During my years abroad, I became a mother. I’ve been back in Ireland now for a while. Yet still I stop and look around me when I hear a child shout “Mummy”. I forget that in Ireland that’s what kids calls their mothers. Up until recently, I was the only “Mummy” in a blowing gale […]
Seriously, Lads!
“Ah come on Lads!” So declared my 9 year old daughter to the other kids in the local playground this weekend – the bigger one that has the cool sandpit construction setup. “Lads”, she says, “let’s have the water flow a bit first and then see if it’s stuck.” I smiled when I heard that: […]
The tooth fairy is dead. Long live the tooth fairy.
It’s the end of an era. The tooth fairy is no more. The family myth was foiled yesterday morning by the youngest in the family. An upper tooth had fallen out at school and even though it was lost on the way home, she went ahead and left a book under her pillow (a habit […]
One cup of family baking
It’s a slow family Saturday morning in Dublin. Our eldest daughter has offered to make one of our favourite breakfasts, waffles. Norwegian waffles. We have a standard recipe (with its secret ingredient*) but I’ve never written it into my recipe book. Instead it’s bookmarked on the iPad at Norwegian food site Matprat.no. I could of […]
Cross your arms and eat your pastry
A Danish pastry shop is one of the world’s great wonders. Especially for travelling families. Our 9 year old was tired and very grumpy. I knew if we kept walking through this part of Copenhagen we’d find a fantastic bakery. We kept walking. We turned a corner and there was the magical sign. “See that, […]
A lifetime of needles
I’ve been scrabbling through old boxes of folders and files, the ones that hold the history of my little family’s health through the years of our peripatetic life. Having moved to a new country three times in as many years, you would think that I – the mother – would have kept tidy the folder of “important […]
A Neighbour’s Kiss
We’ve been to lucky to set up our new home just outside Florence, a rental apartment carved out of a beautiful old villa. It’s 15th or 16th century, says our next-door-neighbour who introduced himself on our first day. Cinque o seicento. I’m not sure which. Luciano is in his mid seventies, more of a grumpy charmer than […]
An Old Dictionary
Our 9 year old needs an Irish dictionary for school. She’s been in school in Dublin for a year now and has managed to catch up really well with learning Irish. All the other kids started when they were about 5. Even if you speak another language, which she does (Italian), Irish is not necessarily […]
The Red and the Green
England and Ireland – they’re different. As a child I’d always grasp this when I looked around a street in Dublin or London and saw a postbox. Irish postboxes are green and in England (and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) they’re red. To the Irish eye, this English red can seem brash, a show of […]
The view from the roof
I took this photo in 2000 from the rooftop of my workplace near the Flatiron building in Manhattan, on 19th Street between 5th and 6th. We worked long hours at our vibrant little web agency, and we’d often pop up to this rooftop for some air, a chat, a look at this view and to […]
Back to the schoolroom in Ireland
Arriving back at school last week, our youngest nudged us away from the door on her first day – “I’ll go in by myself”. I took this as a good sign as we start into our second year of school in Ireland. A big pull for us to move here from Italy a year ago was to settle […]
The Irish for Brexit
“Brexit” is now a universally-known word and it is used as is, with no local translation. Brexit is Brexit in every language. Every language, but one – Irish. The word Brexit was first coined in 2012, eight months before David Cameron announced he would be holding a referendum on the UK’s exit from the EU. […]
The Child of Prague – Patron Saint of Climate Change?
Ireland has been going through a heatwave these few couple of weeks. This is, of course, not natural. There have been lots of internet jokes and chatter but the oddest one is people asking the Child of Prague to make the heat stop. I’ll try to explain. The Infant Child of Prague is a little […]
The Beaches of Dublin
Dublin, and the whole of Ireland, is currently melting in an amazing heatwave. The beaches are as busy as they ever get, blankets out, old bottles of sun lotion tossed around, feet gingerly dipping into the water to cool off, 99 ice-cream vans at the top of the path. My family and I actually started […]
The Truth about the British Isles
It’s a bit of sport for Irish people to watch how a successful Irish person – like Saoirse Ronan – is called British by the media. Over the years I’ve had to explain many times (even to English people), that we are not British, or part of Britain, or the UK. But we are in […]