Róisín Ingle

....on space and time

IT RAINED AS WE negotiated with a fisherman from Clare Island who produced a bag of fresh-caught ray that fed us in a variety of ways for a week. “That’s a quare bag of fish,” he said, as we handed over a tenner. It poured from dramatic skies as we investigated rock pools on a silver strand near lovely Louisburgh, dressed head-to-toe in rain-busting waterproofs.

Walking the same beach another day, the wind blew so hard it rustled up a miniature sandstorm and a passing stranger took our photo on the lunar-looking landscape.

Under drizzle we landed giant swan pedalos on the lake at Westport House. We ate ray sandwiches and ray salad – drawing the line at ray curry – in the rain. One day, it was warm enough to wear togs and take a dip in the clear waters of Old Head Beach. Later, it lashed. Horizontally.

“Did it rain much?” people asked when we told them about our staycation in Co Mayo – because we are programmed to think this way. And, when we admitted that it did rain, they made sympathetic noises as I tried to convince them that the weather wasn’t the point.

More pertinent holiday questions are: “Did you get head space?” “Did you laugh a lot?” “Did you feel totally free at least once a day?”

But we don’t tend to ask any of that. It’s just, “Did it rain?”, which is like asking whether Usain Bolt ran quickly or Katie Taylor was fierce.

It’s over now, so you drive back home in torrential rain and try to prepare for re-entry. This means doing domestic jobs you’ve kept on the long finger. There is a load of stuff under the bed that needs to be transferred to the attic, for example. If a couple of these long-finger jobs get done then it feels as though you’ve prepared properly for going back to work. It’s the adult version of covering your books.

I hated covering my books. Hated that back-to-school feeling creeping in on you like a bad smell, the whiff of sandwiches left too long in a lunchbox, the pong of socks shoved down the back of a locker in the changing rooms. Eau de Curtailed Liberty.

In school, you could judge the owner of the books by their covers. Some girls covered their books in wallpaper. The heavy-duty kind, all swirly patterns. This told you that they came from houses where wallpaper was prized and where even spare scraps should be used up.

Some people covered their books in clear, sticky-backed plastic so that they would be preserved and you could see the name of the book without having to open it.

I envied these people. Clear plastic seemed the height of sophistication and practicality. We had paint on our walls. No wallpaper, unless you counted the bit of woodchip on the walls of a box room. Our books were covered in brown paper that came on a roll. I don’t know what that said about us.

Nothing fancy, just functional, a sort of Amish aesthetic. Anyway, by the middle of the term, except for the clever, clear plastic brigade, even the industrial wallpaper covers were peeling away, making you wonder what was the point of covering them at all.

Back at home, I complete long-finger jobs and give myself over to that back-to-work feeling. I’ve just read a small book by Arnold Bennett called How to Live on 24 Hours a Day which has hit on something that niggles at me every now and again. “You are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life. And the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leaving undone something you would like to do and which indeed you are always hoping to do when you have ‘more time’.” It’s like the man is inside my brain.

Bennett says the notion of not having enough time is the reddest of herrings because we have all the time there is. And because time is utterly democratic, all of us have the same amount. How we spend the time is what the book is about. He says we should talk more about spending time than we do about spending money.

Making the most of the time I have – which is the same amount we all have – I decide, when it comes to excavating stuff from under the bed, that nothing will do except to also move the bed into a different position facing the window.

My partner in back-to-work jobs is not impressed. But I am determined to move the bed and, when we do, it crashes into the only full-length mirror in the house and the mirror cracks and I think “seven years bad luck” because I’ve been programmed to think that way.

Later, my neighbour Barry wonders about the object we’ve put in front of the house for dumping and I tell him it’s a broken mirror.

“Seven years bad luck,” I say, automatically.

“You don’t really believe in all that, do you?” says Barry, standing outside our house. It starts to rain.

“No, I don’t,” I say truthfully. “Good,” he says.

I go back to work where I avail of the full-length mirror in the lift and notice a copy of something called Fifty Shades of Grey sitting on my desk. It sounds like the kind of gloomy, glass-half-empty book about a certain Irish summer I’ve no intention of reading.

In other news . . . Parents who are bored with bedtime reading (get behind me, Peppa) need a book by Debora Tobin that lets little ones have a laugh at their elders’ expense. Bee The Book allows parents to become a character in a simple farmyard story. €12.99 at beethebooks.com.