Upfront

I’M OFF FOREIGN now but it feels like my holidays started when I got the train out west recently for work. I dragged my mother along – she has the free travel – for company. She packed her sleep apnoea machine, her talking Stephen Fry alarm clock and her Werther’s Originals (I jest about the Werther’s Originals) and we caught the 9.30am out of dodge to the city of tribes.

“I’ve been to the Galway races before,” she reminisced as we arrived at the station. Already she could feel a post on her blog, which has eight readers and rising, coming on. “Your father brought me,” she said putting on her back-in-the-day voice. “I remember there were lots of gypsies outside selling things, and I always thought it strange that we had a dinner of ham, tomatoes and bread.”

Working at the races basically involved a lot of running around after politicians, horse trainers, pretty, over-dressed ladies and Chris de Burgh. As I ran, I kept glimpsing my mother sitting windswept and forlorn in her bright red mac on a bench outside the champagne tent. She would have sat inside except she didn’t have a spare €110 for a bottle. “Don’t mind me, I’m grand,” she’d say. I noticed she cheered up after paying a visit to the Hot Beef Roll tent. “There was half a cow in that,” she said, looking around for the mythical Ham, Tomatoes and Bread tent.

We were staying at the G hotel. Imagine if Marilyn Monroe, a brace of supermodels and an extra terrestrial with taste designed a hotel – that would be the G. I mean this in a good way. It had the effect of making me want to paint everything in my house pink or gold and only ever wear silk dressing gowns in an endless variety of jewel colours. My mother got drunk on a glass of what she said was “the best Chenin Blanc in the world” and had to have a tropical shower the next morning to recover.

She declined to attend the races again, preferring to eat fish and chips at McDonagh’s and browse Charlie Byrne’s book shop. At a five-course lunch at the race track (Hello? It’s called research) I met some glamorous ladies who were judging a hat competition in the G. “All back to your room for a party afterwards?” they said. I told them about my mother’s sleep apnoea machine and how it stops her snoring so loudly the room shakes. They seemed to lose interest in the party after that.

You need to let your hair down after a few days working the races, so on the last night I made an effort. Brushed the Ballybrit out of my hair. Ironed a skirt. Applied eyeliner, mascara. But I still looked like a dowdy weed in a garden of award-winning roses that had been over fertilised. Everywhere, women dressed to kill were being slowly murdered by heels and hat pins and Harvey Wallbangers. I got chatting to a couple of young women who were making a pit stop at the hotel before hitting Galway. In one of those random conversations with strangers, one of them told me that she’d got into a terrible habit of putting dot com at the end of her sentences. It started out as a novel little linguistic tic but now she was in the grips of dotcomitis. She was in Supermacs, for example, and kept demanding cheeseburgerchipscurrysauceandacoke.com. Annoyingly, there wasn’t apickonher.com.

This exchange reminded me of school, when I was in the grips of the “nine times” craze. Basically, “nine times” was a code for sarcasm. So if you hated maths you’d go: “I really love maths, like, nine times” and move your right thumb up and down. It got us through many a dull lunch break. Eventually my friends said that, as usual, I had torn the arse out of it and “nine times” became uncool long before I stopped. I’ve tried to find the origin of this expression but the only other time I heard it said was on RTÉ comedy sketch programme Your Bad Self. I’ve Googled it, to no avail. Anyone?

I also fell in with a group from Naas, Co Kildare who demonstrated how to party Galway Races-style. Urged on by them at some point past midnight, I joined the back of a conga line in the direction of the dance floor, at which point I summoned the lift which took me, Star Trek-style, from the lounge to my sumptuous bed. Totallywrecked andevidentlynotfitforseriouspartyinganymore.com.

“G,” as my Ma inevitably wrote on her blog. “What a week.” I’ll need a holiday to get over it. Oh. Good.

roisin@irishtimes.com

THIS WEEKEND Róisín will be reading by the pool in Portugal, cocktail in hand, while her two 15-month-old children sit quietly for hours engrossed in Peepo and Duck On A Bike. Like, NINE TIMES