third bonniest baby in killala

“Who’s judging this year?” I had been interrodgating my fellow mums in the village shop about the Bonny Baby Comp at our local festival. “Outsiders,” was the word on the street. Damn - there was no political angle to exploit, no vicars to charm, no counsellors to lobby. Tommo’s wide reputation as a charming flirt among the customers of Lucy B’s hair salon, his sojourns being baby-sat behind the till as I whizzed round Centra would count for nothing. It was all about how he performed on the day.
I got to the festival early so we were there for hours before the competition started, and a shower of rain put pay to Tommo’s crawling explorations . By the time the judges got to him my gorgeous baby was as angsty as a bag of rats and, despite my best efforts, covered in snot and dribble and expensive Ella’s Organics Carrot and Sweet Potato mash . He tried to launch himself off my lap, wriggling himself out of his posh christening jeans onto the slippery marquee floor. Then he caught sight of a lifesize Barney, eyed it suspiciously for a few seconds, before howling. A giant Minnie Mouse tried to console him, and he went mad altogether.
“He’s normally very good humoured,” I said to the judges. “He’s tired – you know?” Then in a pathetic attempt to win favour I added; “We got here too early. He’s been sitting in the buggy since twelve.” All around clean, beautifully turned-out babies giggled, and gurgled adorably.
“Let’s go,” I said to Niall as we waited for the judges decision,“He’s not got a chance. There’s at least three bonnets in there. Maybe I should have got him a bonnet?”
“Hang on,” he said, “lets give it another half an hour.”
We stood and looked down at the pitch as the village kids slid around their primary coloured inflated wonderland in the school grounds. Friend and neighbours drifted about drinking tea, and doling out change to red faced running offspring for their umpteeth bag of popcorn and bars.
The school grounds are sheltered at the back by little green hills. The sun was shining and I said to Niall; “This is great isn’t it? This life – our set-up here?”
“Yeah,” he said non-committedly. ‘No complaints’ was the sub-text. We did the right thing moving here.
I had holidayed from London in this area every year as a child – hooking up with my Ballina gang of friends, going to discos in Ballina Rugby Club, swimming in the old Downhill pool, taking the bus out to Enniscrone. Although I have been living in Ireland for twenty years now, seven of them full time in Mayo, being here in the Summer months still brings me back to that feeling of holiday excitement I had as a child. The soft rain on an overall sunny day, the smell of burning turf reminds me of a time when we had no money, but still managed to get out at the weekends and have a bit of craic.
Tommo came third in his category. No overall place, but there’s next year – and I’ll be ready then. I’ll have him worn out and fed before we arrive- oh, and if the judges are reading this? Third bonniest baby in Killala? I don’t think so!

www.katekerrigan.ie

working too hard....

....and not getting the time to blog. Niall has been crippled with a bad back all week - in bed drugged up the eyeballs smoking fags and ringing down for cups of tea. Getting me back for the meals on wheels service I made him give me when I came home after my c-section last august; ("Where's my pudding?")
Had a good run at the new novel today. The sequel to Ellis Island - I've been fecking about with it for the best part of a year now - but hoping I cracked something today.
Promise to try and keep more up to date with the blog. Column in Femail section of Irish Daily Mail tomorrow - if you can bear to read anything more about my bloody boring life!

The TV Bookclub reviewed Ellis Island this week. THANK GOD THAT"S OVER. I held it together until about an hour before the show on Sunday - then fell apart. Mercifully, they seemed to like it - so now my life can get back to the normal business of writing. Putting the finishing touches to my memoir about our family's past traumatic year - then on with the sequel to Ellis Island - working title City of Hope.
If I am slow to blog it is because I am LOCKED in my mothers shed writing for the next six months.
Laid back life of a writer eh? Who would have thought that such a sit-down job could produce so much bloody adrenelin!

Since when did the human condition become a disease? Because it seems to me that low level hypochondria is all pervasive in our society. I think it’s because our expectations of life are too high. We expect that we should feel vital, and happy and full of energy and fun all the time, and when we don’t we think there is something ‘wrong’. I have seen too many people go half out of their minds with grief because they had a chest infection – and then take to the bed with depression because of the effects of the anti-biotics. I think I would have preferred it in the old days when people gave birth in fields and dropped dead from consumption cutting turf. Getting on with the business of keeping onseself alive until – BAM – time’s up. Imagine a world before you asked people “How are you” and they actually told you? The freedom of not having to listen to your whinging friend (we all have one) regaling you with the boring minutae of her daily ups and downs. The days when you didn’t have to worry about the shape of your thighs because (a) they were like moulded steel from walking backwards and forwards to the well and (b) nobody, probably now even your husband, ever got to see them. We are so bloody precious about ourselves these days. Going to homeopaths and spending twenty euro on 2ml of bottled water for some imagined ailment. “Stress” is what most of it seems to come down to. And yet, what really have most of us got to be stressed about? Nothing. Stress is a useless modern invention – more painful that the Brazilian wax and more pointless than the hostess trolley. People who are starving or dying don’t get stressed – they get sad. Perhaps we get stressed to stop ourselves feeling guilty about all the real sadness in the world. Because, after all, you might internalise other people sadness and that can lead to chest infections! Or depression. Another bandied about term. Depression is a misunderstood ailment – and that is partly because it has become so commonly used to describe how one feels when one is not on top of the world. For that reason, many ‘real’ depressives remain undiagnosed because they are afraid that their very real symptoms – lethargy, feelings of hopelessness, suicidal thoughts etc. – are just them being self-indulgent. The reason for this is because so many of us are, now, self-indulgent about our feelings. We can’t cope with the stress of work, or world poverty, or not having been hugged enough as a child, so we get ‘depressed’. Not depressed enough to take medication, or book ourselves in for residential care, or kill ourselves (as friends of mine with real depression have done) but depressed enough to call is ‘depression’ and garner sympathy and comfort from indulgent friends and family. I just think this kind of emotional – and physical - hypochondria somehow takes from those people who are truly suffering. Selfish miserable attention seekers who used to be told to ‘get on with it’ are now able to take centre stage in our sympathetic, permissive society. Where does the line betweeen genuine hardship and indulgent neurosis end? If there is one thing in my life I would like to change it is my neurotic nature. My tendancy to get het up and hysterical over problems which do not exist. Panicking over posting letters, worrying about my pension, stressing over wrinkles and wobbly thighs. Modern malaises which were once the hilarious “does my bum look big in this” obsession of my Bridget Jones generation. But the joke is starting to wear a bit thin.

Memoir finished - sick with nerves.

Finished my memoir On The Gradient Road last week - and am sick with nerves as I have sent it out to my agent and she is reading it at the moment. Or rather - she not been able to get to it yet - I have to keep calling her to check that the silence doesn't mean that she is sitting in her office with her head in her hands going "this is crap - HOW am I going to tell her." This is the very worst thing about writing - waiting for the first bit of feedback. I never mind editing, or re-writing - or rather over the years I have become immune to it through experience- it is just the initial read by my agent that cripples me with nerves. She is the best agent in Ireland, and one of the best in the world - but what makes her special is the commitment and integrity with which she approaches her work. If she likes it - or rather if she LOVES it - she will sell it - regardless of how "commercial" or not it is. So her early opinion is the make or break for everything I write. She likes thing that are written from the heart, and this book is a memoir - heart? Don;t be talking! I plumbed the very depths of my psyche, heart, soul -as some eminent writer (whose name got robbed with Tom's birth along with all sorts of miscellaneous information that might suggest I have an actual brain in my head) said "I opened a vein and wrote it drop by drop."

On The Gradient Road is a memoir of the past year of my life. Those of you who know me already know that 2009 was a mad intense time for me and my family - Niall and I both lost our only brothers - then his father died in January, with baby Tom being born into the middle of it. The book is the most intensely personal thing I have ever written. It was written as therapy because as a writer I make sense of my life through words on a page, and I found myself unable to move forward with my new novel until I had got all the emotional confusion and upheaval of the last year out of my system. I have no idea if it is any good or not - certainly if it is compelling enough to be published. As my sister Claire says "That's enough about me - let's talk some more about ME." Weird to write a book entirely about oneself and expect people to be interested (hello? I do that in my Irish Mail column every thursday - and here!)
Anyway - in the meantime I am paralysed with nerves, sitting here in my living room, pottering through Facebook, and blogging and waiting - oh and pulling baby Tom away from climbing up on the fire grate which seems to be the only thing in the house that interests him at the moment.
Waiting.
Will keep you posted.

the complaints department

TRIBUNE: THE COMPLAINTS DEPARTMENT

“The complaints department is closed” is a phrase so over-used in our house that our son has started to use it as a retort. “Come on and eat your lovely dinner?” I plead. “The ‘COMPLAINTS department is CLOSED!” he says. I expect he’ll get the hang of ‘Eff off” like a normal eight year old anyday now.
Perhaps it because I am an ungracious reciever of complaints that I’m not a great complainer myself. I am a mutterer and so is my husband. We mutter over our lousy meals and our bad service, we sigh loudly in supermarket queues and splutter in quiet incredulity to ourselves over unavailable sundries. But actually forming our mouths around a public cricitism – well that’s just taking things a step to far. “Not worth it!” is the defence we non-complainers use and yet it is, usually, worth complaining. I know this because I have two English friends who are both magnificent complainers. One is mistress of the stiff letter to supermarkets in particular; “Imagine my disappointment when I drove an hour out of my way to your North London “Superstore” which purports to stock “everything” and discovered that there was no marscapone cheese. Not so “super” now eh?” For a number of years she managed to knock 30 per cent off her food bills by simply outwitting this well known superstore for not stocking culinary essentials such as anchovy paste and rocket pesto. The other friend goes more for the brute force of a hystrionic housewife. In Britain there are people trained to deal with people like her. Her proudest moment was in a well known chain where her failure to procure two jumbo packs of own-brand frozen cocktail sausages for an imminent barbeque send her into a furious frenzy drawing a well-mannered young man fresh from a Customer Services management course from out back. He foolishly suggested that she might buy fresh cocktail sausages.“Do I look as if I am MADE of money?” she shouted at him waving her brand new Nissan Jeep car keys gripped in fists made of expensively french manicured nails at him. ‘And,” not content to leave it at that she added, “You have a very poor selection of shortbreads!” Not ‘no shortbreads’, you understand, but a ‘poor selection’. That sort of detail seperates the men from the boys in the world of customer complaints.
This friend moved from London to Mayo a year ago and staff in her local supermarket have never seen her like. One day their customer services man tried to placate her over a “sub standard” bouquet with some free carnations. “Carnations!” she cried “Are you trying to insult me?” He returned with two bunchs of top-of-the-range lilies and was rewarded with the petulant shrug of a bad girlfriend.
Until relatively recently the complaining Brit was a rare abomination but my friend is spear heading something of a revolution. The area in which she lives is positively crawling with disillussioned English people who can’t afford to live in Surrey and have moved to Mayo instead. They complain about the weather and the smell of sileage and the fact that there is no Marks&Spencers – all of which is very, very annoying. But they also complain about the inflated price of things and there being no marscapone cheese and bad service. They ask for ‘skinny latte’s’ in café’s which are still struggling to come to terms with the concept of the cappuccino. And because they are so good at complaining it means the nice local people don’t have to. The other day I noticed my local café advertising chi-chi breakfast options. There is every possibilility that a Mayo café owner decided there was a market for organic porridge with fresh-fruit compote all by himself – but I like to think there is some repeatedly complaining Brit maurauding through Connaught towns demanding low-cal options for us all. Re-balancing the scales of history – one complaint at a time.

saturday morning

Pancakes, piano lessons, Leo's choice of ghastly american TV kids comedy (Wizards of Waverly place.) Sun is bouncing off the sea, and thinking how powerful wriggler Tom is going to cope at his christening tomorrow (visions of him launching himself out of Father Paddy's arms into the font). Why do the days start with such a feeling of contentment then disintegrate into stress by lunchtime. Sometimes it's worth fostering the objective view of my life I have in the early mornings, before the engagement of busy-ness and responsibility kicks in and snatches my gratitude.