This house hunt (for alpacas) is quite the conundrum

How I beat phobia and made this crisis more bearable

THIS is my first day back after a week off, a week in which I got to do about half the things I intended to, largely because I’m looking at a whole summer stretching in front of me with varying degrees of lockdown in place, and that means lots of spare time.

One job I did manage to complete was clearing out the junk from the shed, and assigning everything that remained to its forever home. During the clearout, I found a small white polar bear, and therein lies a tale.

I used to be creeped out by the bear in the fridge on the Birds Eye ad who talked to the woman when she opened the door – every time I heard him say, ‘Hi, Fiona’, as voiced by American actor Willem Dafoe, my flesh crawled.

My late mother knew it gave me the heebie-jeebies, so you might imagine she would be sympathetic to my phobia, yeah?

Fat chance. One weekend when she was here, she brought a replica bear and, when I was out of the room, put it in the fridge. We howled laughing, of course, but when she went home, the bear went to the shed. I posted a photo of it on Twitter and was soon getting grief because, apparently, I’m cruel to leave a bear, a toy bear, all alone in the dark and cold.

To appease my critics, I brought him in, sat him on an armchair, wrapped him in a little blanket, gave him the TV remote and tucked a miniature bottle of brandy under his arm.

A week later, he’s still there. Amusingly, I’ve become rather fond of having him as company. Mammies, I think, know us better than we know ourselves, and five years after she died, she’s still making me laugh and still offering comfort in the simplest way imaginable, by giving me something to cuddle!

I’M a shocking magpie when I stay in hotels – I always nick the toiletries. My justification was always that I leave them out for family and friends to use when they’re staying over, and sometimes bring them away myself when I know the hotel I’ll be staying in isn’t exactly posh.

That said, I had literally dozens of shampoos, conditioners, shaving kits, sleep masks, soaps and so on, so I made up two big bags and dropped them in to the local direct provision centre in Courtown. If you have loads of them too, why not bag them and do the same, or give them to homeless shelters or women’s refuges, rather than leaving them sitting in a drawer?

THE way things are going, obesity will get me before any virus. Since we last spoke, I’ve cooked roast chicken and colcannon; scallop and spinach pizza with homemade dough; scallops fried in panko breadcrumb; homemade wholemeal crepe with mushrooms, bacon, asparagus tips, crème fraîche, apple brandy and chives; a proper club sandwich; prawns with wholewheat fusilli in a vodka cream sauce (vodka, passata, fresh cream, onion, garlic, balsamic and chilli flakes); and even a proper apple martini, made on Sunday night to fool myself into think I was having one last drink in the hotel before the imaginary transfer to an imaginary airport for an imaginary flight home.

So what did I enjoy most? A southern fried chicken and chips snackbox from Mano’s, my local takeaway in Riverchapel. I can’t tell you how nice it was to let someone else do the cooking for a change!