Northern Delights

AND SO TO Portadown for a much overdue catch-up with Queenie, my mother-in-law in waiting. She’s been giving the question of baby equipment a lot of thought as her Nanny status grows by the month. Her youngest daughter just had her daughter, India, three weeks ago, our two are roughly 10 weeks away from making an appearance and another of her daughters is only a month behind us.

Inevitably there are brochures and price comparisons and a nippy-looking side-by-side pram, thoughtfully picked out for our perusal.

“Och, you’ll be walking everywhere, so you need one with good wheels,” she says, mistaking me for someone with a penchant for walking anywhere. I explain we’ve already got our eye firmly on a front and back design into which the car seats can be clicked because, you know, it’s more convenient.

Queenie is not convinced and cuts in by questioning whether we will actually use the clicking-in car seats facility. “You’ll not be clicking in. When will you be clicking in? I’m not sure you will be clicking in as much as you think you will, you know,” she says, this woman who is a firm believer in endless repetition as a tool for getting your point across.

We engage in a buggy stand-off where I try to interest her in studies that show it’s better for the babies to be facing the parent and she keeps talking about the clicking in issue until she plays her trump card which is that hers is half the price of ours. Of course it is.

I distract her momentarily by producing the spare double buggy that has been given to us, gratis, by a friend. I tell her she can keep it up in Portadown to show off the babies down the town or in the market when she is buying her cut-price vegetables. The thing is, I say, we can’t seem to put it up properly. We give her a go but even Queenie, queen of buggies and bargains, struggles so we pile into her car to go to the local pram emporium where we pretend to be browsing when really we just want someone to help us get our own pram into gear.

While the kind young shop assistant goes off to find spray polish to loosen up the pram joints, I think about how I used to hate this town. I would come up here in the run-up to Drumcree Sunday and make half-hearted attempts to talk to narky-looking locals about how they felt about “the situation”.

I can’t blame them for looking right through me, for spitting in the direction of my notebook, for looking my bad Free State self up and down like I was something Martin McGuinness dragged in. But standing here in the pram emporium, I marvel at how things can change, and how behind all that bitterness there always existed another parallel world where shop assistants go out of their way for you with a smile and with style I’ve not seen in Dublin for years.

The girl is back with a can of Mr Sheen (“don’t use oil”, she expertly advises), and has the buggy sorted in no time. She doesn’t even mind that our oohs and aahs over the new delivery of twin buggies are purely for show. We get back in the car to go to the supermarket where Queenie buys some long-sleeved baby vests (“Six for four pound“) as a present for me, and tells the woman on the till that I’m expecting twins.

That’s fine, because it seems everyone is having animated conversations about all kinds of everything at the till here and so the retail exchanges take much longer than they do in the places I’m used to, where all you get is a desultory sigh or a “Have you got a club card?”

In a nurturing mood, I offer to make dinner for everyone. Chilli, I suggest to Queenie, who nearly crashes the car and says “Chilli? CON CARNE?” as though I’ve just suggested stir-frying some kangaroo with a side of cockroach. It turns out she had already decided to splash out on a Chinese.

This worries me. For years I’ve heard my boyfriend’s enthusiastic tales of the weekly Chinese Takeaways of his youth and baulked at the less than generous portions. What would happen was they would order one beef curry, one fried rice, two chips and a portion of sweet and sour sauce. The sauce was “for Da”. Allegedly, this paltry feast would be stretched like the loaves and fishes to feed eight people. The first time I ordered a Chinese with my boyfriend nearly nine years ago he almost fainted when I ordered a chicken curry for him AND a prawn satay for me AND a portion of fried rice. Each.

“We’ll never eat all that,” he whispered, in awe. “Speak for yourself,” I said lorrying down fistfuls of prawn crackers.

I go into the Chinese with Queenie just in case. I tell her I’m at the constantly hungry stage and I can’t take the risk that she might order one main course to feed eight people. She doesn’t believe in excess ordering at the Chinese, kind of like the way she doesn’t believe in Ikea. We compromise on three main courses, a couple of portions of rice, and some chips. I worry all the way home that too much of my Prawn “Cantonese style” will end up on someone else’s plate. Incredibly, this £18 order ends up feeding eight hungry people.

In these penny-pinching times we could do worse than listen to our Mammies on both sides of the Border. Mine went into her local butcher in Dublin recently and emerged with a whole chicken, some broccoli, a bag of potatoes, parsley, thyme and two stuffed lamb’s hearts, which came to just over a tenner. That lot stretched to feed six people over two nights.

Queenie, eat your heart out.