Keep looking at the Met Éireann app while saying “ochón, ochón” and wearing a shawl like Peig Sayers did when she looked at the Met Eireann app: The Met Éireann app doesn’t care. It gives its wet weather predictions without emotion, almost as though it’s mocking us. Write: “Met Éireann app sentient?” in your notebook and obsess about that for a while.
Praise Sir John Lubbock, inventor of the bank holiday: Sir John Lubbock is the liberal peer and banker who tabled the British Bank Holiday Act of 1871, an Act we were subject to due to colonialism. Bank holidays were basically part of a societal arrangement by which the worker got some days off instead of revolution and collective ownership of the banks. In Ireland, I chose to believe that the August bank holiday is more connected to the ancient pagan festival of Lughnasa (August 1st) than reforming British toffs with newfangled ideas.
Celebrate Lughnasa by having your children engage in feats of strength on a mountaintop: This is why you’ve been overscheduling them with all those team sports for the past year, for a set of ritual games that the god Lugh organised in honour of his mam. According to lore and Wikipedia, Lughnasa is a funeral celebration for the goddess Tailtiu, who died of exhaustion after clearing Ireland’s forests to make way for agriculture (“Don’t mind me, I’m just clearing Ireland’s forests to make way for agriculture”), and yet it’s a festival still named after a man, her foster son, Lugh, who just watched (classic Ireland).
Wash your electric car ostentatiously: If you don’t have an electric car, just hang a kettle lead out of the boot of your 2009 Nissan Micra and make a big deal of plugging it in to “charge” at the Barack Obama Plaza.
Visit the Barack Obama Plaza: Look, even if you don’t plan to, you will end up at the Barack Obama Plaza or some other plaza (they’re all basically the Barack Obama Plaza) and there’s nothing you can do to avoid it. Irish people spend an inordinate amount of time at service stations, a liminal space between worlds, like the one in The Magician’s Nephew, where you can stare at a revolving display of Haribo Supermix for days on end.
Lie to the children that you’re going to visit relatives or the seaside or a funfair, then pull in and reveal you are actually spending the weekend at the Barack Obama Plaza on junction 23 of the M7, and if they don’t like it then they can get a job.
At the Barack Obama Plaza you can get petrol, buckets of coffee, a carvery lunch and a photograph with a cardboard cut-out of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States of America. What else do they need? Gaze at the people there: the cheery staff, the confused Americans, the dazed bus drivers, Marty Morrissey who lives there. They all seem happy enough.
Explain to the children how, after Obama’s visit to Ireland in 2011, the Irish paid tribute by naming a petrol station after him, a cunning reference to America’s oil wars. When the children say, “Mummy I want to go home”, say, “You are home, children.” When they argue with you, say, “We have always lived in the Barack Obama Plaza on junction 23 of the M7.” Return to work on Tuesday morning as though nothing has happened.
[ If Moneygall can throw in a bouncy Barack Obama, we’re thereOpens in new window ]
Throng somewhere. A beach. A park. A festival. A concert. A public meeting: It’s all just an excuse to throng. Being amid a swarming mass of human bodies is a hobby the Irish have had for some time. People love to throng of a long weekend. It would be ideal if you also “revelled” so that we can have a headline that says “Revellers throng at [wherever you’re thronging and revelling]”, which we can put beside a picture of some overflowing bins.
Center Parcs is one of the places where you could throng: There were huge celebrations when Center Parcs first came to these shores and now families amass there every bank holiday weekend. There they play and lark and wear animal masks and say gnomic things to a policeman from the mainland before dancing around a large burning wicker giant filled with braying animals.
Full disclosure: I have not been to Center Parcs and may be getting it mixed up with The Wicker Man.
[ Center Parcs: How much will it cost you and is it worth it?Opens in new window ]
Have a family film day where you watch classic family favourites like The Wicker Man: You don’t consider The Wicker Man to be a family favourite? I would argue that it should be considered a family favourite. Think of it as a long episode of Fireman Sam except one where the happy people of Pontypandy start a fire that Fireman Sam can’t put out but nonetheless may involve him. And people forget that The Wicker Man is a musical filled with jaunty folk songs. I believe it was the musical they did this year at my nephew’s school. Or possibly they just have a Wicker Man (it’s an Educate Together).
Do some gardening: Gardening is easier nowadays thanks to fashion for wild flower gardens. Suddenly you can display your horticultural indolence as a virtue even though your wild flower garden also features crisp packets, old washing machines and lost children. This year, I am experimenting with form by cultivating a “wild flower driveway” which has various plants peeking up through the paving stones. Do not listen to naysayers who say that there’s more to having a wild flower garden than just neglecting your property.
Discard screens for the weekend so your family can “live in the now”: Tell everyone that it’s a fun family experiment. Take away your family’s tablets, phones and televisions. Put them in a heap in your wild flower garden and hire a local tough like myself to sit guarding them. Wait, aren’t windows a type of screen? Smash the windows, then close the curtains (probably could have just done that instead of smashing the windows, in retrospect).
Take the children outside and say: “The world is a screen, the best screen of them all!” Try other formulations like, “The sky is a screen” and “The trees are a screen, a natural screen” and “The sun is a screen”. Take the children to an optician after they stare at the sun for too long.
Oh no! The opticians is filled with screens. The optician calls them “lenses” but you know his game. There’s a scuffle and in the scuffle a lot of “lenses” are broken. Don’t back down. You are teaching your children the importance of living in the now, a now that involves terror of you and your hatred of screens. Go to a restaurant. After five minutes give them back their screens.
Visit the Galway Races: Many people enjoy going to the races during the August bank holiday to watch man and horse working on problems together, most typically the problem of going faster than other nearby men and horses, rather than nuclear fission, but I live in hope. Warning: you can’t have a go of the horses. And if you try to have a go, an English-accented Irishman in tweed will shout at you and hit you with his stick.
