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.

Sugar Highs and Low Pressure

Despite the fact it’s only a three hour journey and I left Kinsale at 11am last Tuesday, I didn’t get home until six hours later. I had to make five nap/coffee stops. I’m putting it down to the #heatwave and the #aircon I’d only discovered in my car a week before, it does ice or nothing. The first stop was in Cashel and I thought I might as well have lunch instead of just coffee and read a little, the heavy seafood chowder at Cashel Palace probably precipitated the lethargy a half an hour down the road. So I took the exit for Portlaoise in dire need of a double expresso, no coffee shop in sight until I got to the other end of town and the motorway again, where there’s one of those giant hotel/shopping places for weary travellers, called Midway, to where I don't know, not Cork anyway.

Top tip for M7 or M8 travellers from Cork, it’s the second Portlaoise exit for your expresso. And pecan Danish. By now I’m having such sugar spikes and being microwaved in the car that I have to pull in for a ten minute nap before I get to Newlands Cross. Note, for a coffee supplement on the way to Cork I recommend Kildare Village, only go in with blinkers on, you’re bound to buy a frying pan or suitcase that you don’t need.

At the other end of this napping trip I was due out for my first sailing race this year and taking a novice with me, that meant speed dressing and speed driving out to Dun Laoghaire. I’m not far off being a novice myself, I only accidentally took up racing seven years ago and my favourite time is a summer’s evening with a bit of a breeze. It was bliss. There are others that prefer being sloshed about in gusts to prove their equality. I’m good with mine.

I was on winch duty, it’s a 33’ boat so that meant little space in the cockpit, and kneeling quite a bit. And that is how the torn ligament has come back to haunt me, well former absentee boyfriend didn’t help when he leaned on said knee a few weeks ago. But enough of him.

It’s no fun being physically curtailed, it makes you feel crap that you can’t run or cycle or even walk with an elegant gait. And I’m frankly furious still hobbling with a bloody great knee brace on; especially without the painkillers or anti-inflammatories they gave me the first time round. Now I’m in danger of becoming a knee bore at parties.

So there’s the tenant interviews to be getting on with. This man came last week who’s seen the room in February and didn’t really need to move in then, now he’s back again, inspecting my interiors. He’s from Southampton and has a busy, proper job nearby. He’d probably work out fine as he’ll be going home every weekend to his wife, who won’t move to Ireland. Suits me.

Then there’s another candidate who flies helicopters to an oil rig off Denmark and would only be here for two weeks each month, we shall see, neither of them want to move in until September. In the meantime, I came up with the mild brainwave of the Irish summer perennial – the foreign student. I think it must have been the shock of seeing the Revenue had pocketed the property tax straight from my bank account and quick as a light I rang the language school; she’s coming on Saturday. Shock. Evening meals and breakfast, talking and all that stuff.

It means the annual few days in west Cork has to be deferred and Calves Week will be missed for the first time in seven years; who knows, another drive down the M8 might just have sent me to sleep and I’m better off staying put.

Or am I? Cost Centre #1 (the 23 year old) hollered at me this morning, 'Mom, there's a giant rat in the garden'. Unashamedly sitting on my night club garden seating. Clearly, I screamed my head off and then took a photo, so that's what that brown thing is.

I've lived here for nearly twenty years and never saw a varmint before. We've got traps down, tasty bacon on them, I bet someone will tell me they don't eat bacon. Apparently not cheese either. H.E.L.P.