Category Archives: Ireland

Parent.ie

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I love the Internet.

About a year and a half ago, I stumbled across an Irish parenting blog called “And My Baby” (now defunct). It led me to a Facebook group, quite newly formed, called the Irish Parenting Bloggers . After a little hesitation, I joined the group, happy that they’d have me, considering the way I’m not entirely an Irish blogger (except when I am).

Anyway. That was then. Over the past week, I’ve found myself frantically messaging and writing and editing and giggling and logging in and checking and updating and discussing, and generally marvelling at how amazing the Internet is. Here I was, working, collaborating, with a group of women I’d barely or in some cases never met, on something we hoped could be really big.

We launched it on Tuesday. It’s called Parent.ie . It comes from a team with a dizzying breadth of professional and personal experience, and I’m very proud to call myself one of them. We hope it will be topical, relevant, local, global, intelligent, entertaining, irreverent, thought-provoking, and informative. I’d love to see you over there too.

I write for Parent.ie

Redirection

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I’m busy working on an exciting new venture that will be unveiled at a later point, but in the meantime, Office Mum interviewed me a little while ago, and you can read the results of that over here:

Office Mum stories – Maud of Awfully Chipper

Also, it’s snowing again, and I don’t really want to talk about it.

This entry was posted in bloggers , Ireland , self-centred and tagged elsewhere , guest post , interview , Irish bloggers , Office Mum on by .

Brat bán sneachta

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Mabel making a snow angel

Apparently every Irish essay I ever wrote in school involved the unlikely scenario of waking up to snow. I know this, because I can still write it.

Ar maidin, dúsigh me go luath mar bhí geal ait ins an seomra. Nuair a d’fhéach mé amach an fuinneog, chonaic me brat bán álainn sneachta ar fud na háite.

[In the morning I woke up early because there was a strange light in the room. When I looked out the window, I saw a beautiful white cloak of snow everywhere.]

(No correcting my Irish, please, from any of you Gaelgóirí. It’s mostly right, and I only looked up one word.)

I know this phenomenon is not limited to me, because the first thing my husband said to me this morning was that he was considering posting “Brat bán sneachta” as his Facebook status.

But I remember so well all the mornings I spent lying in bed trying to divine a geal ait  (strange light) in the room, approaching the divide of the curtains slowly, wondering if what I was seeing through the crack was just plain white sky or if it might possibly be a brat álainn sneachta (beautiful cloak of snow) after all.

Almost always, it was not snow. In spite of all my Irish vocabulary had taught me, snowy winter days are not very common in Ireland.

But last night here, around 3am let’s say, when for some unknowable reason (Mabel) I was wandering around our house, the geal ait was completely obvious. Instead of an inky night sky  - Washington DC light pollution allowing – the sky was eerily light, illuminated somehow from within, or maybe as a reflection of the thick layer of white stuff it had already begun to lay down below it. I could see the softly falling flakes quite clearly everywhere without having to find the arc of a streetlight to show them to me.

So, snow day. I think the sled is buried somewhere at the bottom of the garden. Hope we can find it.

Dash making a snowman

This entry was posted in ex-pat , Ireland , Uncategorized , winter and tagged Irish language , Snow , weather , winter on by .

Milking my origins – my Listen To Your Mother audition

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Let me tell you something: I sound horrible.

Okay, that’s a bit subjective. What I mean is, I hate my accent. I don’t hate that it’s Irish, or that it’s Dublin, or that it’s South Dublin; just that it’s some horrible accent I can’t even put a name on but that sounds just like this girl who was the year below me in school, who I always thought sounded poncy and annoying. (Or maybe she just was annoying. I wasn’t able to separate her from her accent.) The first time I heard myself on tape was SUCH a blow to the ego.

But I have accepted my accent and moved on, and I try hard to avoid hearing myself recorded, because from inside my head it sounds fine and I’m just going to continue to pretend that that’s what everyone else hears too.

(I’m pretty sure that what you sound like on a tape recorder is not exactly the same as what other people hear in real life, especially what I sounded like on a tape recorder in 1984, which is probably the last time I intentionally listened to my voice. But there are elements. Elements that you don’t hear from the inside but everyone else does. The way someone’s voice on the telephone – and I’m not talking about their telephone voice for talking to strangers that’s extra polite and/or assertive depending on the task at hand – someone’s voice on the phone sounds like them but not exactly like them. I imagine that’s the sort of difference there is between what I sound like on a recording device and what I sound like in real life.

Please do not disabuse me of any of these assumptions, even if they’re totally erroneous.)

ANYWAY, enormous digressions aside, that’s the thing. But when I decided to audition for Listen To Your Mother , I knew that my accent could be a point in my favour, because for whatever reason, many Americans love it. They love accents, full stop. (Period, I should say.) They love accents that are cute or sexy or exotic and that they can also understand pretty easily without squinting and tilting their heads and listening extra hard to figure out what it was you just said and what that means in American. So I had a bit of an unfair advantage, I figured; and I was willing to milk that as much as I could.

Which is not to say that I wrote and performed a piece in pure inner-city Brendan Behan-esque Dublin vernacular or put on my Lucky Charms accent and pretended to be from Wesht Cork. I just talked, and even though my Irish friends think I sound pretty American these days, and most Americans I know are used to me now so they don’t bother to remark on it, there’s enough there to be heard.

So I did that. The hardest part was (a) driving all the way to Gaithersburg, a mere 30 minutes away, (b) managing not to take a wrong turn where Google maps had not told me there was a turn at all, (c) arriving half an hour early without so much as a book to read (and my phone is not smart enough to be fun), and finally (d) not being able to find the right room at the last minute because the nice lady at the front desk had disappeared and room 37 was up the stairs and through two totally unmarked doors.

The easy part was meeting two lovely and very groomed women who greeted me kindly, let me sit down and de-stress, and listened to me read my piece. I galloped through it far too fast, in spite of all my best efforts, but they laughed in the right places and said “Aw” at the end, and (I’ll admit it) said they loved my accent.

So, that’s that done. There are more auditions next weekend and they won’t announce the cast until the 15th of the month. I really do believe them when they say that if I’m not picked it’s not because they didn’t like my story: they’re not putting together a volume of memoirs, they’re crafting a stage show, and it needs to have a certain arc of laughter and tears, light and dark, the strange and the familiar. I did what I wanted to do, that’s all.

So if you live in a city where there is a performance of Listen to Your Mother, if it’s something you’ve thought “I couldn’t possibly do that” about because really you’d love to but you think you’re not a big enough blogger; you’re not a blogger at all; you don’t have anything to say; you are too shy or too plain or too old or too young … yes, you can. Just do it anyway (though probably next year, at this stage). There’s no wrong way. It’s just reading your story to two nice women in a little room, and then you’ll know you did it. Whatever happens next is … beyond my control.

Weather permitting

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It’s clearly unfair that in America the concept of the snow day – when work or school is cancelled because of too much snow for your particular part of the country to handle – even exists. Ireland needs some days. I came up with a few you might like to try using on the establishment.

  • Rain days, for when the rain was pelting so hard against the window all night that you couldn’t get a wink of sleep.
  • Wind days, for when the wind is blowing your front door shut so you can’t leave the house.
  • Sheep days, for when the wind and rain are blowing the sheep sideways across the roads, causing a traffic hazard.
  • Mist days, for when you can’t see as far as the car in your driveway, let alone a bus stop. It would clearly be dangerous to venture out looking for it.
  • Radiance days, for when you’re blinded as soon as you go out by a strange shining orb in the sky. You’d better go straight back inside and take it easy in a darkened room.
  • Temperate days, for when it’s much too nice to go to school and you just have to play hooky.

Let me know how you get on with that.

Snow, trees, cars, houses

Weather, from both sides

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Everything is about the weather right now. I know it’s a terrible topic, but I can’t help it.

In Ireland, something that looks awfully like a hurricane is bearing down on the west coast, bringing storm surges and flooding all over the country. In the US, most of the lower 48 states are facing record low temperatures, and everyone is complaining about how cold it is, or how cold it is somewhere else and how much those other people who think it’s cold have no idea what cold is.

I learned my temperatures in celsius, like any good European. In Ireland – I mention, for the sake of my US readers – the average temperature is 10 C (or 50 F), but things don’t vary much from there. A scorcher of a summer’s day right in the middle of the country might measure 29 C, but a more normal summer temperature might be 18. That’s about 64 F, which is barely Spring for much of the landmass I now occupy.

Similarly, the temperature might go down below freezing point now and then at nighttime during the winter, but not much below. Forty degrees F or 4 C would be a more normal winter temperature. The wind and rain do make it feel colder, but not an atrocious amount colder.

An atrocious amount, coincidentally, is about how much the temperature is dropping tonight where I live now. It’s just about freezing point at 7pm – that’s 0 C or 32 F, for those of you who like the numbers – and in the coming 12 hours it’s going to drop to a low of 6 F, with a windchill factor making it feel like minus-14. Fahrenheit . That’s minus 15 and minus 25 C, respectively.

I cannot begin to imagine what this will feel like. Of course, I have no intention of finding out, since I have every intention of being tucked up nice and warm in my bed. (Or quite possibly Mabel’s bed.) But by nine in the morning it promises to feel like minus-26 C (with windchill), which is quite cold enough. So far they haven’t cancelled school but have put it on a two-hour delay, which means that Dash will go in at eleven, when it’ll be a positively tropical minus-8 F or minus-22 C. And sunny. Sunny all day. Lovely!

When I first moved to the US, we lived in central Pennsylvania, and there were two very snowy winters. I do remember it being about 17 F one day, and wondering if there was anything I should know before venturing outside in all the clothes I owned. Would my nose fall off? Would my eyeballs freeze? Apparently not. But this will mark the first time I’ve ever encountered negative fahrenheit temperatures, a thing that has always seemed singularly unnecessary to me – surely once you’re below freezing point there isn’t much difference in how much.

Oh, ha ha, says everyone in Canada.

There’s actually hardly any snow left on the ground here today, thanks to our milder temperatures and some rain yesterday, so with luck there won’t be much moisture to cause dangerous road conditions. It’s just that I’m a little afraid of leaving the house at all, because my fingers might drop off like icicles, or my brain cells atomize themselves.

Come back tomorrow to see if I’m still here.

Dichotomy

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There are two kinds of tree lights: multicoloured or white.
There are two kinds of apples: eaters and cookers.
There are two kinds of sins: a mortaler and sure it’s only a venial sin.
There are two kinds of things to eat: a meal and a collation.
There are two kinds of embarrassed: morto and scarleh.
There are two kinds of pudding: black and white.
There are two kinds of children: a dote and a holy terror.
There are two kinds of cake: birthday and Christmas.
There are two shops on Grafton Street: Switzers and Brown Thomas. (Dating myself here.)
There are two kinds of tea: Barry’s or Lyon’s.
There are two sorts of Guinness: a pint or a glass.
There are two kinds of weather in Ireland: drizzle or lashing.

There are two kinds of Christmas: the ones when you go home, and the ones when you don’t.

Concerted effort

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My favourite Christmas carol is God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, because as an alto I can’t get up high enough for all the other ones.

I used to sing in choirs. I don’t have a particularly good voice, or a particularly strong voice, and I can only stay in tune when surrounded by a group of people also singing the same thing, but I enjoyed it and I can read music decently enough not to go horribly noticeably wrong. I also showed up for practice, which is always a bonus from a director’s point of view.

My husband has also sung in choirs for many years. He’s much better at it than I am, being what you might call legitimately musical and with a nice voice to boot. He’ll even sing alone in front of other people, if you ply him with a drink or three. And it will sound good.

At Christmas, the Messiah is what we should be singing. I sang in the Messiah several times, in school and college and afterwards too. I could probably still get a fairish proportion of the alto line right, if given a score and placed right in the middle of all the other altos. Some day, I’ll go to a singalong Messiah and do that, I hope.

For years, the choir concert was part of the beginning of Christmas. Long black skirt, black long-sleeved top, putting on my makeup in the bathrooms in the Science building of UCD, or the ones Dramsoc used in the LGs of the Arts block. Waiting upstairs in the O’Reilly Hall, going through those last few bits where I still went wrong, marking them with a pencil so at least I’d know where to stop singing for two or three notes rather than mess it up. The sound of an orchestra tuning up; it’s like the clinking of ropes on masts in the harbour on a breezy summer’s day. Sometimes I was in the orchestra instead – third clarinet or something like that. Again, not very good, but a show-er-up.

I love the anticipation, the lights, being on stage, being important but camouflaged as one of many. Not being the one who faints, that’s vital; there’s always one. Watching the conductor, trying not to giggle, turning pages silently. Looking out for parents, friends, whoever you could strongarm to come along. Smiling keeps you in tune. File out row by row, one by one.

On the whole, I enjoy a concert a lot more when I’m part of it than when I’m just watching. But we should find a concert to go to, because it’s not Christmas without one.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

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Christmas in America is so different from Christmas in Ireland.

  • In America, you go to a performance of The Nutcracker. In Ireland, you go to the pantomime.
  • In America, the big shopping day is the day after Thanksgiving. In Ireland, it’s traditionally the Feast of the Assumption, December 8th; because all the schools would be off and everyone from the country would come up to Dublin. After going to Mass, of course.
  • In America, you have to be careful to say “Happy Holidays”, in case someone is Jewish or of some other faith, because you wouldn’t want to offend anyone. In Ireland, you say Happy Christmas, because offending people is a national pastime and insulting someone is a true mark of friendship.
  • In America people drink egg nog and eat candy canes. In Ireland they drink whatever you’re having yourself, and eat selection boxes and Quality Street.
  • In America, Turkey Day is Thanksgiving; people eat all sorts of different traditional foods on Christmas Day, depending on their heritage. In Ireland, Turkey Day is Christmas Day and that’s that.
  • Americans bake gingerbread houses and peppermint bark; Irishers bake mince pies and Christmas cake.

And yet, my Facebook and Twitter feeds – full of people from both sides of the Atlantic – confirm that:

  • Everyone is unable to believe that it’s December already.
  • Definitely nobody is ready for it to be 2014.
  • People everywhere have either done all their shopping or are leaving it till the last possible minute.
  • Christmas is becoming more commercial every year, but the Christmas spirit is still alive and well if you take a moment to look for it.
  • Some people’s Christmas trees are already up. Some are not.
  • Letters to Santa are being written and some children, on both sides of the Atlantic, are having up close and personal encounters with the man himself. (Don’t ask how. It’s magic.) 

I think it’s just possible we are all cut from the same cloth, after all.

The secret life of books

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I started reading Charlotte’s Web to Mabel last night. She’s heard bits of it before, when B was reading it to Dash about a year (or more) ago, and she was concerned that she wouldn’t like it. She asked me to promise before we started that the pig doesn’t die. I said he didn’t.

I didn’t mention the spider.

I love reading books I loved to my children; but more than that, I really love having the exact copies I read to pass on to them. There’s so much history there. Even if some of it isn’t even mine. Case in point, this edition.

                                                  battered copy of Charlotte's Web

I’m pretty sure I bought it at my local second-hand bookshop (the wonderful and sadly now defunct Exchange , in Dalkey). I couldn’t tell you when, but I might have been around ten. It probably cost about 25p. It’s a 1976 edition, and still has its original pricetag on the back:

I don’t know where or what the APCK bookshop was, but I love that it was 49 and a half pence. The halves mattered.

On the inside, the plot thickens, because there’s this:

This is a nuns’ book! 
And further, this, written with one of those invisible-ink pens that didn’t show up until you rubbed the other end over where you’d written. I had one of those pens, but Thomas Galin (sp?) is not me.

For some reason, I never wrote my own name in, but I can guarantee that it has been sitting on my bookshelf for longer than it sat in the library of the junior school at Mount Anville or on the shelves of one Thomas Galin. And now it can sit on one of my children’s shelves, at least for a while.
******
I hope she doesn’t get upset about the spider.