Men at Work

Sometimes I hear too much and don’t know where to start with a blog post. Like, I didn’t expect to be sitting beside a ‘Children at Risk’ social worker in a yacht race last Tuesday. He was the bow man and I was the ballast, we’ve been on nodding terms for many years and this was the first time we got talking about his work. There are things happening to children and adolescents in Dublin that would make your hair stand on end, there are teenagers and early twenties afraid of absolutely nothing and without any regard for law or life. I had to bury some of the stuff he told me until I’m ready to resurrect it, it was so upsetting.

It certainly distracted me from full-on landlady house. As I sat typing in silence on Wednesday, I counted my front door opening at least eight times with comings and goings, and wondered how it had come to this, my breath caught for a moment and I remembered, this is life, all of us here are dealing with change.

The passing traffic  now comprises two fifty-something men, two twenty-something boys, the ladydog and me. Gentleman Lodger #1 stays at weekends, GL #2 goes home to his wife at weekends, they may never meet, indeed I could rotate the one room and have a third full-time lad. GL#2 has promised he is handy around the house, I wonder does that include painting? Boiler fixing? In fact, all I really want is a man who vacuums, cleans bathrooms (properly) and does the ironing, I'd give a discount for that because it would make my life total heaven as opposed to approximate hell. I've just offered Cost Centre #1 who works in a bar and is languishing in bed, to get up and iron, 'this is my Saturday' he says (it's Monday morning to the rest of us). I think I'll lock all the doors and windows so he can't escape until it's done. 


When Tristan Davenport stayed here in the early summer he used to check the blog to see where he was the night before, now he has gone back to city living and enterprising foodie events, he still knows more about landlady house than I do, I forget what I write and he reminds me. He’s the only gentleman lodger to know there was a blog, the cost centre sons claim they never read it, but lest there be any libel actions taken, I don’t write anything mean. Well, I wouldn’t have anyone mean staying here, but it takes time to figure people out, I find.

I interviewed an ‘aviation professional’ for Tristan's vacant room, he turned out to be a helicopter pilot who worked two weeks on and off from a base in Denmark, ferrying the employees to the gas terminal, he told me the business was booming, they were employing more and more. He spent an hour in the kitchen explaining the concept of ‘out of hours’ Over and Over, don't think we could have shared a house. He also explained that the small town where the gas men were based was short of hotel rooms so they had special beds that alternated with the night and day shifts, when one guy got up to go to work, another came in and turned the bed over to sleep in it. It’s all in the name of fuelling our world.

It turns out I knew some of this pilot’s customers during the Boom, the movers and shakers that got shaken and moved. He shifted uncomfortably, I never heard from him again, or thought about him until the helicopter crash yesterday off the Shetlands. At first you might think they were passengers on a trip, a freak accident. But they were men doing a job, supporting families, they would stay on the rig for two weeks at a time and they were coming home from work. And now at least four of those will never get home.