Ireland Day Five
DAY FIVE
CLIFDEN 11am
In all the kerfuffle over Pepsi (who was now showing signs of great improvement) we had forgotten to go into Clifden the day before to look for a wetsuit for Kris. He had braved the bitter cold of the sea with Jess and Josh again the previous day but only briefly and my mum, seeing how the wetsuits Jess and Josh had allowed them to stay in the water a good while longer, decided that they’d pick one up for Kris. However Pepsi’s veterinary visit had taken precedence that day and for reasons of canine concern and general bone idleness (we were on holiday), Kris’s trip to the shop was postponed until this morning.
My mum and dad went with him along with Alex. They gave the shop with the expensive wetsuits a wide berth and headed into the sports shop that had been closed on the Bank Holiday Monday and quickly found some wetsuits that were comparatively cheap at 40 Euro’s, which were still four times as expensive as the ones we bought in Keswick, but given the price of most things in Ireland, we felt that was still a bargain.
There isn’t anything fundamentally awkward about wearing a wetsuit per se. However I suppose when you have not come across one before in your life, you may well feel a little addled. Certainly that was the case this morning as the owner of the sports shop was treated to a little show that he will probably remember for a very long time.
After debating which size to get, they picked a wetsuit off the rail and measured it roughly against Kris, it seemed likely to fit so my mum, ever the one to ensure that all clothing items fit perfectly in the shop, ushered the embarrassed 13 year old to the changing rooms at the back of the shop for him to try on. You can imagine the joy of a 13 year old being asked to try clothes on, you can multiply that fractious tone several times over for a Wetsuit and Kris.
After several minutes waiting outside, to the accompaniment of groans, moans, ooh’s and ahhs, my mum could wait no longer. Kris had pulled the curtain across to preserve his dignity and my mum had assumed by his sounds of struggle that the wetsuit was a little tight and she asked him if this was the case.
“Yeah, I think so...” said Kris yanking back the curtain to reveal that the wetsuit was only halfway up his body. However something was slightly amiss. He still had all his clothes on and was busily trying to yank the wetsuit over his trousers.
“You’re meant to take your clothes off you tit!” said my mother in her kindly grandparently way that she has, before dissolving into fits of laughter with Alex and my dad.
“Oh... I didn’t know...” mumbled Kris, pulling the curtain back across before struggling out of the wetsuit, removing his exterior clothing and pulling on the wetsuit, a great deal more easily this time. When he had climbed inside it, he opened the door.
“Hmmmm...” said my mum looking at the sight that now met her eyes. “Aren’t wetsuits meant to be skintight?” she said looking at the baggy section around the midriff.
“It’s the zip, I can’t get it to pull up fully” said Kris.
My dad tried to help him out and taking the zip, he zipped it up fully and they looked at him stood there in his wetsuit.
“Erm... does it feel ok? Not too loose?” asked Alex eyeing up the baggy midriff section.
“No it feels fine.” Kris said in the teenage way which actually means “Just buy it, I don’t care, I’m embarrassed and in a shop with no trousers on and I just want to get out...”
“Really, cos you look like a tit...” my dad would liked to have said as Kris stood there with the rubbery middle section still wallowing around his midsection.
“It’s tighter at the back. It’s ok. This’ll do” said Kris who by now was aching to get out of his second skin and put his clothes back on.
Quite what the man in the shop thought when my mum paid for the wetsuit is open to conjecture and it was only when they returned home that the mystery of the bagginess was resolved. As soon as the car pulled up later that afternoon, Jess and Josh excitedly ran to get into their wetsuits and Kris, now suitably equipped, joined them. Five minutes later he wandered through to the lounge with it on.
“Ian, can you help me zip this up?” he asked as he waddled uncomfortably towards me.
“You’ve got it on backwards, you complete tit!” I laughed pointing at the baggy midriff “The zip goes at the back and that is where your arse should be!” I said pointing at the baggy midsection that was actually a place to park your botty.
“Oh!” said Kris. “I’ve never worn one before...” and off he went grumbling, returning a few minutes later looking less like a hollowed out walrus and more like a lithe lifeguard.
If it had been a trying morning for Kris, it had also been a trying one for Ian, Katharine and the two kids. Jessica had expressed an interest in going pony trekking on holiday once more and we had all agreed that this was a good idea, if it wasn’t too expensive. Back in blighty that seemed a sensible choice, now we were here, we knew that it was going to be expensive anyway. Ian however had steeled himself to give horse riding a try and was adamant that neither cost, nor beast, was going to stop him in his endeavour. He happily agreed to pay for the trip for the four of them. Ian's like that, incredibly generous and boundless optimism. I personally do not go horse riding for one good reason and that being for me to sit my bulbous arse on a horse would be tantamount to grave animal cruelty. Instead I had dropped them off and gone hunting along the coastal road looking for potential shore fishing spots.
Their trek took them around the mountains surrounding Cleggan, down through the town and back to the pony centre, affording them great views of the natural beauty of this place that was our temporary home. At least it would have done if Ian’s horse hadn’t been keen on trying to bite any other horse in the vicinity and both adults pathological fear of falling from their mounts onto the peaty ground below.
An hour, an inordinate amount of Euro’s and four ice creams later, I returned to pick them up and bring them back to the cottage, rosy cheeked and happy after their mounted sojourn across the Irish wilderness. My search for potential sea fishing marks had been fruitless, if interesting on the narrow, but incredibly bumpy Irish roads, at one point I took a bump a little too speedily and succeeded in launching the car uncomfortably high into the air, banging my head on the roof as gravity momentarily lost its hold upon me, which is no mean feat I can assure you. I did feel at one point I could almost have looked line "Dino" from the end credits of the Flintstones, when he sticks his head through the car roof.
Still it had been a good day for all, and best of all we had Fish and Chips for tea, or so we thought...
COTTAGE 7pm
Our search for Fish and chips nearby had begun the previous evening. We had gone through the small stash of outdated leaflets that every holiday cottage has filling up a drawer somewhere and discovered that there was an actual Fish and Chip ‘van’ in Cleggan. The only problem was that it was only there in the summer months. Namely, July to August.
This presented us with our first problem. The nearest chip shop we knew of was in Clifden. That was a good 25 minute drive away and so, by the time we returned with the food, it would most likely be cold. My Dad had hit upon an idea earlier on during the day and after he’d returned from Clifden from the wetsuit trip, he had headed off into Cleggan with Ian on the premise of finding out if there was a chip shop locally from the local shop.
When my Dad says this on holiday it actually means. “I am going into the
village to the pub for a drink.” And so with Ian in tow, he headed off into the village, to the pub and enquired behind the bar, after a pint of Guinness, whether there was anywhere that would do ten lots of fish and chips that didn’t require a half hour drive or more.
“Oh! No worries! I can do that for yis !” said the lady behind the bar.
“Really?”
“Oh yes, that’ll be no problem!” she said. “When do you want them?”
“Well, we were hoping for tonight...”
“Ah... I may not have enough in for ten...” she said disappearing to check her stock returning a few moments later “...Sorry, I’ve not got enough to do it for yis tonight... I can get it for you tomorrow?” So it was agreed that my dad would pop down to the pub for around 7.30pm tomorrow to pick up the ten portions of Fish and Chips. So delighted were they with this stroke of luck that my dad ordered a coke and Ian another Guinness to celebrate. Shortly afterwards Jon turned up after walking down into the village from the cottage and he joined them with a drink, buying my dad another soft drink as he was driving, and Ian another Guinness, which Ian had to down rather quickly when it came to leaving the pub to return to the cottage.
The news of no fish and chips was not a great problem, my sister had already bought stuff to cook a Mexican for us all so she volunteered to cook that tonight instead of tomorrow. It was a hearty enjoyable meal, made even more memorable by the fact that drinking three pints of Guinness in a short space of time, was having a very amusing effect on Ian.
Firstly he was grinning inanely. That, in itself, isn’t particularly unusual but when combined with giggling fits at almost any occurrence and the fact that when he walked out into the hall, to try and usher the children from their bedroom back into the kitchen, he completely lost his balance and slid across the wooden floor before falling flat on his arse in front of my dad, who was completely helpless with laughter, made for a highly entertaining start to the evening.
The entertainment continued later as we piled into the front room to watch Manchester United take on Barcelona in the Champions League final. Being from the North West and British we of course should have been cheering on our countrymen against the Spaniards. However as a room full of mainly Liverpool fans (Jon supports Derby, which doesn’t count as a Football team), we were of course happy to forego our kinship with our North West cousins and noisily cheer on Barcelona against Sir Alex’s men. However to enable us to view the game from the chairs in the room, we had to perform a little technical wizardry.
The television itself was not quite archaic but it was well on the way to earning an appearance on “Cash in the Attic”. Flat screen LCD televisions are all the rage, but not in this part of Ireland where they still seem to prefer the 3 ton boxes that give you a fuzzy 6 inch picture if you are fortunate. Worse than that however was the fact that the TV did not have its own stand to manoeuvre it about so everyone could see. Instead it was perched on the side of a cabinet and faced directly and squarely into the room, meaning anyone sat at a slight angle which, if you were not one of the three people who sat on the sofa directly in front of it, meant everybody else, then you could not see anything at all.
The children had tried to rectify this problem themselves on a previous day, turning the television so they could view it more clearly, however the television had shown an unerring tendency to try and fling itself onto the floor as soon as you attempted to move it from its place on the cabinet. My dad hit upon a clever solution, using a table from the nest of tables in the front room to balance the TV on so it could be turned. But not before Kris has rescued the TV from being smashed into a thousand pieces on one occasion as Josh and Jess tried to move it. This led to a great deal of shouting and gravely intoned warnings that if the children ever tried to move the television again and damaged it, then daddy would have to sell various parts of their bodies in order to afford a replacement.
So it was with great delight we cheered Samuel Eto’o when he opened the scoring for Barcelona, how we chortled with glee as United were outplayed by Barcelona’s majestic midfield and then how we delighted when the 5ft 7” maestro Lionel Messi sent a header past Edwin Van Der Sar to make it 2-0 and send United back to England having been roundly spanked. What was particularly gratifying was seeing so many members of the English press, who had already anointed United as European Champions, forced into a gloriously shame faced climb down, admitting that, despite their assertions to the contrary before the game, by far the best team won on the night.
Still, it wasn’t as funny as the wetsuit incident or Ian falling on his arse, and it wasn’t as amusing as what happened the following day at another football game.
CLIFDEN 11am
In all the kerfuffle over Pepsi (who was now showing signs of great improvement) we had forgotten to go into Clifden the day before to look for a wetsuit for Kris. He had braved the bitter cold of the sea with Jess and Josh again the previous day but only briefly and my mum, seeing how the wetsuits Jess and Josh had allowed them to stay in the water a good while longer, decided that they’d pick one up for Kris. However Pepsi’s veterinary visit had taken precedence that day and for reasons of canine concern and general bone idleness (we were on holiday), Kris’s trip to the shop was postponed until this morning.
My mum and dad went with him along with Alex. They gave the shop with the expensive wetsuits a wide berth and headed into the sports shop that had been closed on the Bank Holiday Monday and quickly found some wetsuits that were comparatively cheap at 40 Euro’s, which were still four times as expensive as the ones we bought in Keswick, but given the price of most things in Ireland, we felt that was still a bargain.
There isn’t anything fundamentally awkward about wearing a wetsuit per se. However I suppose when you have not come across one before in your life, you may well feel a little addled. Certainly that was the case this morning as the owner of the sports shop was treated to a little show that he will probably remember for a very long time.
After debating which size to get, they picked a wetsuit off the rail and measured it roughly against Kris, it seemed likely to fit so my mum, ever the one to ensure that all clothing items fit perfectly in the shop, ushered the embarrassed 13 year old to the changing rooms at the back of the shop for him to try on. You can imagine the joy of a 13 year old being asked to try clothes on, you can multiply that fractious tone several times over for a Wetsuit and Kris.
After several minutes waiting outside, to the accompaniment of groans, moans, ooh’s and ahhs, my mum could wait no longer. Kris had pulled the curtain across to preserve his dignity and my mum had assumed by his sounds of struggle that the wetsuit was a little tight and she asked him if this was the case.
“Yeah, I think so...” said Kris yanking back the curtain to reveal that the wetsuit was only halfway up his body. However something was slightly amiss. He still had all his clothes on and was busily trying to yank the wetsuit over his trousers.
“You’re meant to take your clothes off you tit!” said my mother in her kindly grandparently way that she has, before dissolving into fits of laughter with Alex and my dad.
“Oh... I didn’t know...” mumbled Kris, pulling the curtain back across before struggling out of the wetsuit, removing his exterior clothing and pulling on the wetsuit, a great deal more easily this time. When he had climbed inside it, he opened the door.
“Hmmmm...” said my mum looking at the sight that now met her eyes. “Aren’t wetsuits meant to be skintight?” she said looking at the baggy section around the midriff.
“It’s the zip, I can’t get it to pull up fully” said Kris.
My dad tried to help him out and taking the zip, he zipped it up fully and they looked at him stood there in his wetsuit.
“Erm... does it feel ok? Not too loose?” asked Alex eyeing up the baggy midriff section.
“No it feels fine.” Kris said in the teenage way which actually means “Just buy it, I don’t care, I’m embarrassed and in a shop with no trousers on and I just want to get out...”
“Really, cos you look like a tit...” my dad would liked to have said as Kris stood there with the rubbery middle section still wallowing around his midsection.
“It’s tighter at the back. It’s ok. This’ll do” said Kris who by now was aching to get out of his second skin and put his clothes back on.
Quite what the man in the shop thought when my mum paid for the wetsuit is open to conjecture and it was only when they returned home that the mystery of the bagginess was resolved. As soon as the car pulled up later that afternoon, Jess and Josh excitedly ran to get into their wetsuits and Kris, now suitably equipped, joined them. Five minutes later he wandered through to the lounge with it on.
“Ian, can you help me zip this up?” he asked as he waddled uncomfortably towards me.
“You’ve got it on backwards, you complete tit!” I laughed pointing at the baggy midriff “The zip goes at the back and that is where your arse should be!” I said pointing at the baggy midsection that was actually a place to park your botty.
“Oh!” said Kris. “I’ve never worn one before...” and off he went grumbling, returning a few minutes later looking less like a hollowed out walrus and more like a lithe lifeguard.
If it had been a trying morning for Kris, it had also been a trying one for Ian, Katharine and the two kids. Jessica had expressed an interest in going pony trekking on holiday once more and we had all agreed that this was a good idea, if it wasn’t too expensive. Back in blighty that seemed a sensible choice, now we were here, we knew that it was going to be expensive anyway. Ian however had steeled himself to give horse riding a try and was adamant that neither cost, nor beast, was going to stop him in his endeavour. He happily agreed to pay for the trip for the four of them. Ian's like that, incredibly generous and boundless optimism. I personally do not go horse riding for one good reason and that being for me to sit my bulbous arse on a horse would be tantamount to grave animal cruelty. Instead I had dropped them off and gone hunting along the coastal road looking for potential shore fishing spots.
Their trek took them around the mountains surrounding Cleggan, down through the town and back to the pony centre, affording them great views of the natural beauty of this place that was our temporary home. At least it would have done if Ian’s horse hadn’t been keen on trying to bite any other horse in the vicinity and both adults pathological fear of falling from their mounts onto the peaty ground below.
An hour, an inordinate amount of Euro’s and four ice creams later, I returned to pick them up and bring them back to the cottage, rosy cheeked and happy after their mounted sojourn across the Irish wilderness. My search for potential sea fishing marks had been fruitless, if interesting on the narrow, but incredibly bumpy Irish roads, at one point I took a bump a little too speedily and succeeded in launching the car uncomfortably high into the air, banging my head on the roof as gravity momentarily lost its hold upon me, which is no mean feat I can assure you. I did feel at one point I could almost have looked line "Dino" from the end credits of the Flintstones, when he sticks his head through the car roof.
Still it had been a good day for all, and best of all we had Fish and Chips for tea, or so we thought...
COTTAGE 7pm
Our search for Fish and chips nearby had begun the previous evening. We had gone through the small stash of outdated leaflets that every holiday cottage has filling up a drawer somewhere and discovered that there was an actual Fish and Chip ‘van’ in Cleggan. The only problem was that it was only there in the summer months. Namely, July to August.
This presented us with our first problem. The nearest chip shop we knew of was in Clifden. That was a good 25 minute drive away and so, by the time we returned with the food, it would most likely be cold. My Dad had hit upon an idea earlier on during the day and after he’d returned from Clifden from the wetsuit trip, he had headed off into Cleggan with Ian on the premise of finding out if there was a chip shop locally from the local shop.
When my Dad says this on holiday it actually means. “I am going into the
village to the pub for a drink.” And so with Ian in tow, he headed off into the village, to the pub and enquired behind the bar, after a pint of Guinness, whether there was anywhere that would do ten lots of fish and chips that didn’t require a half hour drive or more.
“Oh! No worries! I can do that for yis !” said the lady behind the bar.
“Really?”
“Oh yes, that’ll be no problem!” she said. “When do you want them?”
“Well, we were hoping for tonight...”
“Ah... I may not have enough in for ten...” she said disappearing to check her stock returning a few moments later “...Sorry, I’ve not got enough to do it for yis tonight... I can get it for you tomorrow?” So it was agreed that my dad would pop down to the pub for around 7.30pm tomorrow to pick up the ten portions of Fish and Chips. So delighted were they with this stroke of luck that my dad ordered a coke and Ian another Guinness to celebrate. Shortly afterwards Jon turned up after walking down into the village from the cottage and he joined them with a drink, buying my dad another soft drink as he was driving, and Ian another Guinness, which Ian had to down rather quickly when it came to leaving the pub to return to the cottage.
The news of no fish and chips was not a great problem, my sister had already bought stuff to cook a Mexican for us all so she volunteered to cook that tonight instead of tomorrow. It was a hearty enjoyable meal, made even more memorable by the fact that drinking three pints of Guinness in a short space of time, was having a very amusing effect on Ian.
Firstly he was grinning inanely. That, in itself, isn’t particularly unusual but when combined with giggling fits at almost any occurrence and the fact that when he walked out into the hall, to try and usher the children from their bedroom back into the kitchen, he completely lost his balance and slid across the wooden floor before falling flat on his arse in front of my dad, who was completely helpless with laughter, made for a highly entertaining start to the evening.
The entertainment continued later as we piled into the front room to watch Manchester United take on Barcelona in the Champions League final. Being from the North West and British we of course should have been cheering on our countrymen against the Spaniards. However as a room full of mainly Liverpool fans (Jon supports Derby, which doesn’t count as a Football team), we were of course happy to forego our kinship with our North West cousins and noisily cheer on Barcelona against Sir Alex’s men. However to enable us to view the game from the chairs in the room, we had to perform a little technical wizardry.
The television itself was not quite archaic but it was well on the way to earning an appearance on “Cash in the Attic”. Flat screen LCD televisions are all the rage, but not in this part of Ireland where they still seem to prefer the 3 ton boxes that give you a fuzzy 6 inch picture if you are fortunate. Worse than that however was the fact that the TV did not have its own stand to manoeuvre it about so everyone could see. Instead it was perched on the side of a cabinet and faced directly and squarely into the room, meaning anyone sat at a slight angle which, if you were not one of the three people who sat on the sofa directly in front of it, meant everybody else, then you could not see anything at all.
The children had tried to rectify this problem themselves on a previous day, turning the television so they could view it more clearly, however the television had shown an unerring tendency to try and fling itself onto the floor as soon as you attempted to move it from its place on the cabinet. My dad hit upon a clever solution, using a table from the nest of tables in the front room to balance the TV on so it could be turned. But not before Kris has rescued the TV from being smashed into a thousand pieces on one occasion as Josh and Jess tried to move it. This led to a great deal of shouting and gravely intoned warnings that if the children ever tried to move the television again and damaged it, then daddy would have to sell various parts of their bodies in order to afford a replacement.
So it was with great delight we cheered Samuel Eto’o when he opened the scoring for Barcelona, how we chortled with glee as United were outplayed by Barcelona’s majestic midfield and then how we delighted when the 5ft 7” maestro Lionel Messi sent a header past Edwin Van Der Sar to make it 2-0 and send United back to England having been roundly spanked. What was particularly gratifying was seeing so many members of the English press, who had already anointed United as European Champions, forced into a gloriously shame faced climb down, admitting that, despite their assertions to the contrary before the game, by far the best team won on the night.
Still, it wasn’t as funny as the wetsuit incident or Ian falling on his arse, and it wasn’t as amusing as what happened the following day at another football game.
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