THIS MAN’S LIFE
NURSE, the screens! I am insane, apparently. (This is not because my favourite Christmas movie is Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut rather than Miracle on 34th Street or even Meet Me
in St Louis.) This is because I’m the living embodiment of the definition of insanity.
I do the same things over and over and keep expecting different results. I am talking about trying to get my kids to bed and it is turning into a disaster.
It is the same every evening — a nightly battle of wits and wills. I am the last person my three-anda-half-year-old daughter listens to on these matters. I have tried the usual seasonal warning: Santa’s elves are outside the window watching and you better go to bed quick or else Santa will bring you a sack of coal. (For the record: I might actually have said a sack of poo.)
Emilia seems to believe that for about a second — before she is out of bed again and downstairs looking for a teddy that Emilia just has to have before she can go to sleep.
And once she is downstairs looking for that elusive, nay divisive, teddy, she is soon demanding she needs a glass of water from the fridge lest she expires from extreme thirst. To rub my nose in it, perhaps, she tells me that teddy wants a glass of water too.
And while I go to get a life-saving glass of water from the fridge for my daughter and her thirsty teddy, Emilia has bolted, cackling, to the living room; and before I can put her up for adoption, she has switched on the TV.
My jaw hasn’t had a chance to hit the kitchen floor with shock before Emilia is shouting like an Opposition TD in the Dail in a debate: “Five minutes of Mickey Mouse, Daddy! Five minutes! Just five minutes and then I’ll go to bed.”
Only she won’t. She never does. Five minutes of Mickey Mouse always turns into a demand for five minutes of
Peppa Pig. And so forth and so on. My daughter plays me like a violin every night at the same time. Holding our 10-month-old baby Daniel, my wife Aoife doubtless thinks I am insane but, out of a sense of humanity, chooses not to tell me. We went to see The
Grinch at the cinema last Thursday evening with the kids. Big mistake. Not just because my wife possibly feels there was no need to go a movie about The Grinch when she lives with The Grinch already. That’s for another article.
Emilia wanted to sit on my knee because she thought the Christmashating furry green antihero was scary. She sat on my knee for all of two minutes. Enough time, as it happened, to tell me she wanted a dog like with Max for Christmas. (Please note: The Grinch lives on Mount Crumpit with his little dog Max.) In the end, Emilia spent most of the movie running around the cinema while her brother crawled as fast as he could.
By the end of the movie, Daniel and Emilia (who was hopped up on sweets and ice-cream) had exhausted themselves so comprehensively that getting them to the car took the same effort it took The Grinch and Max to haul the stolen Christmas presents from the heartbroken kids of Whoville back up Mount Crumpit to his grim Grinch gaff. Worse still, by the time we got home neither of the kids had any intention whatsoever going of bed, they were so worn out from The Grinch. So it wasn’t so much tears before bedtime as roaring crying and refusing to go to sleep for an hour. It was 9pm before my wife and I finally got them to close their eyes and go to bed. But not, of course, in their own beds. I was in Emilia’s bed...with Daniel. And my wife was in our bed... with Emilia.
At 5am, Emilia woke up and came in with thirsty Ted and woke up Daniel in her bed. I picked up Daniel and brought him into his mother’s bed and told Emilia to go to sleep. It was like Lanigan’s Ball — with beds. (‘Emilia stepped out, Daniel stepped in again. I stepped out and Emilia stepped in again.’) Threatening Emilia with calling my personal friend Santa on his private line to order her a bag of coal if she didn’t go to sleep this second, she closed her eyes and at 5.15am, peace was restored. Until it wasn’t. At 5.45am before dawn on Black Friday, I thought my poor mind was playing tricks on me when The Grinch was suddenly looming over me. Emilia had turned on a YouTube cartoon of The Grinch on the iPad. “It’s Grinchie, daddy!” In my sleepdeprived state, I thought I was hallucinating. It was like when Alan Bennett writes in The History Boys about “subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.”
****** One of the great Irish actors, Patrick Bergin, is about to release a single for charity. I have beautiful memories of him.
In 2002, in his hotel suite in Budapest, Patrick was alternating between reading me Buddhist poems and singing his songs on the guitar, as we both looked down on the River Danube. It was a surreal night.
Patrick told me he saw his father the week before he went into St James’s Hospital in 1991. Paddy Bergin was 78 when he had a heart attack of some sort. He smoked a packet of Player’s every day of his adult life. His son Patrick wanted him to hit 80. He’d tell him: “Another two years at least, Da.” For once, his father wasn’t listening.
A couple of years before he died, Paddy Bergin knew he had emphysema and called his son into the room: “Do you know what emphysema is?”
His son hesitated. And once you hesitated with Paddy Bergin, you were gone. He jumped in: “Do you know or do you not know?”
“Well, no, I don’t, Da,” admitted Patrick. “I do,” chirped Mr Bergin. “I’ve been looking it up. In the Oxford English Dictionary it says emphysema is ‘shortness of breath’.” His father paused for theatrical effect and looked at young Patrick. “When you think about it, son,” he muses, “isn’t that what everybody dies of in the end?”
Paddy Bergin was a very erudite man who studied to be a priest with the Holy Ghost Fathers in Blackrock. He instilled the spiritual dimension in his family.
Young Patrick Bergin, like his great mate Gabriel Byrne before him, thought about becoming a priest but bottled out.
He loved going to church and looking at how high the ceilings were. He would often wonder why God needed so much space up there.“It was to make young boys like you look up,” the priest told him.