Summertime and living is easy until your home gets in the way
FOR every silver lining there is a cloud, is the negativistic inversion of the positive aphorism. Ok, let’s start again – in lazyman’s. What I’m getting at is, the weather has been great. Real summer weather. Barbecues are hopping with pig and cow meat and everyone, well almost everyone is in good form.
While trying to describe the seasons to The Little Fella on May 1st, I declared, exuberantly, in a lilting voice full of forced optimism, that it was indeed summer.
‘In real life,’ he intoned from the viewpoint of his babyseat.
The four-year-old was nonplussed by the grey clouds above, but now, at last I can explain using great waving and pointy uppy motions, that there is such a thing as summer.
Look! That yellow disc in the sky proves it. The summers of my youth seemed to stretch on forever, like the beach we always visited in Kerry.
It was thus for most people my age. We struck the summer jackpot in the Eighties.
These days farmers are contending with nine month winters, one farm rep declared at a meeting called Crisis in Farming that I attended in my capacities as a journalist on Thursday night. (Being a townie most of what I listened to was new to me!)
The meeting, which was ironically a farmerless zone as they were too busy working, heard that wet weather is the future, wet and warm, so our gardens are going to become tropical eco systems,
So back to the clouds. The absence of same has shone a light, The light you could say, on the jungle that is my inherited garden. Oh yes, once this fine l-shaped beauty could have been a Bloom contender, today it would be more befitting in a horror movie than the Chelsea Show.
The reason I determined, on Saturday, following a lengthy spell of doing very little at all, is that I suffer from a surprisingly common condition called Chronic Laziness or Claziness (I’m too lazy to come up with a better medical term).
Such is the debilitating power of this hitherto unrecorded condition, that it prevents its sufferers from doing much at all. Symptoms include, but are not limited to: Inability to be bothered cleaning in awkward places around the house.
This is not due to some belief that putting one’s hand in a tight, out of view spot will see it bitten off by some rabid animal, no, it’s just chronic laziness.
Cleaning the guttering after 11 a.m.
This has to do with the celestial effect the sun and moon have on the male of the species post 11 am. Painting the fence after 6 p.m.
This has to do with digestive reasons and the way physical exercise will exacerbate Claziness.
As the sun beat down ferociously (and most welcomingly) last week, right up to yesterday, Irish men, long time sufferers one and all, let out a collective groan, One neighbour, paintbrush in hand, grumbled: ‘There’s no end to it. If you own a house there really isn’t, I mean we turned out to vote last week, now we have to make our house, gates, gardens and hedges presentable. I’m going to buy an apartment and there’ll be none of this maintenance. Just not fair. Harrumph!’
I feel his pain. The arrival of guests to chateau Looby this weekend means I will have to trade the sofa and Rolland Garros for the lawnmower and the gardening gloves, but who’s complaining.
Now back to the sun lounger!