Home Economics and Hedge Funders

It’s that sunny Monday afternoon when there is nothing but #royalbaby in waiting all over Twitter. So I might as well bleat about #landladyism instead. As well as being a landlady (to one gentleman lodger who is currently barely here at weekends, bless) I’m also a redundant mother and an aspiring writer, whose business tanked with the unmentionable R word.

I’m redundant as a mother because the two cost centres have become independent in so far as making their own dinner and remembering to wash their own boxers, but not financially contributing as such. So I’ve given them charity rental invoices this summer as they’re both out of college and working. It was the younger one, cost centre #2 who requested an income and expenditure account from me when I reminded him pizza and avocado doesn’t grow on trees and I’d be setting up a summer rent. The CHEEK!!

A quick computing exercise and I broke down the Full Board Bed, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Laundry, WiFi, private rooms, TV etc to a paltry €7.14 per day if I charge them 50 per week. That shook them!

I need at least one week’s charity rent to pay for a bag of coffee I bought in Kinsale last week. I was staying with Annie Oakley in her waterside cottage, very bijou and handy for the town. I craved some real coffee for breakfast and drove to the local Eurospar to buy some for the house, by the time I’d moseyed around the pretty shops on the way back, I’d a ticket. Focking Orse as RossOck would say.

I managed to squeeze a lot into the forty or so hours I spent there, nearly had a swim only the sea was truly freezing and I’ve swam in Seapoint in January so I know what  freezing is. On Sunday night we went to a great little tapas bar called The Black Pig run by a couple who’d worked at Ely in Dublin and wanted to open their own place out of the city. The art on the walls was particularly distinctive considering it was their first place, Gavin Ryan one of the owners told me his dad, Richard, a former diplomat had lent the paintings to them. Just in case this blog gets anywhere outside of my dining room, I think it’s worth mentioning Gavin and Siobhain's restaurant is well worth a visit, quirky and clever interior style, great food.

I also discovered what the inside of a Nordhavn 62 is like, basically a luxury home on the water in the guise of a motor yacht. As I was with about seven Americans by this stage, it was stiff cocktails all round on Monday evening in the glowing sunshine. Mixing with hedgefunders after getting a parking ticket can be very depressing, but the vodka-tonic helped no end.