WE ARE SITTING watching raindrops dribble down windows from the comfort of the Sheraton Hotel on Fota Island in Cork. Well, I am watching the rain. He is reading the oxymoronic-sounding A Contented House With Twinsby Gina Ford and taking notes with one of those old school pens that allows you to write in a few different colours. "You can still get 'em," he says without looking up when I remark on his retro pen choice.
He’s got an impenetrable colour code going on but I think I might have cracked it. The blindingly obvious stuff gets written down in blue, the slightly surprising in green, and the really important/shocking revelations are jotted down in red. (“Don’t make any eye contact or talk to them at the 10pm feed. If it’s time for a feed, wake them up even if they are dead to the world.” The kind of thing, basically, that moved one correspondent to e-mail me the other week, saying simply, “Gina Ford is evil”.)
Overnight he has gone from being vaguely interested in what I like to call our imminent lifestyle recalibration to hogging The Book and talking about “the nursery” as though we are shortly going to be living in a JM Barrie novel with Tinkerbell messing the place up with fairy dust and an overgrown St Bernard called Nana ambling about the attic.
He’s all, “What colour do you think we should paint the nursery? How will we know the nursery isn’t too hot for them?” To which I can only respond, “It’s far from a nursery either of us was reared”, forcing a compromise which means we now call it The Bedroom With The
Moses Baskets In. I can’t yet bring myself to say “the babies’ bedroom”, on account of chickens and hatching and all that jazz.
We are down at the Sheraton for a spot of pampering, a chance to do some things we are led to believe we will never be able to do again on a regular basis, at least not until 2027. Top of the list is Spend The Entire Day In Bed, which we do on the Saturday except for me venturing downstairs to the spa in a robe and slippers, which doesn’t really count as leaving the bed especially when you still have breakfast-in-bed croissant crumbs decorating your chin.
I’m booked in for something called a “Mamma Mio Smoothie”, which is not a healthful drink but a lovely beauty treatment (unfortunately, I cannot reveal too much about it because I was asleep for most of it). The gentle therapist moves my, ahem, gently snoring frame from my right side to my left side, all the while slathering on sweet-smelling potions and breaking down into manageable pebbles the large piece of granite that has taken up residence in my lower back in recent weeks.
Then it is back to bed to sleep off number two on our list which had happened the previous night in the hotel’s Cove Restaurant: Have A Civilised Dinner with Adult Conversation. Chablis and oyster soup. Foie Gras and smoked eel terrine. Osso Bucco of venison, if you wouldn’t be minding, finished off with white chocolate and rhubarb parfait. It’s all accompanied by lots of chat about estate agents, football, Xbox games and covetable lipsticks of a shade that might be favoured by ladies of the night. There is some baby talk of course, both pro-Gina and anti-Gina to keep it balanced, and a little bit of recession chat naturally, but it’s mostly stuffing one’s face with gourmet treats. I even – call the pregnancy police – sip some wine.
There follows the day in bed while I snooze, in between fielding questions such as “so, exactly how many nursing bras do you have?” which leads me to conclude that I definitely liked him better when he was just pretending to be interested in our imminent lifestyle recalibration. By early evening, we venture out in the rain to tackle number three on the list, which is Eat At My Favourite Restaurant in Ireland and Possibly the World.
How do I love thee Café Paradiso? Let me count the ways. Your unassuming decor that allows the sophistication, innovation and sheer deliciousness of the food speak for itself. The things you can do with a creamy cider sauce and a handful of wild mushrooms. The way you layer turnip and Portobello mushrooms together in a red wine sauce making the much-maligned turnip taste like the most exotic and delicate tasting thing ever to be brought out of a kitchen. Your elderflower cordial. Your DIY dessert made up of cookies, a shot of espresso, ditto Frangelico and perfect vanilla ice cream. It’s as good as I remember and even the thought that it might be many years before I eat a beetroot tart with Bluebell Falls goats’ cheese like that one again, can’t spoil the sensation.
A successful weekend, so. A weekend of last times. The last time being on a plane where I just have to worry about my own fear of turbulence instead of calming the fears of two little people, the last time we’ll sit in companiable couply silence watching raindrops race down the window, the last time we’ll snuggle in a hotel bed without wondering what they are up to back home or in the travel cot. All those last times before all those first times come rushing towards us like a rollercoaster with no emergency brake. And I cannot wait.
