Starting from Scratch

Here is a list of things that I could not work out how to operate when we first moved in:

1. The oven

2. The grill

3. The door locks

4. The upstairs windows

5. The downstairs windows (totally separate issue)

6. The upstairs shower

7. The downstairs shower

8. The bath

9. The kitchen light switch

10. The house alarm

11. The kitchen gas fire

12. The microwave

I should point out that when we moved in here I was on my own, grown-up-wise.  We dropped Josh at the airport in the morning and started moving into the house in the afternoon as he flew to Seattle to work for two weeks.  I could also point out that on his return he wasn’t much help as he couldn’t solve many of these riddles any better than I could.

When I say, for example, that I couldn’t work the kitchen light switch I literally mean that I knew where it was and what it was for and still could not figure out how to use it to make light happen.  And the upstairs windows: for the first few weeks I looked at them and came to the conclusion that there was no possible way that they could open.  I still have not got to grips with the gas fire but I only tried once or twice because we don’t need it.  And to be fair, the microwave did turn out to really be dead.  Even the magical handyman, Tom, could not heat up my spaghetti in it.

Tom was the saviour of everything in those first two weeks.  He works for the rental agent and was around a lot to start with doing handyman things.  There was also a plumber, Gerry, and there was always one or both here for a while.  I did get sick of it because we had been living with other people or in serviced apartments with other people looking over our shoulders for many weeks and I was ready for some privacy.  There was a relocation company on our case and they did certainly make my life much easier over that time.  They booked everything, organised everything, sorted out problems and even covered details like bringing groceries when we first moved into the house and providing us with a really excellent road map book of Dublin which was my security blanket for a long time.  I couldn’t have done it without them but by the time we’d moved in and had the rental agent around, the relocation agent spending almost a full day photographing every square centimetre of the property, the rental furniture men spending a day putting up beds and filling the cupboards with Ikea crockery, the census woman and a few others it was beginning to feel like a railway station and if I’d known how to work the door locks I probably would have gone into hiding.

On the morning that we moved in I noticed that there was water pouring out of the side of the house in between the first and second stories.  You could see by the state of the concrete path underneath that it had been going for a while so I thought perhaps that’s just what Irish houses do.  The relocation agent was still there so I pointed it out to her and she said oh, that’s just the overflow from the something something something, but she’d mention it to the rental agent.  Thus began the many weeks (well, two or three.  It felt like more) of Tom and Gerry more or less living here while they tried to sort it out.

I had quite some difficulty in grasping the issue because I can’t understand a word that Gerry says.  Tom has a beautiful melodic way of talking and I can follow it just nicely but Gerry – not so much.  On the phone there’s no hope at all.  My first contact with him was when he kept trying to call me to make a time to come over but it took about three goes before I even got the gist of who he was and what he wanted.  Even then the only thing I could do was listen and hope that I could pick out a time and a day from the general torrent of words.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t and I ended every (completely one-sided) phone call by saying ‘Yes, that’s fine thanks, we’ll be in all day’ and then never being able to go out because I had no idea what I’d agreed to.

I persevered, however, because I was quite interested in why our house had water pouring out the side of it.  The neighbours were also interested; they’d complained about it to the rental agent too.  Probably the sound was making their kids wet their beds at night.  Well, Gerry said (and I’m paraphrasing here so you don’t have to nod and smile then stay in all day because you have no idea what you’ve agreed to) that the ball cock was worn out in the water tank in the ceiling so all the water was running out the overflow pipe.

‘But the hot water cylinder’s right here in this cupboard’, I said, wondering if he’d got his plumbering certificate over the Internet.  ‘Not in the ceiling.’

‘Ah yes’, says he, ‘but I mean the cold water tank.  There’s a cold water tank up there in the ceiling.’

‘There’s a what?’ I replied. ‘Why?  We live in the middle of the biggest city in Ireland.  We have mains water.  Why would they store it in a tank in the attic?’

The explanation, as is so often the case, is that broadly speaking it’s the fault of the English.  More specifically it’s something to do with water pressure.

Anyway, the older-than-God English cold-water tank required many visits from both Gerry and Tom who had to cut a manhole in the ceiling of the girls’ room so that Tom could get to the ball cock which was obviously installed not long after World War Two and ignored ever since.

The up-side of having Tom turning up every morning for a while was that he could solve all the problems that I’d accumulated overnight, and it’s lucky that he’s such a nice man because most of them were, well, not rocket science.  Do you know how embarrassing it is to say to someone that the kitchen light doesn’t work and could he please fix it, and watch while he turns it on by pressing the switch?  In my defence, neither the relocation agent nor Josh could do it either so it’s not just that I’m reaching the stage of befuddlement where I shouldn’t be left alone with complicated equipment like windows and ovens.  It was really not obvious.

So thanks to Tom I am now am expert in turning lights on and off, cooking with both the oven and the grill, opening and also closing windows and getting in and out of my own front door (don’t judge, yo.  The handles go up for the lock to work.  Who ever heard of door handles that go up?).  I ignore the existence of the house alarm like a boss most of the time and I can totally shut it up when there’s a power cut and it spits the dummy (more often than you’d think for a big city).  I can run a bath with the best of them.  I’ve used the downstairs shower at least three times with great success although I think that might just be good luck.  But the hot water system in general, and the upstairs shower in particular, that is my nemesis.

Perhaps my problem was over-confidence.  I will admit that I sauntered into the bathroom that first morning fully expecting to be able to master the shower without difficulty.  I had, after all, been showering successfully for the best part of forty years and considered myself at least as competent as the next person.

As they say, pride goes before a fall.

So I casually draped my towel over the radiator (towel racks haven’t made it here yet, or at least not to this house), stripped off and stepped in.  And looked at a whole collection of knobs and switches.  Most showers in my experience have one knob, helpfully labelled ‘hot’ and one end and ‘cold’ at the other, and it’s all pretty fool-proof, so why does this one need the dashboard of a 747?

I spotted a switch named ‘on/off’ and this did, as advertised, make water come out.  I worked out the temperature dial (which also has a button on it, not content to just be a dial) and all was well.  There was another dial there but it didn’t seem important so I didn’t try it.  I lathered up my hair then all hell broke loose.

All these buttons and dials are not stuck to the shower wall, they’re stuck to a big box thing that’s stuck to the shower wall.  And, as the water suddenly went icy cold then stopped altogether, this box thing started making a noise that I can only compare to a three-piece band composed of a chainsaw, a jackhammer and a guy starting up a vee-dub Beetle that hasn’t been serviced since 1966.  I was terrified.

I pressed ‘off’ and it all stopped.  I mean seriously, you guys, it was like the four horsemen of the apocalypse stampeding through my bathroom except louder.  I thought it was going to explode.  It took years off my life.  Having the noise gone didn’t fix everything though, because I still had shampoo everywhere.  In trepidation I turned it back on and got much noise and a bare trickle of freezing water, so I turned it straight back off.

Right, so, I thought, I’ll go and rinse off in the downstairs bathroom and wait until Tom arrives (but with my clothes on) and ask him, what the heck?  Why doesn’t the shower, shower?  This was a great plan except that the downstairs shower turned out to be still more complicated and inexplicable.  A completely different set-up, this time it was just mocking me because it did indeed have a knob with ‘hot’ at one end and ‘cold’ at the other but no way at all that I could find to make water come out of it at any temperature.  Eventually I managed to make a tepid dribble happen (probably the water that had been sitting stagnant in the pipes since the last tenant left) and got most of the shampoo out of my hair and settled in to wait for Tom so that I could once again have the fun experience of admitting that I couldn’t find my way around a piece of basic household hardware.  As I say, lucky he’s a patient and kind man.

(I did manage to find his limit though, the day we failed to fully appreciate how limiting it is to have a really antiquated sewerage system.  We’ll just draw a veil over that one.)

It turns out it’s not me that’s completely thick, it’s the design of the plumbing system.  I still don’t really get it but here’s what I understand so far: we have the cold water tank in the attic as previously mentioned and a hot-water tank in the hot-water cupboard (‘hot press’ if you’re Irish).  The water in the tank is heated by the gas central heating system.  There’s a boiler in the garage and a few miles’ worth of pipe running all around the house in the walls, circulating water past the boiler and through the radiators, and somehow some of it ends up in the tank.  It’s really noisy, too.  It creaks and clanks and gurgles and ticks.  Poor Noah, sleeping in a room alone for the first time in his life, took months to get over being terrified and huddling under his blankets until driven out by the threat of hyperthermia.

The knob in the upstairs shower that I’d ignored was the water pressure, and it was turned up to full.  The box thingy that it and the other knobs are attached to is some sort of electrical pump motor.  In my short time in the shower I had used up all the water in the tank and the motor just, I don’t know, went off the reservation.  Which explained why the downstairs one hadn’t worked either; there was no water left in the tank.

Well, okay, sez I to Tom.  Well and good, but there are six of us here, and if the tank can’t even cope with one shower without going all bunny-boiler, what are we to do?

So he showed me The Immersion.  It gets a capital letter because of its significance as a feature of Irish family life.  Immersions seem to come up a lot.  You go to the hot water cupboard and look inside and there’s a timer, an on/off switch, and a switch that says ‘sink/bath’.  The Immersion, Tom explained, is a heating element that heats the water up lickety-split if you’re in dire need and can’t be waiting for the central heating to do the job.  You can choose a small amount (‘sink’) or a larger amount (‘bath’).  It’s still not instant; you’d want to give it half an hour.  Because of its nuclear-capable wondrousness at heating the tank up in express time it’s very expensive to use and you mustn’t accidentally leave it on or your power bill will be through the roof, so it will.  The gas is cheaper so once the weather warms up you’d want to leave the central heating on the timer but turn the radiators off.

Then Josh came home and failed to accomplish a shower so I had to try to explain it all to him:  You press ‘on’.  You make sure the temperature dial is at 5 because at least 50% of the time the shower won’t start if it’s on any other number.  You have the pressure turned right down or the water’ll be gone so quick you’ll have to wash individual limbs on separate days.  And you needed to turn the heating on a good hour ago.  Sometimes it still doesn’t go.  I don’t know.

My explanation of how to use The Immersion didn’t satisfy him (big surprise) so he Googled it and was amazed that anyone would ever think to design a system so convoluted.  The ‘sink’ and ‘bath’ settings actually operate two different elements, one at the top of the tank and one at the bottom.  They somehow know to heat different amounts of water.  There is no thermostat anywhere about the place with this system so when The Immersion is left on it just keeps heating, and heating, and heating which is why it becomes a disaster of the kind that leads to recriminations years later.  Why have a ‘sink’ setting when it doesn’t know to stop after heating a certain amount?  I don’t know.  Why design a water heating system with two separate elements but zero thermostats?  No idea.

So here’s the shower scenario now: totally, completely hit-and-miss.  Earlier on we sometimes just couldn’t get them to work at will but at least if the shower gods were smiling and water did happen it was usually hot.  Now that it’s late spring we barely use the central heating any more and as a result there’s nothing heating the water.  Sometimes we turn the heating on and the radiators off, but we do still need a wee bit of heat downstairs in the early morning so then someone has to remember to go around twice a day and fiddle with the radiators.  Sometimes we gingerly dabble with The Immersion but only after setting about five alarms to remind us to turn it off.  More often than not I try to snatch a quick shower at some random time in the day and end up standing there watching the pitiful cold dribble and swearing like a sailor.  Or having to boil the kettle to wash the dishes.  Or telling a small naked child they’ll just have to deal with the head-to-toe mud/ice cream/felt pen body art with a face cloth.  Whoever designed this system was clearly an obsessive compulsive scheduler whose mission in life was to force the rest of us into an iron-clad daily routine which, like the Hotel California, we can never leave.

I blame the English.

 

 

 

 

 

I should really start doing credits for my blog post titles.  Most of them are ripped off from song lyrics or books.

Well, that’s the internet for you.

Not the dessert penises one though.  That was all mine.

Aaaaanyhoo….

When our destination and timing were confirmed last year it occurred to me that we’d be in Ireland for the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising.  I didn’t know much about this except that it was important and that they haven’t fixed the bullet holes in the walls of the General Post Office yet.  I saw them last time we were in Ireland.  I didn’t know whether the centenary would be a big deal or whether it’s the sort of thing where people vaguely say months later, ‘Oh, I suppose it was a hundred years since the Rising a while ago.  Doesn’t time fly?  Pass the butter please’.  I do remember thinking it’s a shame that the kids wouldn’t be in school before the event because if you go to someone’s country and take advantage of their hospitality and their free Monday lunches and their Marks and Spencers Food Hall then you should show them respect by not being ignorant, you know?  And I wasn’t the one to help them in that area.

I needn’t have worried because yes, it is a big deal and quite hard to miss and yes, at least some of the children are learning about it in school because it turns out to be a series of dates that are important rather than just the one over the Easter holidays.

On Easter Monday 1916 the Rebels went into the GPO on O’Connell Street, the main north-south street through central Dublin.  The GPO is a huge and impressive building and must have seemed impenetrable.  It was business as usual inside and to start with the tellers kept serving customers as they wondered why these tossers were wandering around shouting.  Eventually, though, it became clear that the Rebels meant business and everyone else left them to get on with the serious business of overthrowing the government.  They raised the tricolour flag on the roof and Padraig Pearse stood on the steps and read out their Proclamation of Independence to what seems to have been a small and ambivalent crowd.

Over the course of the next six days the seven leaders commanded 1,000 volunteers (including 200 women) who attacked strategic landmarks – the City Hall, the seat of government in Dublin Castle,  the Magazine Fort (where weapons were kept) and a few inner-city parks and buildings.  To begin with the British had very few armed policemen or soldiers around so the Rebels gained a fair bit of territory quite quickly.  Then it all went custard-shaped.  The British called for reinforcements and 19,000 troops turned up and started fighting back.  As big and fortress-like as the GPO was, it couldn’t stand up to being shelled by gunboats on the river Liffey and all but the facade was destroyed.  The Rebels tunnelled out, saw the bodies on the street, and surrendered.

The seven leaders plus various others were executed in Kilmainham Jail (now a tourist attraction) within the week.

Here’s one of the things I find interesting.  They are now regarded as heroes and the Rebellion as one of the most significant events in the progression towards freedom from the British.  At the time, though, it seems that they were really quite unpopular with their fellow Irishmen and women.  As they announced the Proclamation of Independence on the GPO steps some of the people in the crowd threw stones.  As they were taken to their executions they were spat on.  They certainly weren’t universally supported within Ireland; not even close.

Part of this was because many Irish people had relatives fighting with the British in the Great War taking place at the time and therefore had some feeling of allegiance in spite of past differences.  Also, I suppose, they didn’t want people bringing violence and destruction so close to home, and as one statistic I read claimed that 54% of the dead and wounded at the end were civilians it’s a valid point. Certainly there were 40 children killed including a 2-year-old girl hit by a stray bullet while in her mother’s arms.  Another factor, it seems, was that the population was only 50 years past the famine and the scars lingered.  In our local library at the moment there’s an exhibition showing the diaries kept by a lady named Kathleen King  who lived in the nearby suburb of Dalkey.  She died in about 1978 and among her belongings her family found these very detailed journals which documented the Rising, among other things, from the perspective of the ordinary person.  During the week of the Rising the city’s infrastructure collapsed and Miss King recorded that their household had no access to food.  When the siege ended and deliveries to the shops started again without too much delay there was huge relief because, with the famine in living memory, people had been terrified of it happening again.  For a population severely traumatised relatively recently the prospect of making already hard times harder in the hope of political gain in the distant future was probably a very big ask.  And I’m sure there were other reasons that I haven’t worked out yet.

So how did the people who put their friends and neighbours through all this end up with their statues and memorials decorating the city?  Well.  The British, as it turned out, gifted them with the always-handy PR move of turning them into martyrs.

The British Army reacted with brutal swiftness.  They rounded up thousands of people, some innocent, and took most to internment in England where many were held without trial until an amnesty in 1917.  They executed 16 leaders immediately.  One, Joseph Plunkett, married his fiancee Grace Gifford 8 hours before his death, undoubtedly because of her very fine hairstyle.  Irish people who had previously considered the Rebellion to be a betrayal began to be resentful of this heavy-handedness and the Irish Nationalist movement gained a new momentum that carried them all the way to becoming a Republic in 1949.  A similar thing happened after Bloody Sunday, which boosted IRA membership more than anything before or since.  You’d think the British would have learned by then.

Although the 1916 Rising is now commemorated annually (apart from a gap during parts of the 70s and 80s because of the Troubles) and is an especially big thing this year, still not everyone is on the same page.  There are those who think it was ill-considered, a futile waste of life, and who believe that what it did achieve could have been done better in other ways.  This may be so; I don’t know.  We do know that there were organisational problems that made it less effective than it could have been.  It was originally planned for the preceding Friday and there was a ship en route from Germany packed to the gunwales with weapons for the Rebels to use.  The ship was intercepted by the British Navy, however, and the Rising was postponed.  The Dublin Rebels decided to go ahead on the Monday anyway (it was Irish Grand National day and all the ruling British politicians were watching the horses so no one was running the country) but the 3,000 men and women from outside Dublin who were ready to come and fight didn’t get the memo that it was going ahead after all and so stayed home to wash their hair.  Had the leaders in Dublin decided to wait for more arms and more troops things may have ended differently.  They didn’t plan on a war; they meant to take over politically while the people with guns just stood there looking convincing.  Also, although they cut the telephone lines into Dublin Castle they failed to de-activate the phone exchange so back-up from Britain was called very quickly.  It’s possible that they realised quite early on that some of these hiccups had weakened their position considerably because a priest was called into the GPO on Monday – the first day – to hear confessions.  Or maybe it was their plan all along to die fighting and let martyrdom do their work for them.

I picked up bits and pieces of this along the way but it all came together last Tuesday when I went on a bus trip organised by the home-school liason teacher at the kids’ school.  In teaching terms, this lovely lady officially has the Best Job Ever.  She’s a real teacher, so I assume is paid as one, but her whole job is to deal with adults.  She liases with parents over concerns about children, she organises parent help for various school projects, and in the interests of community involvement and people getting to know each other she organises bus trips to historic places for parents.  I thought it would be good to meet some people so I signed up (and I dragged Amy along otherwise she’d have stayed in bed the whole time I was gone) and it was great.  A bus picked us up after school drop-off and took us to the GPO where there’s an amazing multi-media 1916 exhibition which opened only a couple of weeks ago.  It has artefacts from the time – uniforms, weapons, letters (including several written by Rebel leaders to their mothers or wives in the days between their sentencing and their executions, if you’re looking for poignant) and telegrams, medals, posters, newspapers etc – and a short movie which really has you feeling as though you’re there.  It was the first time I’d seen photos showing how completely destroyed parts of the centre of town were.  Most of O’Connell Street was reduced to rubble.  It really was a war, briefly.  There is also a new memorial sculpture there in the GPO for the children fatally caught in the crossfire.  Relatives of victims were later able to claim compensation on a case-by-case basis but children didn’t count for much and there are some heart-breakingly cold letters from the claim evaluators explaining this to grieving parents.  One boy was shot while looting a sweet shop which reflects an interesting little bit of social history.  Sweet shops were among the businesses worst hit by looters and pilfered articles recovered by police included a toffee hammer.  For many inner-city children it was the one and only opportunity they’d ever had to eat sweets and, as the writer of a book I flicked through pointed out, there was probably a good number of adults who looked back on the Rising with a kind of happiness because of that.

Then we went to a cafe for soup and ciabatta sandwiches and tea and coffee and little slices and the bus took us home in time for school pick-up, and all this for four euros per person.  There’s one more of these outings this term and I’m totally going.  I don’t know or care where we end up; it’s worth it just for the lunch.

The main centenary commemorations seemed to be over Easter weekend.  We happened to be passing through the centre of town on the Monday and there were Gardai (Police) everywhere and many paddy wagons (you’re probably not allowed to call them that here but I don’t know any other name for them) and the mood was sombre and eerily quiet despite the crowd.  There seemed to be processions to various memorials.  Later there was a concert in O’Connell Street with choirs and things.

Proclamation Day was celebrated on March 15 with school children raising flags and trains decorated patriotically.  I had assumed that this was the anniversary of Padraig Pearse delivering it from the steps of the GPO but I now know that it wasn’t so I don’t know how they came up with that date.  Easter in 1916 was later than it was this year so the true anniversary of the first reading of the Proclamation, and the start of the Rising, is April 24th.  The surrender was on Saturday 29th and the executions began on May 3rd so I’m sure there are more remembrance ceremonies to go.

There are posters and flags and huge paintings on the sides of buildings in town talking about remembering 1916.  There are photos and short biographies of the main players on the walls of the train.  There’s a well-graffitied temporary wall around a construction site on which someone has listed the names of the seven men who wrote a Proclamation so revolutionary that they were convicted of treason on the strength of it.  As we were eating our soup after visiting the GPO I asked the ladies around me if they’d learned a lot about it when they were at school.  Not so much, they agreed; it wasn’t really mentioned.  The one next to me said that she’d started work on her 14th birthday and maybe if she’d gone to secondary school they would have covered it there.  Yes, the others said, maybe at secondary school.  They remembered the 50th anniversary but were teenagers and had much more important things on their minds.  It can take a while for the past to turn into history and I think this might be a good example of an event that’s become a lot more palatable and popular over time.  The rough edges – the bloodshed, the children, the destruction and disruption – have been smoothed as the Rebels’ dream has come to pass, regardless of how useful their contribution really was.

If nothing else it provided Ireland with the eventual Republic’s founding document, the first of its kind specifically addressed to both men and women.  It’s a strong document written by men who had great faith that one day their country would be able to live by it.

This country that they loved and fought for and died for, it’s a great country indeed.  I’m happy to be here and happy to celebrate their centenary with them.  I’m happy that my Irish child, and my others, have this chance to learn something about the price of the freedom that most of us have always taken for granted.  It’s important.