IT'S A DAD'S LIFE/ADAM BROPHY:The laundry waits for no man, famous or otherwise
ONE OF the things about spending a sizeable amount of your time taking care of the kids is that you don't feel particularly glamorous.
In fact, some of the time you think of yourself as faintly ludicrous. You find yourself in a playground on a drizzly Wednesday afternoon in March and know that this wasn't how you pictured it in your dreamy teenage fantasies. As you stand staring at the swings, you also realise that you're at an age when this isn't a temporary stop on the way to rock god legend or Booker prize glory. This is you. Pushing a swing in the rain in your mid-30s. Ludicrous.
What should make matters worse is that some childhood friends have achieved high levels of musical and literary regard. But they don't live in gold-plated castles and fly pet monkeys on kites for fun.
They live in estates in Leitrim and terraces in Drimnagh and still have to don windcheaters themselves to appease their brood in disheartening weather. This realisation should cheer me, and often does, but right now I'm soaked in a stupor of personal disregard intensified by spring showers.
In times like this, you can only keep moving forward. Launch them high in the swings, prepare to catch them when they fall from the monkey bars, chase them through the maze, nurse a grazed knee after the inevitable fall. Just keep doing the job, the cloud will lift and everyone will trudge on and maybe the next generation might make the cover of Rolling Stone.
On this particular day, we make our way home via the supermarket. There I meet Stano, who occupies his spare time away from life as an electrician with his little-known (but should be world-renowned) band, Richer Than Astronauts.
His immediate concern is whether they should press 500 or 750 copies of their seven-inch single. Why vinyl? "It's just for us," he says, "And we like vinyl." Of the five people he knows who own turntables, four are in his band. This isn't going to break the US and he doesn't care.
We get back to the house in time for dinner. The grizzly sea captain who masquerades as my father-in-law has recently returned from the sailing trip of a lifetime. He is regaling us with tales of his voyage which started in St Lucia in the eastern Caribbean.
From there he sailed west, spent two days cutting through the Panama Canal to Panama City, then hugged the Colombian coast until he and his compadres arrived in Salinas in Ecuador.
The last leg brought them to the Galapagos before he separated from the rest of the crew (who are currently making their way on to Australia) and flew home.
As he explained how they quaffed champagne and dived from the boat to mark their crossing of the equator, I eyed the laundry basket and wondered did the elder have a clean uniform for the following day.
Later, Dave rings and informs me he can't go running the following night because he is involved in a focus group to examine middle-aged women's attitudes towards cheese, cheddar in particular. "You're joking," says I. "Nah mate, I'm serious. It's fascinating stuff, you wouldn't believe how much these women have to say about cheese. Fascinating."
Right so, and we reschedule our run.
I'm putting the phone down and wondering at the wonder of cheese when the missus starts to mutter about chest pains. "Ring Uncle Mike," she says. "I'm not ringing Mike because he's had a heart attack and you're wondering if you're having one yourself. You're the healthiest person I know, you're grand," I reply, sympathetic as ever.
The pains aren't going away and she's getting very shifty on the couch, ruining any enjoyment of the DVD I've rented. "Listen, will we go to casualty?" I ask, wanting her to tell me she's fine and let's not bother.
An hour later and we're settling into a night in A&E in the Mater, dodging the drunks and the drug-fuelled, but at least relieved by the triage nurse that it's not a heart attack. Instead, seven hours later, we are told she probably has pneumonia.
In my layman's experience, pneumonia is quite serious. Yet it still takes three days and phone calls from the afflicted missus for her X-ray to be forwarded to her GP for confirmation that this is, in fact, her condition. She gets drugged up and told to take to the bed, officially.
In the meantime, the kids need a runabout. I think I'll take them to the playground. That should knock the guff out of them; they might even go to bed early tonight. We could get that DVD again.