Cavan Calling: I am a morning person. Tony is not. All those years of very late nights following stage performances have altered his body clock permanently - or that's his explanation. The advantage for me is that I get to potter around first thing and enjoy the peace.
This morning I was at my computer by about a quarter to seven, and as I have my desk positioned under an east-facing window I watched a beautiful sunrise. I can understand why painters, such as Turner, became utterly obsessed with trying to capture the light from the sky. The wonder of it is almost indescribable and changes all the time. This morning the mountains were bathed in a fiery glow that gradually faded into orange and then a pure, icy blue. It is amazing how many shades of blue the sky can be in one day. It's also surprising I ever manage to get any work done as I spend so much time gazing out of the window. Mind you, if my school reports were anything to go by, I always was a daydreamer.
Blue is one of my favourite colours and when Tony and I were choosing the colour for our front and back doors I thought blue might be nice. Tony was, of course, only involved in this choice in the most loose way - I asked him what he thought about the shade I liked and he agreed. The only issue that concerned him was that it was not Everton blue - Tony is a lifelong Liverpool football club supporter.
Our house painter is a lovely man called Sean Monaghan who lives in Belcoo. Probably, as he has children of his own, but certainly because he is a kind man, he understands how daft children can be at times and he stepped in to save my son Sam from my wrath. Sean and the man who works with him, Steve, painted most of the rooms in our house, but we decided we would do some ourselves. One Sunday, Tony and I had to go out and Sam, who was visiting, offered to paint one of the spare bedrooms. I was at pains to point out to him that as the emulsion and the gloss were the same colour and in similar cans he should be careful and make sure he was using the right paint. The inevitable happened, I'm afraid, and I returned to find my darling son had used gloss on the walls. I tried to convince myself his motives were generous and therefore I shouldn't shout - too much! Sean, who was by then working on another project, offered to come to our house in the evenings and rectify Sam's contribution. This was very generous of him and Sam was particularly grateful.
I suppose it is an expectation grounded in my childhood, but I do still somehow expect men to be practical. When I was at primary school the girls had lessons in needlework and the boys in woodwork. The failure of any of my sons (and I have four) to be in any way useful is a source of bemusement and some irritation. As I discovered the other day, this reactionary viewpoint continues to catch me out despite all my feminist principles about not gender stereotyping.
I wanted to put some hooks on to the wall in the utility room from which to hang the laundry baskets. I bought the hooks from a DIY shop and as I was paying for them I said to the man at the till that I assumed ordinary, brown rawl plugs would do the job.
He thought not and gave me some blue ones. I thought they seemed too big, but on my first attempt still tried to use them. I was right. They were too big and the brown ones were the right size. I am now pondering why I initially went with what the man in the shop advised. Was my early social conditioning kicking in and making me automatically assume as a man he was certain to know better than me, or was it simply because he worked in a DIY shop it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about?
My feminist awareness was first raised in the 1970s when women were still struggling to assert the reality that we are the equal of men on any level - political, economic and in woodwork classes. I'm not certain the latter hasn't come back to bite us on the backside as talking to friends who also have sons we appear to have raised a generation of boys who are as helpless on the practical front as we were assumed to be when we were young girls. Is this progress?
