Category: At Home With

Think of all the phrases that worry you, that stop you in your tracks when you hear them, make you raise an eyebrow involuntarily, cause the hairs on the back of your neck to twitch, not yet having decided whether they should stand-on-end, or simply at half-mast. We’ve all experienced that dread, the sinking stomach moment when somebody says, ‘I want to be honest with you.’ Or perhaps they whispered, ‘There is something you need to know.’ Can any good come from such a beginning? Experience says no. In fairness, very few of the people who begin conversations this way have your best interests at heart. In fact, anybody who strikes up a conversation this way immediately falls into the enemy camp.

Remember, a friend, on discovering that you reek to the heavens will give you a warm embrace, then stand back and say, “Oh my God! You stink.” An enemy will sneak up on you, and in the guise of friendship will say, “This may sound personal, but…” They will then proceed to ask a million questions about your hygiene routine, your living quarters, your access to running water, soap, shampoo, and an underarm razor. All the time, as you wilt before their eyes, they shall maintain the veneer of caring, a rather diluted smile, one which conveys pity and superiority in equal measures. There is no point explaining that you have just come straight from a 24-hour rave, that the smelly rag which causes them offence has been signed by every member of your favorite band, and that you plan to frame it before falling into bed and sleeping for a week. No matter what you say, this kind of friend will twist your words and will hear only a groveling excuse, while you are not excusing yourself, but celebrating a really good time. Most people are too polite to tell this kind of friend that they do not need their advice on any subject, most fail to immediately turn the tables by giving them a Google map, with directions as to where they can stick their advice, and the majority are, certainly, far too nice to be ‘honest’ right back at them.

However, there are real friendships which can stand the most brutal levels of honesty. But even so, there are marginal calls in certain areas of your life. Take for example the fact that a friend of mine recently gave me a tin of paint. I will admit that this was probably my own fault, one should never boast about cobwebs in your bedroom, or cracks in the wall, which become canyons as they approach the ceiling, at least, not to an interior designer. Hints about mold on the window frames should never be sprinkled before such a person, and never brag about sections of bare plaster on the wall, where minor repairs had previously been attempted but not painted over. If only I had taken my own advice and not rambled on to my interior designer friend, exaggerating my woes as I went along; after all, what harm was there in inflating the truth about such dilapidation if it passed a pleasant few minutes? There was nothing I could do about the situation after all, the room was not mine, nor was the house. I was merely a guest in my mother’s home. Making any modifications would have been interpreted as interference, perhaps even elder abuse by family or friends, or so I persuaded myself.

However, my perverse boasting about the decrepitude of my bedroom backfired and I learned that one should never mess with an interior designer. The next time we met for coffee I was presented with a free tin of paint. It was a put-up-or-shut-up, checkmate move. Her smile declared victory. I had been outmaneuvered, protests about the price of paint were pointless, this was a miss-tint, practically given away to my friend. Demonstration was futile, the paint was mine.

Driving home, tin in the back of the car, I remembered my first attempts at painting a windowsill. My family is more artistic leaning than practical, which explains why my mother chose me to do her small, interior decorating job. As a 12-year-old boy, my ignorance about house maintenance was complete. Decorating was a foreign continent. As far as I was aware, paint came in rectangular boxes, brushes were tiny, and cleaning fluids came from the kitchen tap. The commission to paint windowsills was well beyond my ken. But there was something about the idea which appealed, so I picked up the tiny tin of paint, a half-inch brush, and sought out the landing windowsill.

I don’t know what you make of dream sequences in films. Most, it seems to me, do not work. They are too contrived, more about the director than the story. The 1970s, in particular, was a dreadful era for the dream sequence in movies. Every feature film, it seemed, had long, unnecessary segues into the world of psychedelic acid tripping. Though most people were not interested in recurrent nightmarish LSD journeys, every Hollywood director was forcing us to join him on one. There were some directors who successfully investigated the landscape of dreams, Bergman for one, but most of these sequences are best forgotten.

The thing about dreams, is that they are more nonsensical than psychedelic. And whether they frighten you, or simply cause you to scratch your head in confusion, they have their own language, one which only rarely makes its way into the waking world. My first painting commission, however, seemed to break through this barrier and caused me to inhabit a waking-dream for a full afternoon. The whole event, even as it happened, had that sense of otherness, that sense of being outside your own body, of watching yourself as the nightmare unfolds. It was a Myles Na Gopaleen, surreal world, in which I found myself trapped, with no hope of escape. It was a sealed universe, one of wrinkling gloss paints, made terrifying by custard-like skins which formed even as the fresh liquid was carefully applied to the wooden surface.

To this day the smell of gloss paint causes flashbacks to that endless afternoon of chemical torture. Like Alice stumbling into a bizarre, parallel universe, I landed in a territory so strange, with rules so complex as to confound anyone except a professional painter. It is an odd thought that everyone believes painting is a simple craft, and while few would ever think of plumbing-up a shower, most people think that even a 12-year-old can paint a windowsill. The fact is, they cannot. They have no training, no understanding of paint – a world of chemical compounds, far more complex than most people realize. Gloss paint, in particular, must be treated with respect. If not understood and given due deference, it will misbehave as it did with me. It is essential that you put down an undercoat before applying the paint. But what did I know of undercoats back then? You’ve guessed it. And any of you who have ever approached a windowsill and failed to apply an undercoat know what I mean. It can be a harrowing lesson to learn.

You see, gloss paint readily allows itself to be applied to any surface. However, it does have phobias you need to be aware of. It has intimacy issues when it comes to other glossed surfaces – rather like magnetic fields, where opposites charges attract and identical ones repel. Painting gloss onto gloss is like attempting to force the North pole of two magnets together, it is not going to happen. In fact, in the case of gloss-on-gloss, the topcoat tries to escape friendly contact by shrinking away from the surface beneath it. It wrinkles on contact, practically screaming for help.

I was unaware of all of this as I faced into the job. To begin with, there was the challenge of opening the microscopic tin of gloss, which was followed by the pleasure of stirring up the separated liquids and of enjoying that first whiff of oil-based paint. Then it was time to dip the brush into the pungent liquid.  Soon afterwards came the excitement of that first stroke, the concentrated, tight-lipped intensity of a boy trying to avoid painting every surface in sight. There were drips of course, but nothing major, and after what seemed like an eternity, I stood back from my first painted windowsill and viewed the shiny, silky surface with all the pride of a Michelangelo contemplating the finished Sistine chapel.

Then it was onto the next room, and the one after that. Finishing my third and final windowsill, hunger called me to the kitchen. However, my gallop towards the food source was interrupted by what I discovered on the landing. My first windowsill, after seemingly accepting all the paint applied to it, had gone rogue and was counter attacking. The fresh paint looked like a rubber mask, desperately pulling itself away from the paint beneath. There are week old custards that I’ve seen looking less wrinkled than that windowsill. My twelve-year-old self did what every 12-year-old would do when faced with such a situation, he spent a few seconds smoothing out the surface before heading off for a well-earned lunch.

After stuffing myself with whatever edibles I could unearth in the fridge, I returned to learn that a serious paint problem had escalated in my absence. My morning’s work was a disaster. All the sills had followed the first one’s lead and were taking the aged-skin-look a little too far for my liking.  So, I spent one of the longest afternoons of my life in a Kafkaesque world, running from window to window, ironing out wrinkles which had no intention of disappearing. I do not remember when I became worn down enough to bow to the inevitable but bow I did. It would be years before someone explained undercoats to me and why disaster struck. In that pre-Google universe, libraries, not YouTube, held the answers to our most pressing questions.

One thing is certain, there was a loss of innocence that day, a threshold was crossed, leaving emotional scars behind. It took many years for the Post Traumatic Stress to diminish enough so that I could open a tin of paint without feelings of foreboding overwhelming me. And now, years later, there was a tin of paint in the boot of the car demanding I face my old demons once again and get down to some serious, surface preparation. My mother raised no objections to my painting the room, so age abuse was no longer an excuse I could hide behind. The paint was applied to the walls of the bedroom, leaving not a wrinkle in sight. The place now looks more glamourous than derelict and I suffered only a few nightmares during the whole process, one I do not want to repeat any time soon.

The lesson learned, though, is that ‘loose tongues’ do more than ‘sink ships,’ they can also cause bedrooms to be painted. But still, there are very few friends who can give me a tin of paint and not mean it as an insult. There are fewer still I would take it from.  

There will be a podcast to follow when my voice has recovered after a recent Covid infection.

The recent coverage of the passport, backlog scandal was presented with such OMG-ness by our national broadcaster, with such red-top zeal, that it made one pause for thought. They reliably informed me that the passport office was as fit for purpose as the Titanic, post its brush with an iceberg. The commentary was hysterical beyond belief. It appeared that holidays were the new subsistence diet of the Irish people and that a passport blight would create an emotional, human catastrophe not witnessed since the eighteen forties. It seemed, that in this post vaccine world, the lockdown would be extended indefinitely for many.

The over-egging of the story, coming as it did from a reliable source, caused this reluctant traveller to stop for a moment and think. Something about it bothered me and then I remembered what. There had been a German wedding on my far horizon, only, somehow the horizon had crept into the neighbouring landscape when I was not paying attention.  The timeline had shrunk from months to weeks. An oops thought sent me frantically digging in drawers for my passport. Double oops; if my passport were an Italian sausage, it was so far past its best before date that eating it would have caused a serious case of botulism.

The warnings were dire. ‘A ten-week passport tailback,’ we were told, was the shortest tailback in town.

It was a very dispirited man who visited the passport website. Hope was gone. The wedding would have to proceed without me. Life would never be the same again.

Once online, there was a simple list of requirements and a sample gallery to show what was expected from my photograph.

Having read the instructions, I filled in the online forms, uploaded the least cadaverous picture of myself, the not-quite autopsy-slap shot, the most animated (but not smiling, no teeth please,) in my collection. One could call it the ‘portrait of a zombie,’ and no Hollywood, makeup artist would quibble with the description. Fee paid, I sat back, with my feet on a stool, and drafted an apology to explain my absence from the upcoming German wedding.

Feet nicely elevated, I thought of other times, ones when the passport mug shot was taken by professional photographers. In those bygone days, travel for its own sake, was exotic. The passport photograph was a portrait, one designed to make you look good. In a recent trawl through a box of family pictures, I unearthed two ancient, green hardbacks, each with a harp on the cover.

Opening them revealed an elegant, young woman in a discreet polo neck, and a dashing young man in a suit and tie. We are talking nineteen fifties glam here, a time when my parents were single and curious to see more of the world. How things have changed in the passport universe since then; and not for the better.

I unearthed my father’s, that young man’s, final passport too, and was faced with a grotesque caricature of a human being.

The picture, somehow, managed to be even more horrible than those normally produced by the automated photobooths, still occasionally seen at railway stations. And it was not the displayed ravages of age, the sagging jowls, the receding hair line, the signs of stroke, the frailty that comes with age, which struck terror in the soul. This was a Francis Bacon meets mutant-movie, special-effects photograph; and should have carried an over eighteen’s certificate. Worst of all, to my eye, there was nothing of the man I knew in the shot. It could not, under any circumstances, be called a portrait, unless you bore the name Frankenstein.

After all, a portrait should capture something of the person sitting before the lens; a light in their eyes, the hint of a life yet to be led, the story of parties attended, experiences survived, and lessons, possibly learned.

These are the signs of life, as are laughter lines around the eyes, a disapproving droop around the lips, or perhaps a frown of discontent etched into the forehead. Better however, is a smirk brought on by a half-remembered joke, or the hint of a smile on a lived-in face.

And yet, for all the sad comparisons between the first and last passport pictures, here was a man who was very much alive.

A man who was yet to party in Germany, be a tourist in Rome, holiday in Spain, and barbeque in the US. Like Lazarus, this apparently dead person, had a few miles in him yet. 

On the fourth day of waiting, the mailbox received an express delivery. The fourth day! Not the fourth week, for the lucky few, who knew a man, who knew a man in the passport office. Not the fourth month, the expected arrival date. The fourth day! Ordered on a Monday, delivered with Friday’s post. Where were all the journalists now? Where were the story retractions? It took God six days to make the world, it took the passport office a mere four to set my world to rights.

But what of the photo? Yes, it was as bad as expected. My jowls seem far worse than when viewed in the shaving mirror. The hairline, ok, so there is none. And, as for my face, it is as one dimensional as a frying pan. No one could call this mug shot a portrait. Looking at the picture, one could not say that here is a writer; a disfigured monster, maybe, a homicidal maniac, perhaps, one might even be persuaded that this is the picture of a fast-order chef. But then, what does a computer know of fast-order chefs? Or teachers? Nurses? Or Doctors?

Looking at my new passport and remembering my father’s final one, I can see him now clapping his hands with relish at the idea of a trip to Germany. I can close my eyes and imagine him licking his lips, while talking in hushed tones of German beer and chilled white wine.

Whatever it makes of me, I sure hope the German, passport-control computer raises no objections to my jowls and allows them, along with the rest of me, into the country. I have a sudden urge for cool German wine.

People say that my 91-year-old mother leads a more full, active life than I do. They may be right. She is, after all, not a writer; a  quietish, retiring type who can only be explained away with reference to, ‘The Spectrum.’ She is an extrovert whose life is full of people, plans and places to go. One part of her regular social life is the Friday night visit from a neighbouring pensioner.

To me, this seems like a reverse hostage situation, where the host is held hostage by their guest. The guest feels exactly the same and, though free to leave whenever they want, they are emotionally trapped until given a special benediction, a sign to say, ‘until next week.’ Does such a theory put me firmly on the ‘Spectrum?’ Or is there a more sinister, underling problem hiding in the background?   

After fifty years of being neighbours, ritual plays a large part in their Friday night sessions. The night is flagged in advance by the Thursday telephone call to confirm the event, though, in reality, it is about the bottle. This should be a Prosecco, or a Cava, white or rosé, it doesn’t matter; it’s bubbles and alcohol content which take top billing in the wine department. Once it has been decided who is bringing the bottle to the event, it is time to organise the nibbles. At the farmers’ market, where these are sourced, I am invariably asked at the three baking stalls, what the guest would like to eat, only to have every suggestion dismissed. My mother prefers to choose her own weapons when it comes to killing with sweetness.

Nibbles ready, bottle chilled, it’s time for the Friday Night Philosophers’ Club, not to mention a visit from the unvaccinated Harriette. Even as she crosses the threshold, before a cork is popped or pulled, or a screw cap turned, she will launch into her first philosophical investigation of the evening with her weekly opening gambit.

Harriette does not believe in the vaccine. In this she is guided by a higher power, Christine Gallagher; a mistic who talks about herself in the third person, perhaps because her body is merely a channel for ‘Him’ to speak through. Her sole purpose, it seems, is to ‘Deliver Heaven’s Message’ to the people of the Earth. In these times of the internet overwhelm, Christine is not above using Ireland’s Eye, a provincial magazine, to spread her gospel. Through this outlet Harriet has discovered that the vaccine is, ‘The Mark of Satan.’   

“The Mark of Satan,” repeats a wide-eyed Harriet, reflecting on Christine’s message from above, even before the first glass is poured, “What do you think of that, Mary?”

“The Catholic church has no problem with Darwin,” comes my mother’s reply, strategically using her deafness as a deflection tool to avoid an argument.

“It’s my immune system,” Harriet tells me accepting her first glass of alcoholic effervescence. “It’s low. I can’t have the vaccine because it’s low.”

“You studied Catechesis too,” continues my mother, “So you know that the church has no problem with Darwin.”

“It’s that Guillain-Barré, Mary, you know, I’d have it in a flash, only for that.”

“Oh, this is good,” my mother replies, toasting her friend after her first sip from the glass.

“I got that in Downey’s.”

“It’s very good,” my mother reassures her. “There’s a documentary about Diana for later.”

With that, it’s time to flee, though when I occasionally pass-through, to pour an additional glass or two, nuggets of conversation grab my attention.

 “They got me the new Bob Woodward in the library…”

“Prince Philip and Christine Keeler were, you know…”

“Can you believe a nun saying that Trump was bringing people to God…?”

“She said she’d take my driver’s licence away from me, Mary.”

“Don’t worry about her. She’s had to retire because she’s going blind…”

“Somebody put one of those dishes in my tree. They’re watching my every move.”

“Hillary Clinton has a new book out and I’ve asked them to hold it for me in the…”

It seems, as I eves drop, that there are rules to keeping a long-term friendship alive. First, serve your wine chilled. Second, always allow the other person to speak without interruption. Third, ignore everything the other person has to say, on every topic. And, lastly, politics and religion can be discussed, so long as you adhere to the first three rules.

An Aga which dates back to the ark is the culinary equivalent of the Morris Minor to modern motoring; there is a sentimental overestimation of its capacities. Don’t get me wrong, the Morris Minor was a great car, for its time. However, it was also slow, clunky, and unresponsive. The Aga, back then, was a bit the same. Especially my mother’s, which landed in her kitchen when the venerable Morris was still in production.

Before the romance of the thing gets to you, remember that my mother’s heavyweight-of-the-kitchen comes with a mercury thermometer (a device so vague as to be practically useless.) Its modern successor comes with an electronic control panel. You have precious little control over the older cooker. Therefore, even if the bar of mercury indicates a nice, hot oven, right now, there is no telling when the silver strip will shrink to almost nothing. In ten minutes, the Aga can turn from a heat-hero, to an arctic-anarchist who intends to ruin your best laid dinner plans. I swear the thing has as many mood swings as a vegan teenager contemplating food labels in the deep freeze aisles of your local supermarket. You must be ever vigilant when cooking. And always bear in mind that the cooker becomes horribly offended when faced with cold-bottomed saucepans. It will take revenge on you should you forget this and be so rude as to place the largest, coldest saucepan from your collection onto its hot plate.  

There was a time when I could handle such temperamental tantrums, but the years passed, I moved onto electric cookers; ones with fan ovens, bright lights, and electric thermostats. I spent forty years forgetting about my mother’s Aga, then covid struck and I found myself in lockdown with my ninety-year-old mother and her sturdy, old range. I must admit that we struggled in the beginning. All three of us had to become reacquainted with each other’s idiosyncrasies. It was a steep learning curve – rediscovering my aged-relative’s lifestyle, becoming used to my childhood kitchen once more, and coming to terms with its neolithic cooker. On a difficulty scale, we might be talking about climbing the north face of the Matterhorn.

Our biggest problem at the beginning was our daily bread. Remember the great, covid, bread shortage of 2020? It will, no doubt, go down in the annals as one of the most unnecessary panic buyouts of all times. It was right up there with the great toilet paper run of the same epoch. Panic, isolation, and being grounded led many people to YouTube for salvation. Never were the words ‘how to…’ typed by so many in a mad bid to save their sanity.  It didn’t matter which ‘how to…,’ you found salvation in, what dark secret your ‘how to…,’ explored. ‘How to…,’ offered a lifebuoy to keep you afloat in the Covid Sea of Terror in which many people found themselves drowning.

After learning everything you needed to know about applying nail polish, or playing the ukulele, I’m willing to bet that everybody looked up ‘sour dough’ on the internet; if only to understand what all the fuss was about. I resisted, the Aga was presenting enough challenges for me on the Soda Bread front, without having ferments living in my fridge, getting up to God knows what when the light went out, planning, no doubt, some kind of explosive escape.

When flour eventually returned to supermarket shelves, I decided it was time to develop a working relationship with the Aga. It was time to bake. Brown bread is easy to make under normal circumstances. These were anything but usual. Mercury thermometers came into the baking equation in a way they never had before. After slopping all the ingredients together – brown bread is easy to make – the problems began.

Any printed markings the thermometer once had, disappeared years ago. A few etched lines remained, a kind of treasure map that might help you to gauge the range’s mood, if properly understood. The line somewhere-in-the-middle became a beacon for the baker staring hopelessly at the mute cooker. A second line, somewhere-below-somewhere-in-the-middle, became another beacon to help triangulate the Aga’s warmth on a given day. The former, I learned after a couple of weeks experimentation, gave me a 40-to-50-minute baking time, and the latter resulted in a baked cake after 50 to 60 minutes. Anybody who needs the security of accurate instructions must know this, vagueness is all the rage in the world of ancient ranges.

However, huge reserves of patience, and much experimentation, yielded amazing results. These, almost outweighed the traumas endured becoming reacquainted with the Aga. The food that came from its oven reminded me of cookbooks from the nineteen fifties. The food looked more real somehow and tasted even better.

But such a prima donna is difficult to live with. The words mercury and cooking do not sit comfortably in the same sentence. Manic temperature swings are not for everybody. Remember too that the carbon footprint of this old oil-burner best not be mentioned in polite society. However, rather like the Mini of old, the Aga has an updated sister. Mercury has been removed from the cooking equation. Proper temperature controls have been put in place. The looks remain the same, but the bragging rights have been enhanced. Convincing my mother that these upgrades are worth considering might prove difficult, but I’m thinking about it.