Trippin' to Malahide

So we ended up in Herself's aul' haunt, Malahide. Every time I go there, the tide is in. But I'm reliably informed there's a beach under the waves not far from the Sea Scout's HQ. Of course, the dunes start further along the coast and eventually become Portmarnock, but that's probably another story and one that would likely go way over the head of this out of towner.

The village is decorated with just-at-end-of-season hanging baskets of flowers which make a pleasant scene. The traffic is bloody well unbelievable, though. I had planned on taking pics of a few shop fronts for posterity but no matter what direction I pointed myself a convertible with build-in blonde or an SUV with God-knows what in it hove into shot.

Malahide Hardware had the fittings for our curtain rails we'd been searching for off and on for the past year. So I bought some to make more work for myself and will probably be found with drill in hand again this weekend straightening the rails out before Herself decides in another day or two that the whole lot need to go in the recycling bin.

Duffy's is the spot for lunch in Malahide. Very friendly staff and boiling hot food make for a perfect combination. I had the Lazagne special -- lazagne with a side order of boiled vegetables that must have been put in the pot so fresh they didn't realise they'd been pulled out of the gound yet. Herself went for roast beef that almost melted off the fork into the mouth. Herself's brother poked his head around the corner just as we were ordering, which was a pleasant surprise. We stuffed ourselves and waddled off down the side streets keeping a wary eye on the traffic warden and the reminder on the parking permit of when we should leave to avoid a ticket.

Days of birds and heavy weather

These past few days. Firstly on the top deck of a bus sweltering along, looking at all and nothing. I noticed over the back gardens of houses off the Old Bawn Road a flock of starlings sweeping upwards. One would arc lower using the downward fall of its trajectory to gain speed then turning the angle of its wings slightly, pulling up, up into the sky, high, higher than I had ever seen them flying before. Something about their dancing skywards puzzled me. Then I realised they were hunting. Catching flying ants rising in the heat.

The birds' wings, stretched wide out to lift them on the hot air the princess ants and male, winged ants were soaring through in invisible clouds, would suddenly twist and fold in an anxious stall as the bird almost stopped to snap up another pair of mating insects.

Further down the road, great flocks of seabirds spiralled upwards over the parklands, following the swarms. White wings upraised they swooped gracefully and plucked at the air.

No-one among the footballers or walkers or commuters stuck in traffic noticed them.

This evening, walking down the long concrete foothpath towards home I noticed scurrying platoons of ant attendants rushing frantically about, encouraging latecoming princesses in lacy wings to take off onto the dull breeze in the torid heat and run the gauntlet in the sky.

Far off towards the mountains a column of hundreds of pairs of white feathered wings blazed in the sunlight, a beautiful ballet of death and of life. The children, bored with summer holidays, didn't look up, but went about the business of who was playing with whom and who's pick it was.

Nothing ever happens in Firhouse, no doubt they'll say.

Flying smoke alarm invasion

Herself thinks that putting on the feathers is just too much. I don't think so. Although the giant "worm" made from a discarded vacuum cleaner-hose and painted reddish might be taking things a little far.

But such is the level to which I have been reduced, wearing a dark-coloured boa and flapping about in snorkeling flippers in my back yard, competing in avian psychology with a savage blackbird which has been terrorising the neighbourhood for the past two weeks.

It started innocently enough with Herself and myself "Oooh"-ing and "Aaah"-ing at the lovely trills and warbles from last year's incumbent in the blackbird territory which appears to extend from the bottom of our road -- three or four back gardens in length -- to the top -- maybe another ten or twelve gardens' worth in the other direction. Last year's cock of the walk was a handsome chappy that battled it out in song with his near neighbours.

This year a new pretender has muscled in. And it isn't only other blackbirds which are considered enemies and intruders.

I thought the cats would naturally be a cause of the incessant "Shreep! Shreep! Shreep!" bird alarm calls, but then I realised the cats were inside the house and the only one around was me, minding my own business in a white, plastic garden chair in the rare patch of sunlight.

"Shreep! Shreep! Shreep! Shreep! Shreep!" the bugger says. And not only that: he flies up to the roof of the house in his Shreeping, then down to the wall, then onto the shed roof. On the shed, he ruffs up his tail feathers and makes a mock charge at me, holding his wings up suddenly to make a threatening flurry.

"That only works on other blackbirds, stupid," I said to him. But he kept right on Shreeping. It was getting on my nerves, setting my broken teeth on the last of their edges.

At one point, our tabby cat arrived outside to survey the scene. She watched him go from shed to house to wall to shed to house to wall again. The evil little puss waited until he had gone out of sight then nonchalantly placed herself in ambush on a piece of junk lying up against the wall.

"Swish!" went her claws as he landed briefly on the uppermost concrete block. He dodged easily. But no. He didn't fly away in fear, as might be expected of a reasonable blackbird. He took up position on top of the shed roof and added a "Chuck! Chuck!" to the "Shreep! Shreep! Shreep!" for a while.

The cats are bemused. His strategy is working, because they have generally made it known that they are less comfortable in the back garden during the day than before. Myself, I tend to stay indoors and close the double-glazed windows so I can't hear him. When he doesn't have me to bully, he Shreeps at wood pigeons and women hanging washing.

I have heard him from inside our kitchen and walked boldly outside clapping my hands loudly. This has some effect -- maybe because it has an auditory component that the little fecker understands -- because he ducks over the perimeter into another garden out of reach and "Shreeps!" at me from a safe distance. But it's only a temporary respite. I need to show him who the boss is.

So in the end I find myself in the black boa and the flippers, clutching a giant fake worm. If he wants to be top of the pecking order around here he's in for a disappointment. I can strut better than him, and catch bigger worms, and flap bigger wings. Just watch me, little birdy!

Herself has gone to watch the television news.

She says she's not answering the door to any more policemen.

Water, the village pump and progress

I was in Edmondstown last week on business and took a few minutes to reacquaint myself with the Owendoher river, still in its relatively wild state before it enters the concrete viaduct by the school.

This picture was taken at the bend by Mrs Kavanagh's old cottage, where a branch of it disappears in a tunnel under the Edmondstown Road to re-emerge on the western side by Rathfarnham Golf Course. The entrance to the "Kilmashogue Cemetery" passes over it.

Owendoher is the anglicised version of the Irish, Abhainn Dór, or River of Gold, which as you can possibly make out from the picture, describes the golden sand and gravel in its streambed.

"You wouldn't drink from a well these days," Mary Keating said in the staff restaurant a few days ago. "All the cows and everything now..."

Carmel disagreed with her.

"Sure the spring water bubbles up and drives out anything."

I was surprised to find a picture of a village pump which is almost identical to the one that used to be in Edmondstown before the worry about nitrates and ecoli and the rest made the Council take it away and connect a smaller pump into the water main. It was described on the Internet as a "19th-Century Village Water Pump" and was for sale on a U.K. garden antiques site along with other relics of our shared histories. In the picture (right) you can see the hook on the nozzle on which a bucket would be hung. Our pump differed in that a hole had been made in the hook such that it made a water fountain for drinking from if the main spout was blocked up by the heel of your hand.

The pump only failed once as far as I can remember. In the 1970s a summer drought made water very scarce, and the pump went dry for a time. We were forced to rely on the spring well at my grandmother's, which never seemed to fail. Even then, I think my mother was becoming concerned about pollutants, and the open-topped well with its stream that bubbled up out of the bank wasn't her natural choice for drinking water. The houses in the area tended to rely on dry toilets or septic tanks which could easily percolate into the waters.

Our national pastime of littering extends to waters as well, of course. As far back as the 1930s, my father slashed the sole of his foot in the Owendoher when paddling. The culprit was a broken bottle.

Some weeks back a customer rang me to complain that someone had emptied the contents of a septic tank into the Owendoher. Being biased by my own childhood playing in its waters, I was horrified at the notion, but colleagues who work in the area of water pollution said it was very common. I suppose the incident was probably a mark of our "development" since the 1930s. A rare broken bottle once containing a ha'penny's worth of pop is now replaced with a frequent tankful of cess sucked up at a million-euro bungalow by a cowboy too busy to cross the city traffic to dispose of it properly. How far we've come since the village pump.

Barbeque and beer - must be a sunny day in Dublin

Yep, it must be a sunny day in Dublin because I am as full as a fat girl's socks on barbequed food, belching gassy lager fumes, and possibly suffering third degree sunburn.

Long weekends don't come very often, we're told. Neither do ones which happen to co-incide with a blue sky unaccompanied by frost. But the stars were right and every house up and down the road is empty except for the back gardens which are now inhabited by lobser-looking people dining on the lawn or patio or muddy puddle.

In keeping with tradition, any doctor's surgery which opens on the Bank Holiday Monday shall be full to bursting with the food-or alcohol poisoned, the sun-struck and those who have gone mildly insane from the lack of Sunday-before-back-to-work Monday stress. I shall not be one of them, I hope.

Image from www.allposters.com

Then, just when all seems lost....

...it becomes the season once again for this!

"I think I will go find a quiet, deep part of the river....

"On the other hand, I could have an ice-cream first.

"Just a little one."