Triple Distilled Communications

Ballymaloe is a special place. It’s like Knock, where any trip becomes a sacred pilgrimage to worship at the altar of food, where we go to think about what we eat, to feel a deeper connection to the land. Or, in my case, where you bring your kids so you can create the illusion that our family is more interested in slow food than fast food, despite what the chips smeared into the floor of the people carrier may attest to.

Despite my policy of only bringing my children to things that don’t cost me any money, I am willing to splash out the five euro entry required for the Ballymaloe Craft Fair, as it gives my children a glimpse of what life could be like if their father had tastebuds. Events at Ballymaloe are special – full of kindly folk who look like they are just back from a painting retreat in west Cork, all speaking in funny accents that sound slightly Amish. Our preparations for any event in Ballymaloe are important – first up was my daughter noticing I was dressed up. Why aren’t you wearing trainers and a hoodie, she asked. Why, dearest child, whatever do you mean – I always wear a wax jacket and my finest Penneys teeds of a Sunday. It’s like cosplay, I explained, only instead of dressing up as Pikachu and Jigglypuff, we are pretending to be affluent, now please just put on this loose-knit rainbow beanie and let’s go.

On our arrival there was the awkward moment when my son asked me why I was putting on an accent and using words like splendid and scrumptious, as opposed to my usual repertoire of casual swears. I had to then explain in angry whispers that these were the gentlefolk of east Cork and I desperately wanted to fit in with them and he wasn’t to blow this for me. So we set our faces to benign smiles, and went off to peruse some of the wares, under strict instructions not to touch anything or seem too interested lest our social awkwardness gerrymander us into a purchase. We were there for free samples only, and no-one was to be shy about it. Oh, it’s dairy and gluten free, vegan, foraged, handcrafted and 100% ethically sourced? Please do tell me more while I pick up your sample bowls and empty them directly into my mouth. Wow, so ethical it doesn’t even cast a shadow, great stuff, any chance you could refill the bowls please.

After a delightful buffet of free food, it was on to the crafts, where half the stuff seemed to be upcycled, recycled, foraged or found, like browsing an especially posh recycling centre. There was even a stall selling antique children’s sleds, which seemed a little on the nose given that we were surrounded by the Citizens Kane of east Cork. But this upcycling and foraging ethos is one I can get behind – find a free thing, do a bit of polishing, and sell it for as much as possible. As I walked around I couldn’t help but think of all the tat I had lying around at home I could have flogged to the petit bourgeoisie of east Cork, broken antique radios, bags of 2013 blackberries from the bottom of the freezer, artisanal bedpans. If it grew in a hedge or stopped serving a function in 1952, then this fair could be its new home. After a while, we realised that we should probably buy something, so I plumped for a vegan chickpea brownie that almost pinned me to the ground such was its density, while my kids got the bargain deal of three small-yet-ethical chocolate bars for a tenner, all made from grainy, slightly bitter chocolate that my daughter summarised as ‘not as nice as a Freddo’. Money well spent.

Of course, the success of our brief sojourn into the upper echelons of east Cork foodie culture was ultimately down to the fact that I only brought the older two children, while my wife had to wrangle the smallies into a rain-soaked playground some miles away so they could all come home with wet arses. This, sadly, is often the way we have to manage things – the older two want interesting excursions, the smallies want to destroy. Finding things that we can all do together is hard, and my wife and I often feel more like shift partners than a couple, dividing the kids and attempting to conquer them, meeting only for brief moments between her job and mine, when we do handover, maybe find the time for a quick argument about money, and then say goodbye. It has become like a relay race, and I keep thinking that there will be a finish line, when the kids are grown, and we will be able to watch a film, have an uninterrupted conversation, chew our food or just be able to go to the bathroom without a child suddenly barging in the door to tell you someone pinched someone. Perhaps in some distant halcyon future we will have our own craft stall, selling preserves, watercolour painting of root vegetables and hats made from itchy wool. See you in a few decades.

The news of Stan Lee’s passing hit us hard. You would think that given his age – 95 years young – we would have seen it coming, but – plot twist – we did not. Much like one of the characters in the universe he helped create, he seemed invincible. Ever since the Marvel franchise started to really gain traction ten years ago, I’ve been bringing my kids to see their relentless stream of blockbusters, annoying them with a sharp elbow whenever Lee’s cameo happened, whispering ‘that’s Stan Lee’ at them as though they ought to know who he is.

But as the years went by and the boys became more and more interested in superhero movies, soon they were the ones turning to me to point out Lee, as I was usually taking the opportunity to doze off despite 100 decibels of surround-sound mayhem.

But it’s not the frequency of the Marvel films that is so striking, rather that they were so consistently good. Lee was the Steve Jobs of comics, as they shared an uncanny ability for surrounding themselves with incredibly talented people. So it was that Stan Lee became a symbol of the shared love my sons and I share. For many fathers, it is sport, but for us, it is a fictional universe filled with strange creatures and relentless chaotic struggles for power. So kind of like sport, but mainly just FIFA.

Marvel for us has become myth – a series of allegories that help me explain the world to them. All the great lessons are there – Tony Stark shows us that money doesn’t buy happiness, Magneto teaches us that magnetic people are often terribly damaged, Wolverine shows that anger whilst occasionally useful generally leaves you poor and alone. Even for my ten year old, showing the first signs of the series of unfortunate biological events that make up puberty, can see that Peter Parker’s transformation into Spider-Man is more about becoming a young man, and how to manage that, than about a kid who is half spider. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to get the subtext of a teenage boy being able to shoot sticky webs with a flick of his wrist.

I’ve used comics to explain many things to my kids, even the differences between the two main political parties in Ireland – one is like Marvel; populist, massively overbudgeted blockbusters that offer us brief periods of escapism before we return to the grim reality of our lives with a belly full of overpriced Jelly Babies, while the other is more like the DC comic universe; unpopular with the masses, filled with noirish intrigue, difficult choices, and pervading sense of gloom. But my mid-level nerdiness about comics is probably more of an affliction on my kids, than gifting them with any real life skills. I know that my nerdiness has a lot to do with being an introvert and, if I’m honest, a bit of a loner – a part of myself that I’m not especially keen to pass on. I have tried to get them into sports that I have no interest in, attempted to be enthusiastic about hauling out to training so I can awkwardly attempt to chat to other dads about sporting events I haven’t seen, but in the end I realise that the reason my kids and I like comics isn’t some genetic predisposition, but rather that they are just little versions of me – slightly awkward introverts who find greater value in being able to identify the graphic artwork of Bill Sienkiewicz than in being able to spot an offside.

A sure sign that I have infected them with my nerdy tendencies was the recent discovery that my eldest son has started drawing comic books at the back of his school copies. So far it’s mostly just scenes based on video games, but no doubt it will soon move on to poorly drawn women in metal bikinis, then reasonably well-drawn women in metal bikinis, then on to strangely homoerotic robots, and after that who knows – but thanks to Stan Lee, there actually might be a career in it for him. Excelsior!

You just can’t beat a good magic road. There are a couple of them scattered around Ireland, but the closest one to where I live – and therefore the best – is at Mahon Falls in west Waterford.

It’s hard to describe a magic road on paper, as they are effectively a grand illusion created by the collision of human endeavour – in the form of a road – and a landscape that refuses to conform to our sense of perspective. Basically, you think you’re going downhill, but you’re going uphill. You stop the car, put down the handbrake, and roll up a slope. It sound ludicrous, but you really need to experience one for yourself, as even for a profound cynic like me, they inspire the same reaction that Fr Dougal had when he was told about one by Fr Ted – ‘this is almost as mad as that thing you told me about the loaves and fishes’.

Last Easter, in a feeble effort to instill some wonder in my kids, I decided to bring them to the local magic road. On the way there I regaled them with tales of how amazing it is, dressing it up with some ludicrous guff about soft places where the walls between worlds were pliable and faerie folk were able to pass through. This, I explained, was why the magic road was marked with a faerie tree, a wiry windswept bush adorned with a selection of rags.

When people say there is no magic left in the world, they might be right, as some nihilist prankster cut down the faerie tree that marked where the magic road is. And so it was that I went crawling through the six-kilometre route, becoming increasingly frustrated that I was unable to find the blasted road. Perhaps its magical power is invisibility, I japed, as my children repetedly asked where the magic road – which I had clearly oversold – was. Attempting to summon it by swearing in front of my children didn’t work, nor did looping through the entire drive a second time. Adding to my frustrations was the fact that my gearbox was acting up. Completely bothered, I drove home. It was only when I got home and angrily googled where the damn road had gone that I realised that my car wasn’t acting up, it was in fact the magic road that I was on, and I was, accordingly, in the wrong gear. Of course, I should have known exactly where it was, as I had been there previously, albeit two decades before.

Back in 1996, I went to Mahon Falls with my mum, dad and sister. We did the magic road, marvelled at the beauty of the falls, and came home. It would be the last day all four of us would spend together. Two weeks later my sister suffered  a heart attack brought on by her epilepsy, and died aged 22. She had been sick for more than half her life, to the point where I can hardly remember what she was like before the illness came. I never really understood what my parents went through until my own daughter was diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune condition, and I find myself living the house I grew up in, sleeping in what was my parents’ room, with a sick daughter who sleeps in my sister’s room. It sometimes feels like I am repeating history, stuck on an endless loop until I gain a deeper understanding of what it was like for my parents to have a sick child. I think I am finally starting to understand, decades too late, how much they and my sister went through.  

I brought my kids back to Mahon Falls in the summer, and this time we found the magic road. They were completely unimpressed. What’s magic about it, it’s just a road, they asked. Magic, I informed them, was being able to discern when you are facing what you might think was an uphill battle, but you were in fact travelling downhill in the wrong gear, simply because you lacked perspective. Magic was knowing when you have it good, and being able to enjoy it, because some day it may slip away from you. The magic, I solemnly intoned, was that we were there together, that we had each other.  It turned out that real magic is knowing that you are talking to yourself, as your kids have stopped listening to you, just as you didn’t listen to your own parents.

Fellow parents, I bring grim tidings from the frontlines of teenage sexuality – it is as bad as you feared. My daughter has been going to the odd teen disco for some years now. First there were the local GAA club discos, sweaty awkward affairs that were mostly for the 12-14 bracket. There was no great debate between us about whether or not she should be allowed go to these – it’s the GAA, sher they wouldn’t know fornication if it slapped them with a hurl. After a year or so of those, she outgrew them, and the next step was a sizeable one – to a ultra-glam club night in the dogtrack, with DJs, spot prizes, PAs by Love Island contestants and more fake tan than a bodybuilding convention. This event was also very well run, with security so tight it seemed like it was designed by a terrified parent. So off our firstborn tottered on six inch heels, but soon she tired of these too. Then she expressed the desire to go to the teenage club night in one of the city centre venues – and this is the point where my culchie roots come to the fore. The city crowd, they’re different you see. Brazen. Wild. It’s the bright lights and high speed broadband, it corrupts them. So when your child asks to go to a city centre teen disco, she might as well be asking if she can go on a week-long bender in Ibiza. You try to be progressive, to be the cool, liberal parent you wanted so much when you were a teenager, but every fibre of your being says ‘this is a terrible idea and you know it’. But she tells you that everyone is going, literally everyone in the whole town is allowed go, even that girl who is homeschooled. So you give in, as we did. And you realise that you were, in fact, right.

One of the girls in the group was unwell. It wasn’t booze, but she ended up in a holding pen that was obviously a holding tank for the trainee dipsomaniacs. Her dad came to get her, and it was from him that we got most of the information about what goes on in these places. Firstly, I would take him at his word, because unlike us, he is from the city, so he knows brazen wildness when he sees it. On entering the venue’s main room he encountered what he described as ‘a mass orgy’, including one couple who he believed were having actual sex. He said he knew what he was describing sounded unbelievable, and he was half tempted to take out his phone and get some video, but then do you really want to be the fortysomething dad caught in an underage disco filming fornicating teens, screaming ‘but I need it to show Joe Duffy’ as you’re dragged from the venue? No, you do not. After that he went to find the drunk tank, passing toilets that, despite clear gender demarcation, were populated with screaming teens of both genders.  He found a bouncer on his trek, and asked him how he put up with the mayhem. He said he normally refuses to work those shifts, preferring the ordinary drunken mayhem of your average Saturday night, but got called in last minute. He said all this with the look of someone who was about to cry, shaking his head at the decline of human civilization he was witnessing, a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare set in Tellytubby land. All is lost, all is lost.

Eventually the man found his daughter, and much in the style of the film Taken, had to shove his way out of there with her lolling in his arms, living to tell the tale of the horror of what he had seen: Teenage sexuality, out of control. When he was telling me about the experience, he had the dead-eyed gaze of a Vietnam vet, and he just kept repeating ‘it wasn’t like that in our day’.  

Of course, my daughter’s version of events was rather different. First we asked the awkward questions – were you drinking and if so how much did you have. She said three quarters of a naggin, which in reality means anything from a full bottle of vodka to four million litres of pure alcohol. But when we asked about what the place was like, she did have the good sense to admit that it was rough. ‘I have never seen so much vomit’ was her TripAdvisor-style summary of the venue. As for the frottage, fornication and general grubbiness of the night, she saw nothing. All I could do was try to encourage her to never go to that place – or anywhere like it – again, explaining that there will always be nightclubs that are rough, where people get plastered, and get sick, and get unpleasantly physical. It’s hard to try and explain this to her – that she is taking her first steps on a long journey, the same one we all embark on around that age, and that some people break into a run long before they should, and end up stumbling into situations that, as minors, they should not be in. But all this is a tale as old as time – boundaries being tested, naggins being consumed, and tidal pools of vomit sluicing around the floor of the bus home. Truly, it was the same in our day.

There are many wonderful things about the dark half of the year – putting children to bed at 5pm, chunky knitwear to disguise your chunky form, pre-festive season crash diets in the form of the norovirus – but one thing that isn’t especially welcome is the official start of goth season. Halloween was known as Samhain to our pagan forebears, presumably because their kids used to come home from school and announce that ‘Samhain needs to help me make a costume for school’.

There is an eldritch dread in any house that a child comes home and insists that they can’t just buy an ill-fitting costume from Smyths, they have to make one, as there will be prizes for the best creation. So not only do you have to take time out of your busy schedule to try and remember Mary Fitzgerald’s Make & Do bit on Anything Goes!, you now have to craft a costume worthy of a Broadway show. Halloween used to be about human sacrifice, so maybe sacrificing our old clothes to some flour and fake blood will appease the tiny gods that rule our homes.

First you have to come up with a costume. You will find that almost every character you suggest will be met with confused looks, because what was scary to you as a child – clowns, priests, triffids – are relics of a bygone age. The costume ideas my kids have are all pop culture icons, which are scary in that they are culturally vacuous, but really have no genuine fear factor. If it isn’t a video game character, or star of a Netflix/YouTube show, my kids are not interested. After finding the family bowler hat and an old suit from when I cared about my appearance, I spent ten minutes telling my son who Charlie Chaplin was and pitching this as the costume to end all costumes. My wife pointed out that nobody in fourth class would know who Chaplin was, and besides, there was nothing scary about him. As he had four wives and 11 kids, to me his life seems truly terrifying.

In the end we reached that point where you realise that whatever you do, your child is going to be disappointed in you, so you scale back your ambitions. We went back over the note sent home from school and realised that terrible parents like ourselves were given a handy get-out clause, in that it was a costume or jersey day. So we dug out an old GAA jersey from 2004 and stuck that on him, topped off with some ghoulish makeup, and told him he was a zombie hurler, or the ghost of someone killed in a sideline brawl, or something, anything.

He didn’t win a prize; that went to one of those kids whose parents clearly have too much time on their hands, bringing back my own memories of losing out in a local harvest fair’s fancy dress competition in the early Eighties. My sister, her friend and I went as the members of Sheeba, Ireland’s entry in the 1981 Eurovision. If you do remember them, you are probably thinking – weren’t they all female? Yes they were, but as we lived in the country there weren’t too many kids of the right age, size and gender to willingly be crammed into a fertilizer bag decorated with gold stars and tinsel and forced to sing in front of the county mayor and someone from the ICA. The memory is seared into my mind, not just because their hit song Horoscopes was catchy, but because of the injustice. We clearly organised the whole thing ourselves – from the bumbling embarrassed choreography, to the fumbled lines, to the upcycled fertilizer bag dresses. But we were beaten by siblings who came dressed as the presenters of Today Tonight, who made satirical quips they clearly didn’t understand, and played to the crowd with some nonsense about milk quotas. More than three decades later I am still disgusted, because I sang a Eurovision song in a glammed up plastic bag and full face of terrible make-up, while some helicopter parent swooped in and stole my prize. So perhaps the true spirit of Halloween is to teach my child that failing on your own terms is better than cheating your way to a five pound voucher for home heating supplies in the local co-op.

The key to a successful family day out is not in the planning, but rather in the total absence of any kind of coherent plan. Even the faintest whiff of a day being squared away for us all to spend together and the natives get restless: The teenager finds literally any other event in the country – Mass, threshing, study group, Young Fine Gael meeting – to attend other than be with us, the ten year old schedules a PS4 team battle that he simply can’t miss, while the younger ones, AKA Thing One and Thing Two, sense that they need to be strapped into a car seat and therefore they go running off in opposite directions. No, the key to it is all is reaching the point on a Sunday morning when you realise that it’s either fling them all into a car and hit the road, or you stay in the domestic pressure cooker and spontaneously combust.

Our day trips tend to involve a lot of holy wells. There are several reasons for this: They remind me of my own childhood, they’re educational in that I get to explain Nietzschean thought to my kids while we stare into the black pool, and most importantly, they are free. The only thing better than a trip to a holy well is one that has an accompanying holy stone nearby, and this is where Ardmore comes in. With it’s sparkling sands, cash-only cafes and Michelin Starred eyrie in the shape of the Cliff House Hotel, Ardmore is like a Greek island jammed onto the west Waterford coast. Perhaps less well advertised is the fact that Ardmore also boasts the holy floating stone of St Declan. Declan sailed over to Ardmore in the fifth century, but forgot his bell, so an acolyte sent it over on a large boulder, in a sort of medieval version of Amazon’s drone delivery service, except Jeff Bezos is even more concerned with owning all our souls.

We duly strolled over to the rock, laid hands upon it and waited for a thunderclap, which came in the shape of Thing One announcing he needed the toilet and attempting to urinate on it. After that we had a short visit to St Declan’s hermitage, home of the holy well. We stared into it, unsure what to do, until an older child asked if they could throw a coin into it. I pointed out that this was a place of pilgrimage for a thousand years, not the water feature in the local shopping centre, so no, we would not be throwing a coin into the sacred well. Also I have no money as I took a liberal arts degree instead of the sciences and my earning power is not such that I can be flinging coins into ancient puddles and such. And there endeth the lesson.

So we trudged back to the car, pausing to peer at rich people through the tinted glass of the Cliff House, and went to Youghal to screech at each other over chips like angry seagulls. Loaded up with lard, they slept in the back all the way home as I wondered if this was what it would have been like for On The Road’s Neal Cassady if he had simply given up on life and bought a Fluence. It’s not half bad, to be fair.

Of course I came home to the latest cry for help from Piers Morgan, who has overcome the fact that he looks like Diarmuid Gavin suffering a food allergy, and now manages to shoehorn himself into all sorts of idiotic controversies. The latest one was about Daniel Craig being less of a man because he was seen wearing a papoose, those things you use to strap babies to men in the vain hope they get an understanding of the lower back trauma suffered during pregnancy. Finally Piers has had the courage to say what we were all thinking – any man who willingly spends times with kids – his own or other people’s – is a weirdo or a wuss. That is, of course, until you actually go out wearing a papoose. You really only get one shot at it, usually with the first child, because if older ones see the smallest being carried, then they want to be carried, and you end up like a deranged possum with various sized children crawling over you. I loved carrying my daughter around in one, and there were several reasons – it was easier than pushing a buggy, it was like carrying a little hot water bottle around, and also because it made me look great: Kind, caring, devoted, and with obvious upper body strength; the papoose was like a magnet to women everywhere I went. Standing around shopping centres was never so much fun, as my wife would return from the shops to find me deep in conversation with some impossible beauty who had wandered over from the cosmetic hall. Perhaps James Bond wouldn’t be so moody if he traded in his Walther PPK for a papoose and spent less time breaking limbs, wearing tiny suits, and watching his girlfriends die in various ways and actually settled down, got an office job, and accepted that his most challenging mission would be trying to stop a three year old from urinating on a holy stone.

Friends, I have some terrible news: It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas. This will come as a shock to many – those who kick against the pricks of artificial pine needles, who see the elastication of the festive period as cheapening it – but you can’t deny that with the dark evenings rolling in and the desire to eat all around us rising, our loins have been girded for the epicurean implosion of Christmas.

There are those among us – country folk, people of the soil – who believe Christmas doesn’t start until they roll their combine harvester into the local town on December 8th and do all their shopping in two hours of panic buying in the local co-op. There are also those among us – specifically Brown Thomas management – who would start Christmas some time in August, when their festive shop opens to great fanfare in the middle of a heatwave, with excited children in shorts and flipflops being greeted by the spectacle of sweaty reindeer using their big brown eyes to plead for death, whilst Santa slumps to the floor of his fibreglass sleigh after succumbing to heatstroke.

There are however, us sorry souls who start their Christmas season even earlier than the high-net-worth individuals that shop in BT – the breeders. In fact, if you have more than two kids, it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas from about December 27th last, when your forward planning for the following year kicks off. If a toy didn’t get opened in the morning melee, it is quietly shuffled back upstairs into the attic, and goes back into the pot for the following year – once more with feeling kids, maybe next time round you will appreciate the 2,000 piece jigsaw of the Basilica at Knock. With a large family, Christmas shopping is not just for Christmas, but for life, because if you don’t spread the cost across 12 months, your January healthy eating plan will involve not being able to afford food.

Central to the success of this year-long shopping is a North Korean-style campaign of persuasion, propaganda and outright mind control. As you find cheap toys on special offer during the year, you need to start training your kids to want them for Christmas: ‘Oh my, look at this clearly rubbish Lego-knock off that doesn’t click together right, wouldn’t you love a massive tub of this garbage for Christmas? What about this Chinese knock-off of the Paw Patrol, Honourable Dog Warriors?’

The under tens are easy to manipulate, with their poor pliable minds open to any and all bargain bucket buys. It’s the older ones that present the real challenges. The 15 year old wants an iPhone; no, not an android phone that is every bit as good as an iPhone, she wants an iPhone and nothing else. Why? The camera is the best, because somehow photos are now used instead of words, much like hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. No, don’t show her the various articles online that proves there are better cameras on better phones for better value, she is not interested. Give her Apple or give her death. She is, however, willing to make some slight concessions by not demanding the most recent iteration of the world’s worst tech investment, and will accept the second-most recent. Meanwhile the ten year old has decided he needs another games console, because two isn’t enough. He is succumbing to the true meaning of Christmas – believing things you don’t have are better than the things you do have.  

In between all this is my need to try and give them something of true value. My parents were conservative when it came to music, films and culture in general, but they had an open-door policy on almost all books. If I was reading, then it couldn’t be a bad thing. When I started getting into Stephen King at 12, they bought me his best works. For Christmas 1990, at my request they bought me works by the Charles Bukowski and William S Burroughs, two of the most pretentious deviants you could ask for. Almost any book I asked for, I got, and while Morrissey once crooned that there’s more to life than books, part of me still believes that there really isn’t.  So the daughter gets an iPhone – and the book Steve Jobs’s daughter wrote about him, so maybe next year the brand won’t be the apple of her eye. The ten year old gets whatever I can throw at him, Tolkien, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, CS Lewis, if it has an elf in it, he is getting it, along with the weak pitch of ‘this is a games console of the mind’. The smallies will get whatever is on special offer in the bookshop – pages missing? Who cares. Soiled cover? Sher it was going to end up that way anyway. Written in Mandarin? Hey, it’s the language of future business. And for us, another few books on personal finance and parenting, because at some point in the distant, utopian, empty-nested future we may actually have time to read them, in between finally completing that Knock Basilica jigsaw.

How did you name your kids? Did you buy a few books, search for titles with true meaning, attempt to use their moniker as a nominative determinism for their future endeavours? Did you give them names with meaning and power, like Miriam, Bertie, or Marty? Did you scour ancient Irish texts to come up with the most unpronounceable jumble of letters you could find, words that sound like dark incantations or the result of a tracheotomy? Or did you just name the child after your favourite pop culture icon, Instagrammer or Game Of Thrones characters? Whatever method you chose, your hopes of giving your precious little one a unique name will all come asunder the first time you bring them to a playground, and you realise that really, everyone else had the same idea. Call their oh-so individual name when they are surrounded by their peers and see what happens; ‘Finnbhennach?’ Half the playground turns around. ‘Cthulhu, we’re going’. Five kids try to climb into your car. ‘Khal Drogo, stop thumping that child’. Three kids all stop what they’re doing to stare at the ground sheepishly. You realise that names come in patterns – how many Aoifes or Darraghs do you know who are over fifty? How many Maureens or Cons do you know who are under fifty? Names are part of a cultural cycle, and a reminder that our attempts to fashion our children into timeless individuals are really fairly lame.

We avoided totemic names with our kids. We just didn’t see the point in naming them after their forebears, as we were only having two, so we couldn’t please everyone in the family. Then we had a third child, and we managed to scrape another random couple of names together, after the statutory six months of heated arguments about how you could never name your child after someone who stole your ruler in second class. So we had our three little people, and all was well. Then, of course, we had Daniel, who we named after his grandfather, just as I was named after mine. We weren’t trying to keep that tradition alive, we had simply run out of names. However, if I had wanted to keep my dad’s name alive, I couldn’t have picked a better candidate to carry it forward, as I usually shout it about 50 times a day; Daniel stop hitting your brother, Daniel stop sticking out your tongue, Daniel could you please stop screaming, Daniel you’re meant to do that in the toilet.

Since his birth three years ago we have spent a lot of time asking ourselves if we disturbed an ancient burial ground, or did something else that might have incurred the wrath of ancient gods and forced them to send us this cursed teddy bear of a child. You bring him to the shopping centre, he runs off and you’re left trying to remember if Code Adam mall lockdowns were an urban myth or an actual thing. You bring him to the woods and he disappears into the undergrowth, leaving you to debate just leaving him there, and wondering if Hansel and Gretel’s parents were ever prosecuted. He is just one of those kids who finds which buttons to push and them plays you like a squeezebox until you think you might have a coronary episode, or just start crying. It’s as though Veruca Salt and Augustus Klump grew up and had a kid – if he isn’t eating, he is screaming – and this is the point where we have to accept that really, Danny’s madness is really down to us. As the youngest of four, we just don’t have anything left in the tank for him, and much of the time we hope all the parenting we poured into the first one or two will trickle down to him. I have a friend who was the youngest of four, and he reassures me that even though he was a difficult child, he turned out grand. Then he usually segues into a story from his lost years spent smoking opium in Asia. Little reassurance there.

They say you shouldn’t wish you children’s lives away, but with Danny it is hard – we find ourselves counting down the days until he starts school and he gets some sort of social skills. But it isn’t his fault he makes so much noise – he just came into a crowded world, and he screams simply so he can be heard.

But it would appear that we have turned a corner, and his primal instincts are slowly dissipating and he is entering the age of reason. The true indicator of this is that he now plays with Lego, sitting there quietly putting it together, rather than taking his brother’s creations and smashing them in front of him to make him cry. After three years of shouting, screaming, roaring and crying his name, it would appear that we are almost out of the woods, and another little being is becoming less strange and magical, and more like the rest of us. It’s reassuring to see, and it is looking less likely that my dad’s name would live on in infamy after his youngest grandchild becomes the next Unabomber.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I twitch awake in a cold sweat, having been scared out of my slumber by a nightmare. You’d assume it was about something terrifying, like being buried alive, falling out of plane, or missing the tax deadline for self assessment, but no, it is always the same thing – unfinished homework.

It’s hard to know what it is about homework that leaves such deep scars on us. Who hasn’t woken in the night after a dream in which they forget to submit an essay titled Emily Dickinson: U ok hun? We almost never dream about dying, or our house burning down, but unfinished homework is always there, the manifestation of all our fears of failure. Of course, then you leave school, and all is well for a few years; your brain gets to chill out and engage in some more normal anxieties, like worrying that you might never own a home. But then you have kids, and the nightmare of homework comes back to haunt you once more.

Doing your kids’ homework with them is almost worse than when you had to do it yourself. You become that irritated parent who can’t understand how this little being who shares so much of your genetic material is unable to grasp possessive apostrophes. In our house we try to split the subjects according to who was less worse than the other. She claims to be good at maths – this is clearly demonstrated by her economic activity, whereby she buys clothes, then subtracts the bags from my line of sight by hiding them under the back seats in the people carrier until a week or so has passed and they can be unveiled with the caveat, ‘but I got them ages ago’. So she tackles the maths, languages and anything else I can throw under those banners, as I’m really only good at one subject.

Regular readers of this column will be shocked to learn that English is my strong point, so I am tasked with doing that part of the homework. I quite enjoy it, but sadly it seems I enjoy it too much, to the point that my daughter’s English teacher said to tell me well done on that poem, but next time maybe the child could do it herself? The next week I responded with a devastating verse in haiku form. That’ll teach her.

Homework has changed. Back when I was a kid it was all rote learning – just repeat every line until it was scorched into your cerebral cortex. Now, it’s all a bit more esoteric, where a homework journal isn’t just where you try to scribble down your tasks; now, the junior infants are expected to keep an actual journal of what they do of an evening.

This is a brilliant step forward in both education and early childhood development, as it means you get to teach your child how to lie. Spent four hours watching ADHD Americans scream at each other on YouTube? Let’s just write down that you read a book, visited a museum and enjoyed a dinner of broccoli washed down with delicious water. It takes a while to coach a five year old into telling these lies, but anything to avoid the humdrum truth – that just running a house is a full time job, and it’s impossible to spend quality time with your children when homework with each of them takes between 30 minutes and four hours out of your evening.

An old friend who is a teacher rails against after-school study, where you pay a few quid for your child to stay on and do their homework with their peers in a supervised classroom setting. It’s monetising childhood, and monetising children, he says. I usually nod and say gosh that is terrible, whilst internally screaming shut up and take my money. Just like when I was in school, I would do almost anything to avoid homework, as it is a pox. But what makes it hardest is knowing that so much of what my kids learn will be completely forgotten by the time they are 25, and will have to relearn it all when their kids go to school, in an endless cycle of intellectual lather, rinse and repeat. But at least they will always remember their dad’s short fuse when it came to the difference between its and it’s.

Our move to the countryside two years ago hit our daughter the hardest. She was 13, the age of urban loitering, and being suddenly dragged to the middle of nowhere has been hard for her. I know it’s hard for her because she tells me thrice daily about how much she hates it here.

But last week there was finally a sign that she might be settling in, when she suddenly announced she was going to the ploughing. Granted, she didn’t know where Tullamore was (‘it’s only an hour away’ she informed us, leading us to wonder if they had managed to hire Vin Diesel to drive the bus), or that the ploughing actually involved ploughing (‘what, like digging holes?’), but she would not be swayed, even when I told her that it was really like Electric Picnic for Blueshirts, with diesel instead of pints and the only dealers there are selling farm insurance.

Sadly, she didn’t listen to us, and headed off on the bus, dressed in pyjamas, as one does. I tried to explain that as country folk we traditionally would have the breakfast the night before  and sleep, fully dressed, in the car, because living in the sticks is all about preparedness: You keep a blackthorn rod next to the bed because every couple of months you wake the a herd of cattle have taken the bold move of going free range by wandering into your garden, and you need to chase them out before one of them falls through the septic tank. Preparedness is the same reason you have a tanker of diesel in the shed, along with three generators and enough gritting salt to melt the ice caps.

I regale my kids with stories about camping stoves being used to cook Christmas dinner after the storms in 1996, and they react as though it was a lecture on the horrors of medieval times. But I would like them to understand that the countryside, and not the supermarket, is where food comes from. Last thing at night I can hear the farmer working, and first thing in the morning he is out there too. Gone are the days when you’d dispatch your daughter to the ploughing to find a fella with a few hundred acres and road frontage, my firstborn was sent off with strict instructions not to talk to any young farmers, no matter how many fluffy lambs they brandished at her, and whatever she did do not go near Macra, that place is Tinder with wellies. Life on a farm is hard, where humans work with, against and for nature, and sometimes nature just turns around and bites them on the rear, as happened to the ploughing on the day my daughter tried to attend. Storm Ali shut the site, and the bus had to turn around, to much groaning and gnashing of teeth from the teen townies on board.

The tailbacks on the way back from the site mean that the busload of giggling teenage girls had to call to houses along the roadside and ask to use their bathrooms. It’s hard to imagine what the homeowners thought when they opened the door to fake-baked oompa loompas hopping from foot to foot in wellies and a full face of makeup, asking to use the toilet, but nobody turned them away, and some even offered them tea and biscuits. My daughter expressed her surprise at this – everyone was so nice, even the bus driver who brought them to Thurles Shopping Centre so they could swarm around the place desperately seeking a Penneys or Costa.

Eventually she made it home, with wellies gleaming, clothes clean, and a general sense of disappointment – ‘I had double art today, I could have gone to school’ she moaned. This was the first mention that her little jolly to Tully was in fact not a school geography trip but an unsanctioned bit of hooky. However, as the first sign that she might be vaguely interested in country life, I am willing to sacrifice her career as an artist so that she learns that rural life means hard work, strange odours and occasionally letting complete strangers use your toilet.

So my weekly column in the Irish Independent shifted from current affairs/pop culture – about which I know nothing – to a column about family life – about which I know very little. Enjoy!

There comes a point in every parent’s life when you have to accept that you are too old for nights out. It usually comes at about the exact second that you become a parent – suddenly you have a deep and profound understanding of why sleep deprivation is used as torture, and how the mind fragments under the pressure of only have a few hours sleep a night. Of course, after a while you just get used to three-to-six hours sleep a night, and you spend your days in a state of casual psychosis. So while a night out sounds like fun, in reality you are going through the motions, trying very very hard to stay awake and engaged, as all you can think about is how this time away from the kids would really be better spent by pulling into a layby and sleeping for four hours, rather than spending a hundred euro on a meal that you can’t enjoy because a decade of frantic, panicked dinners means you have forgotten how to chew.

Thank the stars then for the day date. Yes, it is shameful to admit that you can no longer muster up the energy for any kind of human interaction after 8pm, but there is a freedom in doing so – freedom to wallow in your middle-classness, for the day date offers so many more options than its nocturnal equivalent. The night date has dinner, movie, or booze. Maybe bowling, but after a couple of decades of marriage it feels almost sarcastic in its first-date-ness. Hey, maybe at the bowling alley we could spice things up with some role play, pretend we are on a first date? No. I got married so I didn’t have to pretend to be someone else, so let’s not do that. In fact, let’s just angrily fling those balls into the gutter as we complain about the estate grass-cutting committee and their constant demands for money, as we chug overpriced beer whilst wearing moist clown shoes. I say to hell with the night date.

The day date has wonderful possibilities, like brunch, furniture stores, a half empty cinema, and not being out in a pub surrounded by people who are the same age as your kids. Brunch itself is a whole new adventure – as it has been six years since you were in the city centre, strolling through the streets really feels more like a weekend mini break in an unfamiliar European capital. I bought Nevermind on vinyl in this shop, you think, standing outside what is now either a Spar, vape shop or Starbucks. I’m glad Kurt isn’t here to see this, you muse.  

When you do finally decide on a place for brunch there is that excitement of not really knowing what brunch is, apart from the vague sense that it can only be consumed between 9am and 11am, and only by the middle classes. Revelations abound as you realise that your life partner does not in fact like black pudding, which had you known this two decades before would have been what the kids call a deal breaker. Your west Cork ancestors would be spinning in their graves – they lived exclusively on a diet of black pud, and it never did them any harm, apart from the hardened arteries and gastric distress they died with, aged 65.

After brunch there is the bracing ramble through a furniture shop so you can argue about couches you can never afford. What about that one? It’s suede, just picture it with a bowl of Coco Pops trickling down it. What about that red leather chesterfield? Honestly, you have your mother’s taste, you think you live in Brideshead, not a semi-d in a vaguely reanimated ghost estate. How dare you say that about my mother, what would you know about taste, you grew up in a bungalow, you didn’t even know what bannisters were until you met me. Look, let’s just go to the bedding section and try to figure out which pillow absorbs tears the best.

And so then on to the cinema, where your vast chasm of difference between is thrown into the sharpest focus imaginable. Why don’t we go to see The Nun, I’m adopted and I quite like the sound of it. No, we aren’t going to that, what about Crazy Rich Asians, it’s a rom-com, you remember what laughter and romance are don’t you? I will meet you halfway – let’s go see Black 47, or Crazy Poor Irish as it is also known. It’s basically the same as Crazy Rich Asians, as everyone is skinny and desperately searching for happiness. No, it’s either two tickets to Crazy Rich Asians or we just go back to the multistorey so we can spend 15 minutes trying to back out of a space whilst shouting ‘pivot’ without irony.

Crazy Rich Asians is where we end up, and it is enjoyable, and we laughed and she cried, and all was right with the world. We had our little bubble of peace, to have a conversation, to talk about us, and to muse about what ugly furniture our kids would soil if we won the Lotto. Then we came home, and the bubble goes pop, as our babysitting daughter gave us an earful about the indentured servitude that we forced her into with promises of a festive iPhone and a dog that never seems to materialise. Every child has a tale to tattle, and we are back to being King Solomon, threatening to destroy PS4s, iPads and the WiFi router if they don’t all learn to get along. After a few hours rest, the vocal chords are cranked up to 11, but those hours, free from alcohol to muddy the memory, can carry you through another month or two of hustle and bustle, as you regale friends with tales of the great little brunch spot you discovered, which has been open since 2015 and everyone in western Europe has eaten there. So here’s to brunch, cheap cinema tickets, bickering about chairs, holding hands, time apart, time together, and the day date.