Corkin

There ain't nothin cuter than me, is there? (Yeeees, i think i'm allowed the license to be the uncynical, annoyingly adoring, pukifyingly doting mother in public, once in a while...)


Ghin at the Crawford Gallery...this is his pooing face...


He sees a truck...


...and a digger and cement mixer...












At the dinner table...there were nine children altogether...it was a right menagerie...




At the wildlife park - baby lemur and mummy...


Humans and babies of various ages...


Oisin does a pelican...


...and monkey


This was Ghin just before he fell asleep and missed most of the wildlife park...lamas in the background, in case you were wondering.




Swimming at the new health club. Bliss...





We ended up in Cork over the Easter holidays. It was a long ol drive and Ghin was not having anything to do with the car seat. I remember in the good ol days when there was no such thing as a carseat, or indeed seat belts. People died less then. There were fewer deaths. I sometimes wonder if there is a relationship between this insane cotton wool culture and the increase in people dying bizarrely.

Or not so bizarrely.

Anyway, i had to strap myself in and hold on to him. When he allowed me to hold on to him. Otherwise he was wriggling about like a tapeworm and i spent the best part of the journey resigned to silence.

We don't talk when we drive. Peter just does driving. It is yet another sign that men cannot multi task. I am gathering all this evidence and submitting this as a PhD. He does not know that i'm going to be doing this, of course. Unless he reads this blog. Which i believe is sporadically. Just o do his big brother thing. The 1950s have nothing on the Doran household and free speech.

Cork was amazing. The upshot of this trip is i want to travel in Ireland a lot more. The amazing thing about it, well part of it, is how little time it did take. Cork is just about as far away as you can get in Ireland - if you exclude the windy bendy roads in the far West...but it was only 7 hours and it was with stop overs.

Our first stop over was a village called Kill. Welcome to Kill village, the sign read. Honestly. You get all kinds of funny names. There's Termonfeckin - this is a real village, i kid you not. And Muff - which is just outside Derry. Kilmacrew is a house just outside Banbridge, not a gangsta rap group and Moneynick is a town in Antrim. I love Termonfeckin best though. It's just gotta be it, eh?

Cork City itself was really cool. Although i must say that Irish architecture is weird. You have these huge fuck off shopping centres - now mostly empty in steel and glass and then everything else is from the 1950s. It's a slight exaggeration, but only slight. In Drogheda (another great name), famous for the housing of Oliver Plunkett's head - a real mummified head of this martyr who stood up to the British - but not for very long obviously, there were two of these huge places - beside these tiny houses which could have come straight out of Angela's Ashes. All the houses had these massive ariels on them, on account of wanting to receive the BBC. So much of Oliver's ideas of liberation then...never underestimate the power of Eastenders.

The other thing that really got me was how the place was filled with Polish food shops. In every street there was at least one - which makes many of them. Rows and rows of shelves stacked with tins and tins of pork and pickles with lots of ys and zs and crs on their labels which makes them sound like a particularly fetching dialect which a bee might possess if it had the power to speak.

I also loved the really really old cars that people drove. It was like something out of Father Ted. Cars which were cellotaped together, which had probably not seen the power of the MOT since i was a child. Cork also has an opera house and as i passed it i heard this DJ going on and on about Susan Boyle. Susan Boyle the big surprise on Britain's Got Talent. Ghin was with me, but fast asleep and the sun slanted and sloped onto the river in the late afternoon.

On the other side of the river the hills of Cork held their houses like crazily shuffled packs of cards, all leaning against each other, precariously arranged. They seemed as if they would topple at the slightest breeze, these many coloured, glinting decks, tiny slabs of colour and stone resting by the light of a setting sun. Cork. Pronounced Caark, by the locals. I finally made it to Caark.

I want to travel more, i do. After this year, now that the boys are older i will start travelling. Seeing more of Ireland. Discovering its pretty places. It's charm. because there is still so much which is not of the 21st century. So much that's peculiar to its own time. And it makes me come alive too, seeing different things, smelling a different air. Seeing different shops, having coffee in a different place, with a different shadow...and then i am different too. For awhile, my own narrative interrupted. I am disconnected and things once again are possible. And that's what i love most about travelling. Just by stepping sideways, things, everything, becomes possible again.