Musings on a Life Quite Ordinary

There was a time when I was the go to person for a lot of things technical. It’s true, in 1986 when we got a video recorder at home; I was the one who figured out how to work it first.   With help of course, it weighed about 10 kilos and was the size of the medium suitcase from a matching set of three.   It did take most of the family’s effort to get it into the sitting room, then we relayed across the room dragging and grunting with a final muscle rupturing push to mount it on the shelf under the television.   When I met my other half, I discovered he was pretty good at things like that too, so, along with the bins, I eventually stepped aside and let him take control of all things technical in our lives.   It wasn’t just because he was better than me at it.   Well mostly it was, but also somewhere along the way, I forgot I liked gadgets and buttons. Then, one day in October 2010, I got a smart phone.   I hadn’t planned to get one, it was a hand me do...

I’ve always been a sucker for a clean cut man wearing glasses, so I married one.   Then he went and got laser eye surgery.   I realise there were a number of very good pros for him having had done this such as never again losing his glasses, no more getting new prescriptions every six months and of course there’s the awful memory of the glasses a co worker told him made him look a bit special, but not in a good way. The cons for me were firstly, no more Clarke Kent fantasy, but more importantly and worryingly, he could suddenly see everything.   Everything!   My open pores, wrinkles, grey hairs, black heads – the lot. It was very worrying for me at first, but he has coped well.   I have managed for the most part to erase from my memory the look on his face the first time he saw me in the cold light of day with a head cold, sans make up and in need of my roots being touched up. Credit where it’s due though, he didn’t run for the hills. Getting older i...

I was raised to have respect. It wasn’t a blind ignorant sort of respect given to anyone older, richer or more powerful, but the real thing.   I was taught that everyone deserves respect, including me.   It may sound a little old fashioned today but why is that the case? I was also taught to think for myself, to question and reason.   I may have come to some conclusions that were different from my parent’s beliefs, but I wasn’t chastised for that.   Certainly there were debates and discussions that didn’t all end with everyone agreeing, but at no point in my childhood did it occur to me that I may be lesser than another because I thought differently on a subject than they did. Let me explain what I mean by example.   I became vegetarian in 1979, I was eight years old and we lived in the middle of Ireland .   Most people I knew thought being vegetarian meant you only ate fish and chicken.   My Granny told me I would never get a husband.   I ha...

My daughter asked me to cut her hair this week. It’s not the first time she’s asked me to do this, the last time was a roaring success and I was the toast of the family bathroom for a full hour.   So, naturally on the back of this I was confident I would do well and be the world’s number one mother for a while. However, once the job was done, she looked at her shorn locks in the bathroom bin and went quiet.   Her chin resting on her chest, her little fingers twirling the edge of her pyjama top, shoulders drooping. I had messed up, hadn’t I? I thought my heart would crack in two.   I had done exactly as she asked of me and she had talked about having her hair cut for days with enormous excitement.   So what led to this change of heart once it was too late bewildered me. My little girl keeps things in.   She mulls and muses, contemplates carefully and tries so hard to sort things out herself.   It’s a character trait I admire in her and wish I possessed ...