Highlights this month
- Welcome to the world, Dylan Martin!
- Curse of the nighttime wees!
- Sintra!
- Kylie!
- Ulster says no!
Hello mes amies, and I hope your June was lovely. The most exciting thing for me was the arrival of Dylan Martin, 7 lbs, 2 ounces to the little sister Rita-Anne and Jimmy! He is a little yummer, the image (in my opinion) of Jimmy and super-cute. God, you forget how small they are at that age, though, don’t you? Fecking TINY. I enclose some pictures and in one of them, we were trying to put him lying on his tummy but he insisted on being on his knees, so fair enough. But just so as you know I didn’t PUT him that way, he went that way all by himself. Strongwilled, see. Very advanced already. Also, very popular. Like a new head of state, he is receiving visitors from morning till night, you have to get your spoke in early. To help R-A and Jimmy and thus gain more access to Dylan, Mam boasted to me that she was washing all their towels and sheets, she said this because she knows I’m afraid of the washing machine, but I said, Oh Yeah? In that case I think I’ll make them some dinners to put in their freezers and that wrong-footed her entirely, because she fears the hob. So I made a casserole, just like a desperate housewives type and swaggered over there and got such a great and grateful reception that I immediately returned home and in true, can-do-nothing-by-halves fashion, made several more dinners for their freezer, so much so that they seemed a bit frightened and asked me to lay off it for a while, that they had enough dinners to last them till Christmas.
Meanwhile, the curse of the nighttime wees struck AnneMarie. Remember I wrote a couple of months ago about my terrible condition where I have to get up a couple of times a night to do my wees and if I’m in a strange place there’s a high chance that I could sustain injury going to the bathroom in the dark? Yes, well, Annemarie was in her OWN HOME and still managed to fall down the stairs and – yes! – break her toe. The saddest thing about this is that even though it is hideously painful and she’s in plaster and on a crutch and the mother of a small, wild boy, is that no-one can hear the story without laughing till they cry. Poor Annemarie.
So listen, have you ever been to Portugal? I hadn’t; but myself and Himself suddenly found 4 days where we could go away and decisions had to be made fast because we had no notice and it’s the only chance we’ll have this Summer so we needed a direct flight from Dublin (because if you go via Heathrow you lose 5 hours, also the will to live) and Lisbon was only 2 hours away and half an hours drive from there was Sintra and it’s the most amazing place! Maybe you know all about it and you’re thinking, but EVERYONE knows about Sintra for the love of God, but I was enchanted, all those mountains and huge, prehistoric trees and the switchback roads and the green light and – best of all – those mad, Gothic castles and houses. Did you go down the Initiation Well? And through the underground tunnels? Couldn’t you just see Byron and his ilk, dancing around in his pelt, smeared with the blood of a sacrificed rabbit, beneath a full moon? Magnificent! We stayed at a hotel called Penha Longa and before you go all sneery on me and go, Yeah, well, fine for some, please, please let me assure you that it wasn’t horrifically dear. Yes. I agree if you look on their website, the rack rates would take the night’s sleep off you, but the actual price they charged was a fraction of that and no, I didn’t get special treatment, they didn’t know me from a bar of soap, I just booked like everyone else. And there we had sunshine and a pool with couches and umbrellas and there was a top-notch 6 senses spa. The whole thing was an absolute delight and not a screed of jetlag because Portugal sticks out so far into the Atlantic that it’s on the same time zone as Ireland. This has never happened to me before. While we were there, the European football yoke was on and Portugal was playing and in honour of the lovely time we were having, we decided to support them and, oh mes amies, I am the kiss of death. So is Himself. Any team we support, they take a sudden and inexplicable nosedive. If I put money on a horse, it breaks its leg and has to be shot at the end of the race. Portugal lost, of course they lost. All the same it was a bit of a laugh, we were in the bar with lots of other people (an alarming number of Irish people, I always get a fright when I’m on holiday and I hear Irish accents and apparently Irish people love Portugal. As indeed so do I now. It was not just the landscape and the weather, the people were very sweet and sort of innocent and really really warm and kind. If I had any complaint at all, it would be that the food was a bit bland. One night we went out to a seaside place for our dinner and the waiter tried to tempt me with a traditional Portuguese sauce made with – yes, made with – boiling water! Boiling water and bread! No wonder Irish people love it in Portugal! Ireland is famed for its crap cuisine, we are famed for boiling our vegetables until all flavour has been bet right out of them. We fit right in.)
Now, some books to tell you about. Have you read Lessons in Heartbreak by Cathy Kelly? I meant to write about it back in January when it was out in hardback, but my memory is gone to hell. It’s out now in paperback and it’s BRILLIANT. It’s part-historical, part set in modern day New York and it’s – quite literally – unputdownable. I was on page 120 before I knew what I was doing. It’s a fascinating, intelligent look at the lives of 3 women, it’s dark, it’s light, it’s humane, it’s hopeful, it’s a great, great read.
Now, the second most exciting thing that happened in June was KYLIE!!!! She was playing Belfast, not Dublin, and there were 12 of us, but some were coming from London, but for us Dublin people we hired a mini-bus and a great day was had by all, except when Ulster said NO! We’d arranged with the Odyssey arena people that we could park our minibus, but when we went into carpark, we were told by a youth in an orange fluorescent jacket and a walkie-talkie “NO! YOU CAN’T PARK HERE. You’re too big.” He said there was a separate carpark for mini-buses, so grand, but when we tried to leave, we were told, “NO! YOU CAN’T LEAVE TILL YOU PAY FOR YOUR TICKET.” But when we explained we’d only been in for 6 seconds, we were told that rules were rules and eventually we were allowed to leave and we made our way to the coaches carpark only to be told – yes! – “NO! YOU CAN’T PARK HERE! Normally you could but the council have just said NO! NO PARKING HERE TONIGHT.” We were directed to an official – this time in a YELLOW fluorescent jacket – who sent us back to the first carpark, saying there was NO size, weight or height restriction, where – oh mes amies, it was HILARIOUS – where the orange jacketed jobsworths came running the length and breadth of the place in order to yell “NO, NO. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” at us. You should have seen them, they were so very happy to be on the moral highground, they were THRILLED to have the opportunity to be unhelpful. We made their day, possibly their year.
“NO NONONONONONO! Get out, you’re too big.”
“But the man in the yellow jacket said -”
“NONONONONONO!!!!!! WE have ORANGE jackets. ORANGE trumps YELLOW.”
To be honest, I was quite upset at this stage. Before they kicked us out again and sent us back to the coach carpark bloke, (who unsurprisingly hadn’t changed his mind,) they kindly directed us to ‘a patch of waste ground around the corner about 3 minutes walk from here.” I wasn’t sure which part of that sentence alarmed me most. The ‘waste ground’? The ‘around the corner’ directions in a strange city? The promise of a ‘3 minute walk’? Irish people are notorious liars about time and distance, everything is ‘just coming now’ and ‘3 minutes walk away.’ Meanwhile Himself was ringing the woman who had promised parking in the first place but – guess what? – that’s right – NO REPLY.
Then when we tried to go into the Odyssey Arena, the man took one look at our tickets and said, NO. He had already turned away to shout NO at someone else, but when we asked him why we couldn’t go in he said, “You need a letter.” We produced the letter and he was bitterly disappointed, but in the end he had no choice but to let us in. At this stage we were starting to see the funny side of things. Then Eileen tried to go outside for a cigarette before the start of the show but she was told, “NO. NO. NO. NO. Go out if you must but NO WAY will you be coming back in.” But the best bit, the very best bit of all was when Suzanne and I went to the loo during the concert. When we came back into the arena, we stood for a second on the top of the steps just to get our bearings and the next thing some official girl yelled in our face, “NO! NO STANDING! YOU CAN’T STAND THERE!” We were in CONVULSIONS.
So there we are, June. As I look out my window, it’s fecking pelting down! First of July, for the love of God. Oh I nearly forgot, I’ve another book for you, The Likeness by Tana French, it’s a crime, thrillery-thing but not gorey. It’s so very brilliant, the writing is amazing, it’s very atmospheric. And here’s a link to Kate Thompson’s Love Lies Bleeding, it’s a great book, but Amazon have the wrong cover and apparently the real one, according to Kate, is ‘much nicer.’
I hope you had a lovely June and that you have a lovely July, I’ll write again at the end of the month and thank you for reading this.
Lots of love
Marian
PS Are you familiar with Rimmel’s Coralicious nail varnish? It’s such a beautiful colour, sort of orangey-pink, very cheery, bang on trend to quote Grazia, really pretty and dries fast. There is also a fabulous day-glo pink called Shocker, which has an excellent metallic finish and which I’m in love with.