So long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu!

This is the last morning I will awake to the rancid smell of boiled rice and oats, we hope. I met wonderful Adam in the kitchen on Friday morning, he is lodger #1 and his ski bag lay leeringly in the hallway. 'I see you've a new lodger,' he whispers, 'Yes, but not for much longer,' I confide, 'yes he told me,' he re-whispers. I mumbled something about all the cooking. 'I know, he was cooking something foul in the kitchen this morning,' says he, faux gagging. Now, I'm thankfully vindicated, if the well mannered Adam is offended, it's not just me who can't bear the smell of coddle first thing. 'If I could only find another one like you,' I say. 'There are no more like me,' says he, not whispering.

Cost Centre #2's girlfriend told him he smelled weird recently, it was the boil-up smell from his clothes. My mother has been on the phone, worried that I haven't resolved the situation. She wanted to deliver some of her bargain food finds recently and I had to decline as the fridge-freezer was full of lodger #2's ingredients. Cost centre #1 (who is nearly 23 and has a part-time job, sleeps through the smell and doesn't know what the rest of us are going on about) tells me I'll just have to accept this issue with any tenant. But I had it on good advice that single men like to eat out and when they're not eating out they're at the gym or having pints with their mates. That would be Irish single men, not Latvians.

So, we'll say farewell to Kovac who leaves today and wish him well. I am exhausted from going out to escape the prolonged boiling. You might well ask, why didn't I ban it?  I did ask about cooking in the interview, but I think something got lost in translation, and well, you can't stop someone eating, can you? I'll be banning it the next time.

As a means of escape, I even went to a lecture in a library on, well, historic libraries. The speaker could have been talking about equine DNA, I only went to meet my other library enthusiasts. There are a lot of them. The room in the RDS was packed and they'd only laid on 20 glasses of wine, glad I was sitting at the back with my friend just arrived from  Virginia (the one in the States, not Cavan). We were near enough to the bar to get one of the 20 glasses, where I met the lovely flame-haired architect with whom I'd been in college. I asked how her baby was, 'she's ten' she replied. Are we that old? (We were already well-mature students when we were doing our post-grad). She remembered me telling her ten years ago that my eldest boy had met the Mexican ambassador's daughter at a dreary party I'd brought them along to and had arranged a first 'date' at The Shell. At the time, she said she was blown away by the height of sophistication of my fourteen-year old. Until I disabused her; it was the Shell garage around the corner. Not The Shelbourne Hotel.  I wonder how many such malaprops have gone unnoticed over the years.

After our few sips in the library, nothing for it but to go next door to the Ice Bar for a farewell drink with my friend who's heading to Japan. Now there's a place (not Japan) that's changed since I last visited three years ago. Not a developer in sight. Not anyone in sight except the decidedly idle barmen.

By Friday, I'd already got the acupuncturist booked to view the impending vacant room this week and I'm on my third night escape from the kitchen. With change on the horizon and a certain feeling of order restored, I am even in dancing mood and join some friends in the heated garden of a city club which used to be tight-standing room only and now seats are instantly procured. My jet-lagged friend is just back from New York and tells me he’s checked into a hotel that morning to sleep all day. He'll be in Dublin for a few months and has rented out his own apartment in the city centre. Emboldened by the VAT (vodka and tonic), I offer him a deal that obviously beats the hotel rate. Only catch is I'm in outer Surburbia. And we are friends. 'Ten dollars into town in a Hailo,' I encourage. Mutual friend, Blonde Racquel is also with us and thinks it's a great idea. We decide to sleep on it. Deals done in night clubs after a weary week and a few drinks can have a very different complexion the following day. Especially as next day I was attending a Humanist funeral, a sobering, but as it turned out a joyful event to mark a very distinguished life. It felt odd to be dressing so respectably on a Saturday morning and as I approached Ballsbridge, so too were many others making their way in sober attire towards the funeral venue.  The only other time you see similarly dressed groups walking in this direction, it is in blue or green to watch Leinster or Ireland play.

While hundreds attended the celebration of this fine man's life, I was impressed at the volume of motor bikers that also came to pay their respects. Even the celebrant made a joke about it. I knew John Reihill had a great breadth of interests and pursuits, but hadn’t been aware he liked a Harley. As I walked back to my car, I saw the sign, 'Motorcycle Show 2013', I think he would have been amused.

This evening I have been pleased to sit and write in the relative cool of my home, I quite like the heating off on a sunny day. Kovac (obviously not his real name) and I shook hands and bade farewell,  I asked him to contact me if he needed anything and hoped his wife and daughter would get to see him soon. I'm glad to say he thanked me for his warm introduction to Dublin and I apologised our house just wasn't ready for  a full-on tenant. All is quiet again.