Herself is taking some parental leave this summer: which has provoked a universal you-lucky-thing reaction from colleagues and friends. This overlooks some key facts, particularly their assumption that Herself will be able to knock off the day job, go home and put her feet up for six weeks. Herself has never put her feet up. Most of the time, Herself’s feet never touch the ground, she rushes around so much.
It’s like these people have never actually met her.
Those of us who live with her have taken a more realistic view. Not that taking parental leave isn’t marvellous; it’s just that we all accept that the adjustment might be difficult. Herself likes to be doing things; and she likes to know well in advance where and when this thing-doing will take place.
In fairness, she knows it too. She needs structure, and so in the run-up to the start of the break she constructed lots of lists of various activities she and Daughter Number Four will engage in, along with a shorter list of things she wants to achieve for herself. One of them may involve buying a bicycle.
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And on top of all that, there will be cooking and cleaning. As she’s pointed out to me several times already, I’ll be getting some major Tradwife action between now and the start of September. As an ideologically supportive husband, I am of course horrified by this, and plan to look suitably pained at least a couple of times a week when she plonks a delicious dinner in front of me every evening. (Not too pained though: she is a rather good cook.)
So, understandably, there was a certain itchiness around the house during the first weekend. Nothing too severe. Herself was keeping busy, but when she ran out of things to be busy about, she suggested we all do something: specifically, the Viking Splash Tour.
Just in case you’re not aware of it, the Splash Tour is a familiar sight in Dublin. They use second World War-era amphibious trucks known as Dukws – they are actually 80 years old – to ferry tourists around the city, culminating with the vehicle entering the water and doing a circuit of the Grand Canal Basin. During the tour, everyone has to wear plastic Viking hats and shout at people on the street.
No. Me neither.
There’s a pretty clear reason why they are called tourist attractions: because they are for tourists, for out-of-towners. People who live in Waterford or Cork or Dublin largely don’t need to go on bus tours around the places they live in to learn facts that they know already.
But it was the first weekend of the parental leave. Herself was a little vulnerable, so I opted to focus on her emotional needs. And perhaps a little on all those delicious dinners. I booked the tickets.
It was exactly what I expected, but also not. Our tour guide was charming and mischievous, and fired out various facts about Dublin interspersed with unashamedly chronic Dad-jokes. The passengers lapped it up. Dublin was presented as a place of enormous, sometimes gruesome history, but worn lightly.
But most striking was when we’d pause at a traffic light and the tour guide would lean out of the vehicle to talk to people on the pavement. He’d ask them questions and tease them. Some of the Americans around me lightly gasped when he first did this. In their country, this kind of thing might get you shot.
Sitting there in my made-in-China plastic Viking hat, driving around streets I’ve traversed a million times before, I started to get a sense of how my fellow tourists were seeing Ireland; and how it’s distinctly different from anywhere else. That’s all easy to miss when you live here. Day two of the parental leave and we’d already learned something new. I’m looking forward to the rest of it.