while on the loo would have a bit of a problem too, even leaving aside the problem of how to connect your manual typewriter to the Internet and how you might insert a hotlink.

I suppose what I’m getting to is that blogging is so much a product of this time, and I imagine it will be superseded by something new and improved in a few years, so that our children will read about it in the footnote of a history book and say “Oh yes, my mother used to do that,” and they’ll wonder how we managed when life was so hard and laptops were so unwieldy and you had to use all the fingers of all your hands to put words on a screen. Maybe they’ll all be vlogging, or they’ll attach electrodes to their brains and mind meld, and the whole Internet will be In Your Mind all the time…

If I had lived in any other century – or other few decades, I suppose – I might have filled diaries with my blathering, but I’d more likely just not have bothered. Blogging gives me a tiny, supportive audience – just enough to keep me writing, not so much that they become critical and put me off. The fact that I’m just one of bazillions of bloggers means that if someone doesn’t want to read what I’m saying, they can easily go elsewhere. No harm, no foul; no money or time wasted; no skin off my nose. I get the validation that keeps me writing, I get the creative outlet and outside connection I need in these years when former at-home mothers would be isolated and inward-looking (back to Mad Men , and I’ve only seen the first season so don’t go spoiling me). I get to feel like a writer, without all that character-building, soul-destroying rejection that “real” writers have to go through.

Because if you write, you’re a writer. If you write for an audience, you’re a writer. If you write a blog, or a book, or on the back of a napkin, you’re a writer. If you write because there are words inside and you want to get them out, on paper or on a screen, or somewhere in between, you’re a writer.

I blog because I want to write, and this is where I get to do it.

Unshopping

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Now is the time on Sprockets when we blog…

That is, the children are wending their way to sleep and I am off duty, so I’d better come up with the goods. Whatever they might be.

Earlier I tried to tempt Dash to do his homework, or at least think about his homework. I called out to him from the kitchen as I figured out something to make plain pasta and chicken a little more grown-up for me and B. “I’m not on the menu,” he replied.

I had to laugh. I’m not sure I’m ready for such a smart-arse kid, but it beats yelling, I suppose.

****

I don’t usually go in for reverse shopping, (as I believe Marian Keyes called it, though maybe she’s not the only one), but this morning I got a great sense of satisfaction and freedom out of returning two items I’d bought and regretted.

The first were the red jeans I got at the start of the month. I tried and tried, I really did. I got things to go with them, which I still like and will wear with other things. I readjusted my sensibilities and recalibrated my whatsits and learned to love my hips even when they weren’t balanced by big wedges of fabric flapping comfortingly round my ankles (and soaking up the rain from the ground at every wintery opportunity). I thought I could make them work. I was sure the answer lay in the footwear.

Last week I got a lead on a pair of boots. On Sunday, I bought them. They were on sale, and I had a coupon, and they looked exactly like the boots I needed to go with the jeans. They were even comfortable, which is quite a miracle where my feet are concerned. It was meant to be. I was delighted.

Then I came home and put on the jeans and the boots. (No, I hadn’t worn the jeans to go shopping. What sort of sensible person do you take me for? For one thing, I couldn’t because I didn’t have the right boots to… oh, yeah.) And I was underwhelmed. In fact, I was pretty sure that this wasn’t even just not a great look, this was a downright undesireable look. I looked kind of, well, I have to say, skanky. And not in a good way. Not in a sexy way. Just in a “She shouldn’t have worn that” way.

So I came to the conclusion that if you have to try so hard to make something look right, it’s not going to. The jeans were an unflattering fit to begin with, but just because they were less unflattering than some others I have tried, and because I loved the colour, and they were a good price, I made an impulse buy. Usually, my MO is to spot something I like, mull it over, decide I wanted it after all, go back and find it’s left the shop, and spend the next three months searching in vain for something similar. When you find something that’s right, you should buy it, but I obviously misinterpreted “right” in this case.

So this morning I brought back the jeans and the boots. (Amazingly, I was able to locate the receipt for the jeans.) The nice ladies gave me my money back and I continued on my way with a feeling of freedom and lightness heretofore known only in tampon ads.

The world is my oyster! I can start again! I have fifty-two dollars (woohoo!) back in my wallet and some other poor mug can buy those jeans, and those boots, and I wish them the best with them. They’ll probably know better than to try to wear them together.

So I still don’t know what I’m wearing for Christmas, but I think I’ll be looking more like me in whatever it turns out to be.

Dental

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This evening, as Dash was telling me something at close range, I found myself thinking that his teeth used to be a bit more even along the bottom row than they looked now.

“Do you have a wiggly tooth?” I asked him.
“No,” he said.
I put my finger on the tooth and gently rocked it back and forth.
“Yes you do!”

He was thrilled. He spent the next twenty minutes wiggling it cautiously with his finger and telling me how he didn’t want to wiggle it all the way out. Not yet.

“I’m really getting old,” he told me at bedtime. “Now I’m almost six and three-quarters and I’m getting glasses and I have a wobbly tooth.”

I’m fine with him being six and a half, but that’s it for now. He’s not six and three-quarters till the end of next month. I’m definitely not ready to have a seven-year-old.

I remember seven. I was in second class. Our teacher, Miss O’Sullivan, was twenty-one and fresh out of teacher-training college, and she was trendy and wore jeans and played the guitar. She taught us songs from Jesus Christ Superstar and she would eat an orange peel and all. I don’t remember learning anything much apart from “… red and yellow and pink and orange and BLUE!” (that’s Joseph’s amazing technicolour dreamcoat), but those were the salient points. In a school where the principal was still an old-fashioned scary nun in a long, black habit (but not a wimple; I’m not that old), and where our previous teachers had been at least our own mothers’ ages if not older, Miss O’Sullivan was something new and exciting.

I don’t really remember losing my baby teeth, though. At least, bits and pieces, but not the first, not what it was like to be missing my two front teeth, not how sharp and big the new ones must have felt in my mouth when they came through. Not any of the things you’d think I’d remember.

I do remember how it felt to rock a tooth with your tongue, further and further, until it was holding on by a thread so that you could take it between your finger and thumb and twist it around, and then really the only decent thing to do was just give it a quick yank and put it out of its misery. I think I remember that. And I remember how it felt to gingerly probe the bloody, congealing hole with your tongue – but that memory might be due to all the teeth I had pulled before they put my braces on. That was a lot later, when I was 14.

I remember a note from the tooth fairy, who had forgotten to come, or didn’t have any change and had to give me an IOU, or something. But this was later too, when I knew who the tooth fairy was, so I wasn’t surprised that her handwriting and her little flower sketch looked so much like my dad’s handiwork. (I think that was the same year Santa left me a note because I’d changed my list at the eleventh hour. Poor Santa couldn’t keep up.) I don’t remember the thrill of finding whatever the fairy had left for me earlier on, when I must have believed, when I lost the first few teeth. I don’t know if I got 10p or 50p, but I think probably 10. Only very flaith ú lach* tooth fairies would give out 50p pieces, and this was well before the introduction of the would-have-been-handy 20p coin.

We’ll do the fairy, of course, when the time comes, even though Dash delights in telling me in a stage whisper that he knows it’s really the parents. He’s a stickler for tradition, as am I, and certain rituals must be followed.

And I imagine I’ll end up keeping all the fairy spoils, and eventually find myself wondering what to do with them, as happened to a friend recently. If you look in the comments there, you’ll see I provided her with a nice – and totally fabricated – alternative option. Maybe I should follow my own advice.

*Generous, to the point of rashness, perhaps. Pronounced “fla-hool-ock”.