Feckin’ açai bowls. Or acky bowls as our relatives in the North call them, because in fairness you’d never know how to pronounce the word if you hadn’t heard it spoken out loud. At this stage my daughters are made up of one-third açai bowl, one-third iced coffee and one-third matcha (green drinks young people queue for in town that taste like grass). I mean, I assume they taste like grass. I’m not actually going to be caught drinking one of them. I’m 53. Feckin’ matcha. Feckin’ açai bowls.
I don’t understand the appeal of these things. I’m still not totally sure what an açai bowl is to be honest. These are the distances that must grow between you and your teenage children. Like the new words. They say “whelp” and “bro” and “mate”. I blame TikTok. I blame Love Island. It’s as it should be. The language is morphing. The trends are trending. Some young men walk past our house. One of them says “sorry, dear” stepping to the side of the pavement. I wonder who he’s talking to. He’s talking to me. I am “dear”. Oh dear.
Our daughters’ bikes were left outside all winter. Rain fell. Then more rain. We hadn’t bothered with a cover and now the bikes aren’t fit for the road. Poor bikes, I think when I look at them. Chains rusting from lack of use. Locked to railings in our tiny front yard, going nowhere fast.
I want them to be cyclists. To make good use of the brand new bike lanes that emerged after years of interminable roadworks that clogged up our north inner-city arteries. Two wheels good. They walk, they are not as averse to walking as their mother, thank goodness. They take buses. But on the bike. On the bike, girls, you won’t know yourselves.
READ MORE
I give up trying to persuade them. I’m as bereft about this as I was about the fact that they don’t seem to want to read books any more. It breaks my heart a bit even though I know what they do is none of my business. A friend gave me a framed picture of Khalil Gibran’s poem when they were born 16 years ago, which begins “your children are not your children ... you may give them your love, but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts”. I know, I know. And yet I mourn the books they’ll never read. They will learn about life in other ways. It is okay. All will be well. But feckin’ açai bowls.
The bikes are wrecked. The books I buy gather dust. Then something miraculous happens. My daughters declare this to be The Summer of Reading. I come home and see them lounging on the sofa, not a screen in sight, only a big thick book. Rachel’s Holiday. My heart skips a beat. Then they decide, sing hosannas, it will also be the Summer of Cycling. We bring the bikes to the brilliant men in Penny Farthing Cycles and they fix them up. We buy a cover. No more rust.
It is one of those gorgeous sunny days, dripping with light. We have cycling plans. And then. A massive row. In the middle of a busy street. I want one daughter to wear a helmet and she isn’t having any of it. She cycles away from me and I roar at her. I mean I roar. A passerby asks her if she is okay, if she needs help, that’s how loud I roar. I am ashamed. I am out of order. Stricken. She’s gone.
A flurry of texts. Eventually she relents. She cycles to meet me and she gets an iced coffee (feckin’ iced coffee) while I drink my Americano. We’re at the Russell Street Bakery near Croke Park where such are the delectable ham and cheese croissants, that a group of burly builders tell me they’ve become addicted to them, the way some builders are addicted to chicken fillet rolls. The bakery is beside a branch of the charity Fighting Words. My daughter doesn’t see the irony, not yet, but I do. I apologise. She forgives. She says even with the roaring she still wants to spend this sunny day with me. I’m moved almost to tears.
We get helmets. We get the day back. We pick up picnic supplies in the bakery, we pick up her sister and we all cycle to the Dublin Port Tolka Estuary Greenway. You get there through the East Point Business Park. The greenway has been here for ages but we’re only doing it now for the first time. “It’s like being on holidays,” my daughter says. Dappled light through the forest entrance. The estuary sparkling, butterflies crossing our path, birds flitting through wildflowers. The history of Dublin’s docks laid out before us. We give out about our city. We wonder why we can’t have nice things. But this is the nicest of nice things.
[ Why has it taken so long to develop a greenway for Dublin Bay?Opens in new window ]
We eat our picnic looking out at the bay, listening to the birds, feeling lucky. Much later, after the recoupling on Love Island, mate, we return to the greenway with their father. It’s after 10pm. The moon is big and yellow. The lights from Clontarf dance on the water, the roosting birds louder now. The four of us have the place to ourselves. The swish of our bikes, the call of the birds. All will be well.
