Impending Grandfatherhood

Up until very recently, I regarded myself as a very young fifty year old, fairly active, a bit bolshie and retaining a zest for life. This was enforced when my kith and kin (well, mainly kin – my kith are somewhat miserly) bought me an electrical guitar for my milestone birthday and suddenly I was eighteen again, all teenage kicks and hope I die before I get old.
This came to a sudden and quite premature end a month or two ago, when my son, Neil, and his girlfriend, Amy, announced in true Maggie Thatcher style that ‘we are pregnant.’
Of course, we were delighted and after lots of hugs and congratulations, I expressed the hope, quite naturally, that the baby would turn out to be a boy and not just a child. “I mean, you’re not going to bring a girl back to the Rotunda and ask for a refund but still and all,” I blustered, as they all stared at me disbelievingly.
My wife of course has decided to put her spoke in for a girl because she prefers to buy clothes for a girl and also because boys widdle everywhere. It appears that the male inability to widdle neatly has us marked out from birth.
After sketching a quick family tree, my wife then further pointed out that this impending addition to our kin, meant that she was going to be a Granny and I a Grandad. They then got a good five minutes of entertainment by pointing at me and calling me Grandad.
Later that evening, I informed my wife that I couldn’t possibly be a grandfather, because such people were doddery oul’ fellers without much hair who fall asleep in their armchairs with their glasses perched precariously on the end of their noses. In reply, my wife produced a mirror and asked me to take a good look at myself. I still have no idea what she meant.
Now in my time on this earth, I have been a son, grandson and, briefly, a great-grandson; I have undergone nephewdom and great-nephewdom; I have practised brotherhood; made a fist of husbandhood; posed as a father; experienced uncledom; acted as godfather and run the whole gamut of in-law-hood. Some of these I was born into, some I achieved and some that I had thrust upon me. But none of them have involved the amount of trepidation that impending grandfatherhood has engendered.
Despite the immeasurable number of bytes of information available on the world wide web (at leasty fifty, if not more) there is precious little on the rules of grandfatherhood. One thing I do know is that when the parents leave the child with us, as doubtless they will, we can hand it back at the end of the day. This is one of the things I have been practising and, thanks to the help of Little Ted, Bunno and Milly (now all in their early twenties,) I believe I can handle this part of my impending duties with aplomb.
With the help of various other stuffed members of our children’s infant fraternity, I have also been busy practising regaling them with stories about the old days and how we had it much tougher when I was a lad. I understand that this is an important role for grandfathers to fulfill and I will not be found wanting. Big Ted, in particular, looked very impressed when I told him that the Blanchardstown Town Centre used to be a field and we had only one channel on our black and white television and that only came on in the early evening.
I also understand that it is very important for grandfathers to undermine the parents’ authority at every possible occasion. This can be done in a number of ways. If the poor wee mite is not allowed to have toy guns / chocolate / soothers etc, this will not apply when Grandad is around. With Grandad, everything will be allowed and discipline will be minimal.
I will also make sure to regale the child with stories about his/her father and the antics he got up to as a kid. If that doesn’t undermine his authority, nothing well.
There is also the question of how I would like to be addressed when my descendant finally decides to formulate words. I called my old grandfather Grandad, but he was a doddery oul’ feller without much hair who used to fall asleep in the armchair with his glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose.
My great-grandfather, I called Grandpa but that was merely to distinguish him from Grandad. Grandpa was even more ancient and I don’t actually ever remember him moving.
Gramps is out. I am not, nor ever will be, a Gramps. Gramps implies likeability, a characteristic I have been determined not to cultivate.
I think possibly Sir would be best. Nobody has ever called me Sir, except at Disneyland and I swear there was a big dollop of sarcasm every time it was used. Besides, its best that the little brat knows its place in the pecking order. Longevity means I will be top dog, even though I’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve this. I mean, what’s the point of achieving grandfather age if you can’t lord it over the rest of the family?
So, to continue, I was gradually coming to terms with the new role that I would be expected to play in August. While all the talk around me was of Moses baskets and disposable nappies, I kept focussing on, “He’s had his bottle. Here you are. Bye,” a phrase that I can now reel off with a variety of intonations. (I have also had a go at “She’s had her bottle...” just in case the worst comes to the worst but the words don’t seem to trip so lightly off the tongue for some reason.)
Thanks to the wonders of modern science, I have even been shown a picture of my impending grandperson, though to be honest it looks like a pint of Guinness that’s just settling, though they keep pointing out arms and head to me.
Then in true 39 bus fashion, my daughter, Louise, and partner Greg, interrupted me while I was trying to play a Lionel Richie number on the guitar and asked me could I come downstairs for a minute. Like most fathers, I suppose, the thought flashed through my mind that she was going to announce that she was a vegetarian or a Bohs supporter or something but thankfully it was merely to inform us that we were pregnant also.
So now I’m going to be a double grandfather, which is a bit like being told, well, actually it’s twins. Of course, this adds the problem of having to decide which of them will be my favourite and become the sole inheritor of my practically worthless telephone card collection.
Suddenly life has become quite complicated. Maybe I’ll just fall asleep in the armchair with my glasses perched precariously on the end of my nose.

Decorating lamp posts

Doesn’t the place look bare now that the election is over and the shivering lamp posts have once again been exposed to the cruel March winds roaring in like a lion? It reminds me of my sitting room after we’ve taken down all the Christmas decorations – empty and drab and suffused with the unfamiliar air of normality.
Of course, I know there are some people out there who malign this traditional poster-fest that lightens the place up and brings a tinge of brightness to the unrelenting grey struggle of life. These are probably the same people that display a disaffection for politics in general and have become disillusioned with the whole electoral business. (Yes, it’s hard to believe, but there actually are people like that around.)
But if one were honest, whose heart would not gain a little lift by driving out of their estate and being confronted by a smiling Joe Higgins? Who could fail to be lifted by the sight of David McGuinness’ boyish features adorning every second post down Auburn Avenue?
Driving down the New Ongar Road today with its unremarkable greyness, I found myself harking back to the dazzling array of posters that lit the way to the Shopping Centre like the Yellow Brick Road itself during election time. Sinn Fein’s Paul Donnelly certainly caught the eye with his colourful canary yellow posters, while the now-traditional blue skies of the Fine Gael posters sent a subliminal message of hope to the citizens of Dublin 15. And of course you had the original poster-girl herself, Joan Burton, who would doubtlessly top the poll by a huge margin if, as I have said many times, she allowed herself to be photographed sitting on the sand in a swimsuit and holding a beach ball.
An article in the last edition of Community Voice decried the proliferation of posters and expressed dismay that the Council had not sought to restrict their number, as per their own regulations. Perhaps the writer had a point on health and safety grounds. I know that during the high winds at the start of the campaign, I had a horror of driving down the N3 at 99kph (as I always do, officer) to be suddenly assailed by the sight of Leo Varadkar’s giant face blocking the view out of my windscreen. Such a scenario would make the Amityville Horror look like Bambi. But in general, the more the merrier remains my motto where election posters and tins of Roses at Christmas are concerned.
But, now that our political saviours have all gone back into hibernation, why should that mean the end of street decoration? Are those that aspire to political office the only section of society that is allowed to adorn our highways and byways in such a manner?
I don’t know if anyone went into town during the campaign. (Personally, I try and avoid that section of the city like the plague and only venture there through absolute necessity) The UpStart people, who are concerned with reinforcing the value of the arts in society, launched a poster campaign of their own to coincide with the election. It consisted of poetry and artwork and juxtaposed very tellingly with the political posters adorning the lamp posts. I actually had a short poem featured called Consider the Tree, advocating investment in poetry (particularly in struggling poets in the Littlepace area) which regaled people in what looks like the Lombard Street area.
I would suggest that this kind of poster campaign would have found a great home in Dublin 15 and that we should seriously start looking at encouraging this sort of thing, especially during the cold and bleak months of winter, spring, summer and autumn. We could have Supermarket month, say, during which Superquinn, Tesco, Eurospar, Lidl and the rest all exhorted us to make them their number one. The manager of Dunnes in Ongar could be photographed in front of a backdrop of happy shoppers, asking people in small writing down at the bottom to Make Dunnes in Blanch your Number Two.
Or alternatively, have a radio station month in which deejays (do they still use that word?) beam down from every lamp post entreating you to tune in. Vote local – vote Phoenix. Joe Duffy for a happier life. Radio Nova – Great songs, Over and over again.
How about a Republic of Ireland football stars slot with our sporting heroes vying for public approbation? Shay Given – your number one. Make Kevin Doyle your number ten. Fahy and Duff – a United Left Alliance.
The possibilities are endless and I am calling on the Council now to put the feelgood factor back into our streets.
To get back to the article in Community Voice, it went on to question the suspicious disappearance of many of the posters from our streets and reported the lamentations of both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael that someone was removing them from their allotted locations.
Well, I guess that now the election is over, I can safely ‘fess up, as they say, in da house, innit? To paraphrase Sir Humphrey Appleby’s succinct confession in one episode of Yes, Minister, the identity of the individual whose alleged responsibility for this occurrence has been the subject of recent discussion is not shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led one to assume, but, not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun.
Yes it was I. I knew that once the election was over, they would all be shredded up to make toothpaste or cat food, so I liberated as many of them as I could. My house is festooned with posters from all walks of political life. I have Roderic O’Gorman grinning at me from above the mantelpiece and Kieran Dennison watching over me as I sleep. Clement Esebamen gazes benignly at me as I perform my ablutions every morning and a block of Patrick Nultys ascends the stairs, reassuring me that I am in safe hands.
No greater love hath a man for his political masters.

Of pancakes

(Okay, to explain, The Community Voice has risen Phoenix-like from the ashes and I back doing my Musings again, for the time being anyway)

Recent trips to our local supermarket in Ongar have served to remind me that the most important festival in the Christian calendar is fast approaching. I refer of course to the Feast of St. Pancake, a 32 stone Irish saint from the 5th Century, who lived most of his life just behind Ryan’s Garage in Blanchardstown.
The legend is of course well recorded in the annals that Pancake, when a young boy, had a visitation from God in the form of a frying pan. God told Pancake that he was omnipotent and Pancake figured that, if this were so, the fatter he got, the godlier he would become. He therefore gorged himself on mixed flour and eggs (adding lemon juice or maple syrup for taste) until he became Buddha-esque in appearance and incredibly holy.
His followers tried various initiatives to commemorate the great man – Easter pancakes, Trick or Pancake etc – but in the end they settled on the day before Ash Wednesday – usually a Tuesday – as it was found that pancakes were the perfect medical antidote to the ashes the priest insisted on smearing on your forehead the following day.
It has always been a source of fierce debate in our household – sometimes leading to wrestling matches that my wife always wins – as to how the ritual of pancakes should be enacted.
In our house, growing up, my mother would always make the pancakes instead of a normal dinner and I had always assumed that this was how everybody did it. Looking back, it is perhaps a salient fact that ours was a family of cheapskates and there was a definite financial element to this interpretation of the scriptures.
In my wife’s family, however, they ate their normal dinner and then after Coronation Street – Pope John Paul II was apparently very specific on the timing - the pancakes would be made. How they were hungry for pancakes after already eaten a big dinner was always a mystery to me (who rummages for biscuits at 8pm on a normal evening)
The supermarket in Ongar is now advertising pancake makers, which seem to be glorified frying pans, and frankly, if I was sitting on the jury panel of Dragon’s Den, my pockets bulging with wads of cash, I would soon spot the flaw in the budding entrepreneur who waxed enthusiastic about the pancake maker. I mean, to dedicate a factory to producing these items which are only retailable for one month of the year, for people who don’t want to use a frying pan? And where do you keep the damned thing for 364 days of the year, taking up space?
One concession that we have made to modern living though is that instead of going to the enormous trouble of mixing the raw ingredients of flour, baking powder, sugar and salt – a task that would doubtless have Jamie Oliver reaching for the blender – we now buy a packet of something called Pancake Mix. Traditionalists may scoff but it does the job and saves so much back-breaking work.
The problem is, that you don’t need to use the entire packet for the pancakes, meaning that the packet lives up in the press for years on end. Our current one, which is still perfectly all right, has a sell by date of 2003. The unopened packet that we bought in 2006, when we weren’t sure if we still had a packet in the press, was up last year but hey, we have a lifetime’s supply now. We have even gone to the bother of bequeathing it in our wills to future generations.
Of course, you still have to break eggs and then add the eggs to the mixture and beat the whole lot, so the culinary element is not lost altogether. Not that I have much to do with the technical stuff – my job is to hover and pass over implements like an assistant in an operating theatre, a task I perform admirably, even if I say so myself.
My father – who also used the cooker primarily for telling the time – always maintained, even on this death-bed (which we found rather odd) that the best pancakes were fried on the fat of a female goose that had been humanely killed at approximately 36 months of age and then hung upside down on the washing line for two days. We use Stork. Again, it does the job.
When the pancake is nearly done on one side (x-ray eyes are handy for this) the pancake should be tossed onto the other side, a phrase which always caused us to snigger as adolescents. For years, my wife, doubtless influenced by cartoons of pancakes sticking to ceilings or landing on people’s heads, refused to let me do this, preferring to simply turn it over with a spatula herself. After years of wheedling, I am now allowed to toss the last one and now insist on dragging in all the family to watch me.
As everybody knows, pancakes must not be eaten straight from the pan, no matter how hungry husbands and children crowd around you licking their lips and rubbing their bellies. First they must be placed on a plate sitting on a pot of boiling water on top of the cooker. In this way, the steam from the water seeps through the plate and infuses the pancake with enamel-flavoured moisture. Or maybe it’s just to keep them hot. Who knows?
Choice of filling is possibly a hereditary thing too. For myself, a line of sugar down the centre makes the perfect pancake, though I have been known to experiment with raspberry jam on occasions. Nobody in our house has ever been a maple syrup fan – my apologies to the maple growers of Canada – and I have never understood the concept of squirting a sour lemon into your pancake. Is this the healthy option? Adding citrus fruit to your amalgam of flour and eggs?
Besides, I suppose I’m a bit prejudiced against the followers of St. Jif, a seventh century, yellow, oval-shaped cleric, who lived and preached in the carpark of Power City. For years they have been trying to usurp the venerable St. Pancake with clever advertising campaigns but it won’t work, I tell you.
The common refrain after the last pancake has been scoffed is always – we should have them more often during the year. At least it would help to use up the packets in the press. In fact, last year, I marked down October 17th on the calendar as being the feast of St. Pancake the Lesser, but when it came round, there was something good on telly after Coronation Street.
This year, perhaps.

The end of the line

And so, after seven years, that was final contribution to Community Voice Musings. It was intended always to be the penultimate one, hence no reference to the fact, but as things turned out, Clampanology wrapped it up. I thoroughly enjoyed writing the column and thanks again to Fergus for indulging me.
Peter

Clampanology

According to the Book of Wikipedia (all rise and genuflect), wheel clamping was invented in 1944 by two gentlemen in Denver, Colorado to address the problems of claims being made by drivers that their cars were damaged whilst being towed to the pounds.
It is doubtful whether the citizens of the world have ever included these two gentlemen in the prayers of the faithful at Mass, unless of course they happen to run a wheel-clamping business.
I have never been clamped (cross my fingers, touch wood, catch a falling leaf on the first day of autumn) but I have always felt a certain empathy for the clampee, albeit with a little bit of secret and probably unattractive excitement that “someone’s heading for a big shock when they return to their car.”
I am of course naturally ashamed of this secret glee I feel on seeing somebody else’s vehicle dressed in the tell-tale yellow triangle that proclaims to the world that the owner is a hardened criminal. However, as one of the intractable laws of physics states, the degree of joy increases in direct relation to the value of the car clamped.
Of course, most clampees are victims of an outrageous miscarriage of justice, having only parked in the disabled space for ten seconds while they dashed into the shop to buy some of Trevelyan’s corn so the young might see the morn.
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about clamping. Surely by clamping a car illegally parked in a disabled space, you are further depriving the disabled driver of a parking space for a much longer period of time. Would it not be much less expensive to simply issue a parking ticket, rather than employ a company to fix the Denver Boot onto vehicles?
Having said that, it is hard to feel any sympathy for an able-bodied driver caught in such a way. And don’t tell me that you have never watched a driver getting out of a car in a disabled space to make sure he has some kind of physical disability! Human nature at times can be a terrible thing.
Everybody knows that if you park on double yellow lines, or in a disabled space, you do so at the risk of getting a fine or a clamp. For me, planning a journey should always involve making time to find a suitable parking space, even if it means walking ten minutes. But sadly, today, many people seem to take the ‘having a dog’ philosophy. Why walk at all when you have a car?
Driving around Blanchardstown, it is surprising at how much the release fee varies from one area to another. It is strongly advised that the would-be lawbreaker shops around for illegal parking spaces first, so he can get real value for money. I am thinking of setting up a compare-your-clamping-fees website, so drivers can plan their rule flouting before they depart their homes.
City centre and public street clamping is one thing however but nowadays clampers are operating in private estates on behalf of the management committees. I know of one such estate in my locality. Naturally I won’t mention its name but it is the exact opposite of Archers Wouldn’t.
Here the home owners suffer the slings and arrows of having to pay for permits to park outside their homes. (Would it not be better to issue free permits once the management fees are paid?) Anybody caught without a permit is summarily clamped. However, this has led to a certain degree of anger among residents due to the anomalies of the situation.
Suppose you have friends over? Naturally they would have to park in the next estate to avoid the yellow peril.
If a tradesman comes in a van, he cannot park in the estate at all.
There is no signage on the main road through the estate and no yellow lines, yet drivers parking there are liable to be clamped.
If you have a valid permit but all the spaces are occupied, what are you supposed to do? Park in the next block? No sir, your permit only applies to the spaces in your immediate vicinity.
And what do the residents of the adjacent, Fingal County Council estate think at the sudden increase in cars parked along their roads?
In Scotland, wheel clamping on private land has been judged illegal, as it amounts to ‘extortion and theft.’ In England and Wales, the operator has to apply for a licence before clamping can commence, with strict guidelines on qualification. In places like Rockall and Antarctica, I believe, wheel clamping is non-existent.
Naturally in Ireland, the laws on clamping on private property are much vaguer and await a serious testing in the courts. However, as has been pointed out on more than one occasion, the Gardaí are unlikely to get involved in an issue of clamping on private property as it is a civil matter.
If that is the case, then surely removal of the clamp by the owner of the vehicles involved is also a civil matter not involving the Gardaí. The difficulty is of course to release the clamp without damaging it, otherwise you might be charged with criminal damage. Then again, the clamper, in the subsequent court case, would have to prove it was the owner who removed the clamp and not some local yahoo, hell-bent on mischief...
What angers residents most is that the action seems less of a war on people who are parking illegally and more of a revenue generating exercise for the management company concerned. Drivers have been clamped in the middle of the day with many empty parking spaces around and who are obviously not causing hardship for anybody else wishing to park there. While this may be justification to the ‘rules are rules’ brigade, it fails to address any of the ostensible reasons why the scheme was introduced in the first place.
Personally, I don’t think these management companies are going far enough in their war on stationary vehicles (not to be confused with stationery vehicles bringing much needed envelopes and paper clips to beleaguered householders) I mean, why stop at private vehicles?
If they see a gang of youths hanging around at a street corner, particularly those wearing hoodies, they should automatically clamp them, with a €100 release fee. That would soon put a start to their gallop, to coin a phrase. When the postman leaves his bike parked up against a hedge, clamp it. Two neighbours chatting about the glorious weather we’re having, women pushing prams who stop to admire each other’s babies in the street, trees, lampposts, fire hydrants, the bin trucks, the ice-cream van – clamp them all, anything that doesn’t move. Very soon, there’d be no need for management fees.
Of course, there are enterprising ways around it. Remove your wheels and bring them inside when you park. There’s no way the clampers are going to clamp the breeze blocks now supporting your car.
Better still, buy a set of used clamps on eBay and attach them to your four wheels. Then you can park anywhere and you’ll never be clamped. Simply unlock them when you’re finished, throw them in your boot and drive away.

The fountain pen of youth

There is no doubt that those of us who are somewhat advanced in years tend to look down on today’s crop of students with something approaching disdain.
“We had it tougher” is a refrain that echoes down through the generations and we all have a tendency to view our own schooldays through nettle-tinted glasses – teachers were blood-crazed ogres who would thrash you to one inch of your life if you looked sideways at the kid beside you; confusing ‘there’ and ‘their’ meant public ridicule in the corner of the classroom, which would doubtless result in lawsuits for personal anguish today; not handing in your homework on time was often punished by a public beheading in the playground on big break.
All slightly exaggerated, of course. But we can truthfully say, with hand on heart, that at least today’s young scholars do not have to grapple with the machinations of the most foul of all educational contraptions – the fountain pen.
The transition from junior to secondary school is often not a smooth passage but nowhere was there more of a leap than in the choice of writing implement.
In junior school, everything was done with a pencil – maths, history, picking your nose, fishing your eraser out from behind the radiator. A pencil is a simple thing. It becomes blunt, you pare it. It breaks, you pare it. Eventually it becomes too small to hold and you get a new one. Life is good, the days are sunny.
With your acceptance into secondary school however came a thirty page handbook informing your parents, somewhere near the bottom of page 18, that the student will require a fountain pen. A wha’, da?
There were two types of fountain pen – one that sucked up the ink and one that used cartridges. I started off with the former, which necessitated the purchase of a bottle of Quink, a dangerous item to put in the hands of a young schoolboy.
My father took great pride in showing me how to load my pen. Unscrew the bottle of Quink, insert one end of the pen into the ink and squeeze the body, thus creating a vacuum (which as we all know is absolutely loathed by its arch-enemy, nature.) Release the body of the pen and the ink will rise to fill the space. Replace the lid of the ink, making sure the top is secure. Wipe the nib of the pen on the blotting paper and reassemble the pen, using the manual provided. What could be simpler?
I soon found out that the fountain pen was well named, with its habit of spraying the navy liquid everywhere. My white shirt soon resembled a piece of Wedgwood pottery, decorated in abstract navy designs. It ended up on my fingers, on my face and, on one momentous occasion, on every schoolbook I owned, when I omitted the step of making sure the top of the bottle of ink was screwed on firmly while being transported in my school bag.
The other problem with the fountain pen was that, whereas the school authorities maintained it looked more professional, wielded by young non-calligraphists, the written page soon became a mass of blots as sleeves invariable rubbed the words before they had dried. I have one left-handed friend whose hand to this day is permanently stained through his writing style.
Eventually, my parents acceded to my requests for a cartridge-style fountain pen, though I believe my father saw this as an ignominious compromise, and only agreed when the current bottle of Quink was finished. With cartridges, you simply inserted the end into the pen, piercing the cap and you were ready to go.
The problem was that it always took some time for the ink to flow down to the nib, so you weren’t sure if the cartridge was inserted correctly or not. This often entailed taking the pen apart again, removing the cartridge, soaking your fingertips in ink and trying again. And it still did nothing for the presentation of the written word upon the page.
It was quite a relief to me (and also to my mother who was worn to a frazzle trying new concoctions that would remove ink from shirts) when one by one, my teachers started to allow biros to be used for schoolwork instead. Presumably they despaired of our abilities and railed in the staff room against the decline in standards of the new generation who couldn’t even write a single essay without adorning it with pictures of Lough Neagh.
But old habits die hard and although I now write almost exclusively on a computer, I still end up with ink all over my fingers and have no idea where it comes from. Plus ça change, and all that...

Saving Roger

For my fortieth birthday, nearly ten years ago now, my family clubbed together and bought me a cordalyne. Some people might get a holiday or a new car or an expensive watch or maybe simply a large wad of money but no, my reward for attaining this advanced age was a cordalyne.
The date occurred shortly after we had moved into our present house in Hazelbury. For a year or so, we had toyed with the idea of moving and visited numerous houses for sale along the 37 / 39 bus route. While my wife pored through every nook and cranny with a tape measure, felt walls for damp, flushed toilets and worried about evening sun and aspect, my sole criteria regarding its suitability would be whether or not in had a palm tree in the front garden.
There’s something about having a palm tree in your garden, I’ve always maintained, that lends an air of class or opulence. You could be living in the smelliest hovel in the western hemisphere but stick a palm tree in the front garden and your house is the envy of everybody in the street.
Of course a real palm tree was too expensive for the likes of me, so they bought me a voucher for Woodies and I got myself a cordalyne. It was about two feet tall, had long green fronds and I christened it Roger, for no other reason that it looked like a Roger. (Any Rogers out there, I apologise profusely unless you are actually two feet tall and have long green leaves.)
My wife sat with it in the back seat of the car on the way home from Woodies, trying to keep the leaves out of my face, which is something I do not often find conducive to good driving.
Once home, I dug a large hole in the middle of the front garden, unearthing vast quantities of plastic milk bottles and builders’ rubble after I’d got a quarter of an inch down. After ten minutes of clanging the spade on rocks and concrete, I gave up, handing the offending implement to my wife to finish off the hole.
Eventually we got Roger planted and sat back to admire it. It was very much our stamp on the house, in that it was the same age and would grow with us in our new home. Do you remember that dreadful song by Bobby Goldsboro about Honey planting the tree and when the first snow came and she ran out to brush the snow away? Well, it wasn’t quite like that chez nous, as I had the theory, based on somewhat sketchy botanical evidence that cordalynes thrive on neglect. And there was never a tree that was more lovingly neglected than Roger.
As it grew, the trunk became woodier and ridged like a real palm tree, though without the coconuts, and soon it was taller than me, when we stood back to back, though I cheated for several months by standing on tiptoes. And still we did absolutely nothing to it.
Then, about two years ago, two events occurred in Roger’s still young life that, had he been human, would have roughly equated to castration and schizophrenia.
Firstly, he grew a tuber, a long fleshy like projectile, that stuck out of the umbrella of leaves horizontally. It seemed to be a veritable wasp magnet, with the little tykes flying in from all corners of the earth to amble up and down the length of it, like Sunday strollers on the pier at Blackpool.
Finally, when the sky became thick with yellow and black buzzing creatures, I donned an old anorak and balaclava, grabbed a saw, hacked off the tuber and ran off down the road very quickly.
This seemed to disturb Roger somewhat because shortly thereafter, his trunk split into two and he became a capital Y, like the tropical palm trees you see on idyllic desert islands. Indeed, many’s the time, I looked out on him sitting there in the wind and the cold and the rain and imagined I was looking out onto a sun-drenched atoll in the Maldives.
And still he kept growing, his roots doubtless thriving on the broken terracotta piping and breeze blocks under the front garden.
Until, that is, the calamitous events of January 2010. We may have complained about the snow and ice, donned an extra pair of socks and left for work thirty minutes earlier than usual but think of the catastrophic consequences for Roger and his army of mini cordalynes in the Dublin 15 area!
In our neighbourhood at least, the devastation has been practically total. Our brown cordalyne in the back garden, a stately six footer, and a firm favourite with the hordes of giggling hebes at his feet, shed all his leaves and died a sad and lonely death, trunk damp and rotting. Next door’s cordalyne did the same and word of mouth is that the frost has rendered them practically extinct in the locality.
Except one.
Roger, like Elton John, is still standing but only just and we are keeping a very wary eye on him (he seems to respond well to wary eyes.) In March, the north facing branch of the tree started shedding its leaves, leaving them strewn across the lawn like giant caterpillars. I felt the trunk of this branch and it was soft and rotten, but at least it hadn’t spread down as far as the main section of the trunk.
I knew I had to act quickly. Tearfully, I explained to him that amputation was the only answer and that I would try and source a prosthetic branch for him, though I think he knew I was lying. Slowly I sawed down through the gangrenous limb, feeling him shudder at every rasp of the sharp teeth, until the four foot stump lay pitifully at my feet, leaving me wondering how I was going to cut it up into the ‘finger-size pieces’ that are allowed in the brown bin.
He looked odd and unbalanced but strangely defiant, the last survivor of his race, at least along our part of the estate. We tended him and gave him even more neglect than usual to aid his recovery but it has been touch and go. A couple of weeks ago, I came back from returning a Lionel Richie DVD to Xtravision, to discover three leaves lying on the grass. This was it, I thought. The other branch is going to go the same way as the first.
Since then, however, the leaves have remained in place and I no longer have to down a half a bottle of whiskey before I open the curtains in the morning to brace myself for the potential shock.
As each day passes, we grow more and more confident and hopeful that Roger will make a full recovery, maybe even grow a new limb to replace the one he lost. He seems cheerful and chirpy in himself and I’ve even caught him humming some of the tunes from South Pacific on occasions.
Problem is, he doesn’t know about the other cordalynes yet. I haven’t mustered up the courage to mention them.