The devil may wear Prada, but the vicar wears a Leinster shirt

The vicar called round unexpectedly last Thursday afternoon. The vicar was never going to call round expectedly to this house, since we're not in the habit of expecting vicars here. And anyway, in uber-Catholic Ireland, a protestant minister at the door is only slightly less unlikely than a vampire at the door (and that's only because we all know vampires come in through the windows. D'oh).

Anyway, imagine the scene. The vicar rings the doorbell. A man answers the door.

"Is this the Franklin household?" asks the vicar.

"Yes", says the man, clearly at home here. "I'm not a Franklin, though. Sarah's upstairs showering"

Sarah (why yes, I am in third person this evening; does my bum look big in it?) isn't quite in the shower yet, so she belts down the stairs to see who's in the hallway. She is dishevelled (OK, even more than usual) and panting, her hair plastered becomingly to her cheeks with a winning mixture of sweat and rain.

(I'd been out running, OK? And our neighbour friend was watching the kids as part of our weekly swap. Honestly).

"Hello, vicar," she says, trying to look as if this sort of thing happens every day.

" ..... "

This would be the point where a normal person would offer the vicar a cup of tea and a selection of nice homemade biscuits, but we don't need to tell you that that didn't happen, do we? Nah, thought not.

**************

So yeah, the vicar is sitting in our rocking chair, cup-of-tea-less, chatting brightly with me as he, essentially, vetted our godliness in order to assess whether or not to award Jonah a place in the local school. The kids, all three of them (Jonah's BFF Finn was here too) kept barreling in to see the exciting new person in the front room. Lucas, who at 2 is a mixture of Cartman and Father Jack , was particularly taken by this new audience to admire his sofa-diving technique.

After I'd rescued Lucas from his third landing (upside down jammed behind the baking hot radiator) whilst simultaneously trying to focus on nodding in a suitably pious-looking manner, I suggested to Lucas that he go and read a book with Jonah, Finn, and the longsuffering neighbour friend.

Lucas had a better idea. He disappeared for a couple of moments. We heard some middle-distance thuds, as if blunt objects were falling off high shelves. (They were). Then he reappeared, triumphant, bearing his bodyweight in Hairy McClary and I Love You, Little Monkey tomes.

"Mama read book me" he beamed.

"Yes, darling. I'll read to you after I've finished talking to the nice man"

Lucas didn't hesitate (maybe I'm selling him short in that description above. He has a decent whack of Jason Bourne in there too).

"NO!" he corrected me, dropping the books and whipping, ninja-like, to the vicar's side. "BAD man!" And then, should the vicar be in any doubt as to the toddler's opinion, he whirled his leg back and kicked him as viciously as he could manage.

We're all going straight to hell.

*********

There was one tiny, beautifully ironic, redeeming part of the whole visit. Jonah happened to be wearing his Irish rugby top (for matters of laundry rather than team affiliation). The vicar, delighted, confided to me that he was going to be missing church on Sunday because he was off to Twickenham to watch his team, Leinster, play London Irish. So Jonah and the deliquent vicar bonded over rugby. One soul, at least, may be saved.

Signalling

It’s been six years now since we last lived the UK – a fact that I keep wanting to hold out at arm’s length like Yorick’s skull and gaze at quizzically. Just doesn’t seem possible, that one.

Prolonged absence is supposed to soften the needles of homesickness, but the trouble with needles is that they’re small and pointy and can interfere just when you’re least expecting it.

Every day I drop the kids off at nursery and drive the 20 minutes to work. I’ve got used to the huh??? qualities of Irish radio and have settled into its rhythms, knowing as I look at the clock after the daycare drop whether I’m going to be settling in to the hurling coverage (hurling involving men with sticks rather than booze and toilets) or whether we’ll have moved on to the National Ploughing Championships* .



About a month ago a new needle poked through. As I crest the brow of a particular hill, it turns out that the radio picks up a satellite in Prestatyn or something and British radio comes crackling into force. I’d never considered myself particularly nationalistic - madly in love with my birthplace, sure, but not brayingly English by any stretch. Nevertheless, there was something so heady about hearing traffic reports on roads that sounded familiar rather than trying to decipher where in the hell Sallynoggin might be and whether I should care.



At first, it was just Radio 1, which made me feel old relatively often, since the last time I regularly listened to Radio 1 was back in the 1980s. Then, oh blissful day, I hit upon Radio 4, which sometimes feels to me like the original NPR, but with distinctly more attitude. Very hard to be pissed off about being caught in traffic and late for work when what it gets you is Sebastian Faulks talking on Desert Island Discs about the inherent conflict between the interior mind of women (constantly “in a state of audit”, as he put it) and men (“intermittent”).



I can only get British radio for about 5 minutes, as I coast down the hill towards the sea (reasons to not hate my drive to work #2: I see the sea, for God’s sake! For a split second every day it’s like going to Devon when I was little and being on hyper-alert for that first glimpse of the water).



Five minutes of British radio does two things: it’s just short enough for me to get the slightly-sick feeling that comes with being far away and still feeling 12 years old, and it’s just long enough for me to want to start shouting at the radio. Good times.




*My favourite ever quote from the National Ploughing Championships came from an interview with a young farmer who’d made it through to the final of Freestyle Farrowing (I think I’ve made that up but it’s entirely possible that it’s a real category). The interviewer, fresh from the Lisbon Treaty, asked the farmer what it took to make it through to the final. “A tractor and a plough” came the reply. The interviewer, clearly realizing he’d have to use his piercing journalstic skills to get to the bottom of this, dug deeper (as it were): “No, what sort of qualities does it take?” The young farmer thought for a moment. “A really good tractor” came back the response. Game over.

Things I never thought I'd hear from an Irish builder

"I'll have one of them frothy coffee lattes. Make it decaf though"

The legacy of the Celtic Tiger will live on in its navvies, it seems...

Maybe this is why they call it a coffin surfboard

I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: The absolutely casual, absolutely integrated approach to religion in Ireland really strikes me after our years in Seattle, which apparently has fewer churches per capita than any other city in the good ol' US of A. 

Today's God-is-everywhere classic is brought to you by the schedulers of Ocean FM, up on the North West coast of Ireland, whose description of their Saturday morning programming runs like this:

Easy listening/obituary notices/surf report

Or, in the style of a tabloid subeditor (my secret dream job):

Beach Boys/beached boys/to the beach, boys!

In this instance, it's mostly the order in which the schedulers chose to detail the show's offerings that has me cocking my head to one side with a "hunh???" Imagine being in that programming meeting - the topics up on a whiteboard whilst everyone argued about which order made the most sense. Quite how they came up with this one is a mystery, but I'm glad they did because it made me laugh out loud, and then it made me think.

Death is especially on my mind this week, much as I wish it wasn't. And as coincidence would have it, the image this programming line-up evokes - a few bars of Good Vibrations, a moment of silence in respect of the dead, then off out to catch a wave - seems as appropriate a tribute to this particular death (of an old friend) than any I could have conjured up on my own.  As the Wilson brothers put it:

Well I've been thinking 'bout

All the places we've surfed and danced and 

All the faces we've missed so let's get

Back together and do it again

I wish we could, mate - I wish we could. 

Because if someone had done this to me last year, it would have made my day bright like a shiny, shiny star

I was out meandering with the kids last week. We'd just made it up past the first (of seven) castles and second (of Christ only knows how many) churches in the village when a woman hailed us from across the street. We waited, and she approached us with kids that looked much the same ages as Jonah and Lucas, although girl-flavoured. 

It turns out she'd bought the same pushchair as us (the Phil&Teds e-3, pop pickers) and had a question about folding it. Because I am an idiot, I got halfway to demonstrating how to manipulate the damn thing ("and then you twizzle the little knobs and ta-da! the seat hinges and collapses on top of the other seat") when I remembered that I had two small boys occupying said seat(s).  Brightest button in the box award going to me today, for sure. 

Anyway, during the course of the conversation it emerged that this woman and her family moved here 2 days ago from overseas. We said goodbye, I pointed in the vague direction of our house in case she had any future pushchair-related problems and sauntered off with the wee ones towards the greengrocer to irritate the Maeve-Binchy-novel-made-real ladies of the village as we jammed the behemoth that is the Phil&Teds into the ankle-width aisle. 

As we shopped, I was struck with a remembrance of last year, when we moved here from the US. We didn't know a soul, and Jonah and I were both quite quickly in urgent need of company beside each other. It rained the entire sodding summer, putting the kibosh on our "it's easier to move in summer because you get to meet people out and about" plan, and in fact most plans, really. I made an awful lot of horribly bold-feeling overtures to friendly-seeming mothers at library story times, playgrounds, and, yup, outside the greengrocer. 

Making friends as an adult is in no way less cringe-inducing and nerve-wracking than as a teenager, except you don't have the self-handicap of the bad fashion mistakes and the bubble perm. What spurred me on, what was worse than rejection, was the idea of spending the next god-knows-how-many years with no social contact. 

A year on, my  "I am new - please be my friend" neon sign has faded somewhat. Life is liable to be too busy these days rather than too quiet and a few of those cold-call type approaches have morphed, bit by bit, into solid, funny, cool, happy friendships.  Still, somewhere between the bananas and the grapes, it occurred to me way too late that I could have/should have given P&T Woman my number. Being the one always having to make the effort can be an exhausting part of a relocation and, God knows, a relocation is exhausting to begin with. But of course, at this point, she was nowhere in sight (and if she HAD popped out in between the Chiquitas and the White Seedless, I'd have thought she was an absolute nutter and second-guessed the number-giving, doubtless). 

We finished up our various errands (messages, as the Irish call them) and were trundling our way to the local indie coffee shop. Jonah, like the good Seattle-born kid he is, had requested a coffee stop and who am I to deny him? As we rounded the corner towards Mugs, we saw P&T Woman again. So we stopped, and, reminding myself that I was aiming for Friendly Neighbour mode rather than Random Stalker, I suggested that we swap numbers. 

There's no Hollywood ending to this. Neither she nor I called the next day, discovered that we had more in common than if we were identical twins separated at birth, and have spent every moment since exclaiming that we don't know how we got on in life without the other. This is one of those stories that doesn't round off neatly with a "and then they all lived happily ever after". But, y'know, that wasn't really the point anyway. I dunno, so many people have been genuinely, without prompting, just plain nice to us over the last few years (and the last few moves) that I couldn't see any harm in overcoming the Great English Reserve (bloody English, huh) and offering the contact. And it made me happy for a good while, too, so there's that. And that, my friends, will have to be enough. 

Nun better

After secular Seattle, it's funny being in a culture where religion is so all-pervasive. Sometimes, too, it seeps through in ways that crack me up. Like this, on a radio phone-in:

Local Dublin kid, praising a nun for free tuition ("grinds") which got her through her exams:

"Big up Sister Margaret - she's a bleedin' hero"

Somewhere out there there has to be a nun giggling into her habit...