LETTERS TO MY CHILDREN- 16th September 1992

Dear Jack & Clare,

I was sitting in my office mentally composing a shatteringly elegant and witty opening to this letter when the heavens erupted with one of the loudest thunderclaps I can recall ever hearing. It was followed toute suite by every car alarm in Northumberland Road shrieking in protest at being roused from their usual passive vigilance.

It was good fun though, watching young exec's scurrying out to their cars, hopping from one foot to the other in the downpour while they tried to locate the appropriate key, insert it and turn off their petulant possessions. Despite the fact that they were drowned by this time, they would sprint back to their offices in the faint hope of preserving some piece of apparel (the underside of their wristwatch perhaps?) from the oppressive sheets of water falling on them.

One poor soul had the galling experience, when he turned for the sprint back to the dry haven of his office, of watching a female colleague languidly extend her arm out a window and shut off her alarm by remote control. From a distance it looked like a sympathetic smile, or was she........................ ? Surely not.

I met an interesting pair during my lunchbreak at Sandymount Strand today. With the characteristic abruptness of the Summer version of the Irish weather front, the thunderous gloom disappeared and I took myself off to Sandymount Strand car park to enjoy a couple of sun soaked sandwiches. An elderly gentleman and a young lad of eighteen or so pulled up beside me and started to eat their lunch, staring fixedly out to sea. Occasionally, well - about every ten minutes or so, I would hear a brief phrase uttered by one, never answered by more than a monosyllable from the other.

"Are they workmates?" I pondered. "Friends, acquaintances, or related to each other, as say brothers, uncle and nephew or father and son?" On a subsequent visit I discovered that the last category applied. They were a father and son who worked together, lived in the one house and lunched together.

"We don't see that much of each other really" claimed the son, whose name was Padraig. "Only one person can work on any one piece at a time, so we don't really have any contact during working hours." They were engravers. "We live on different floors of the house. Me Ma is dead and Ivor, that's me Da, has his pals and I have mine. He eats at a friend's house all the time, neither of us would touch a breakfast, so lunch is the only time we spend together. It's kind of a tradition at this stage.

I asked if they talked much and did they always go to Sandymount for lunch? "On the talking front, I'd have to say not really a lot, no, and if we found ourselves saying a lot to each other about something, then we'd probably be having a row. Mind you, we don't row often," Padraig added.

"We went to Monkstown once, just after I started working with Ivor," he recalled. "It was my idea. I thought it would be nice for a change. But Ivor didn't like it, so we came back here."
I left him then, strolling along in the September sun on his own (apparently Ivor doesn't like going for walks either. "Can't see the point in them"), dreaming of the exotic climes of Monkstown's sea front car park.

All the best,

Dad