As darkness draws in, the ghost ship of long-ago Sundays looms on the horizon.
They were grey Sundays when the swimming pool shut except for adult baptisms and even the swings were chained up.
Fred and Ginger tip-tapped across the screen of our old black and white TV... she did it backwards in a silk dress, a boa, high heels and a flashlight smile that said it was easy.
The encore was a circle of swimmers – all holding hands and spread out in the water like a huge dahlia, lying flat in the pool, flipping their legs up heavenwards.
Sunday afternoons were the slump of the week, they were the days when you did your homework because boredom made sums exciting.
“Why did we read so much?” I asked my best friend. “All we did was devour books.”
I’d hide behind the sofa and read the forbidden books, Behan’s Borstal Boy or Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. We went through phases of authors – the Walter Macken phase was the best.
“There was nothing else to do on wet Sundays,” said my friend. “No PlayStation, no computers, what else was there?”
Read more:
Nuala McCann: The comfort of warm fires and old friends
Nuala McCann: Covid showed I married a saint and gave birth to another
Nuala McCann: The camino, said my brother, will teach you. It sure did
Even homework scratched the itch; a hand hiding one half of a vocabulary list, French words chanted softly; the satisfaction of a balanced equation, the raw beauty of a truncated spur.
On those long ago Sundays, our young spurs had been truncated – grey outdoors, black and white films indoors; the world faded to monochrome.
Trust my mother to believe in home education.
On Sundays, everyone was told to find a pencil and paper and write down the 32 counties of Ireland. Then everyone was asked to recite the rivers of Ireland. I can still do it in my sleep.
The woman was only warming up. She pulled out the huge box of Reader’s Digests bought as a bargain lot at a local auction. They smelled of dust and damp – of years lingering long in an attic or a garage.
Sometimes I snuck a few of them behind the sofa. Who could forget those first person stories: “I am Joe’s heart”, or “I am Jane’s right ovary”. I love human biology.
The Reader’s Digests also gifted a disturbing phobia about being buried alive. Someone was kidnapped and held underground. There have been coffins found with scratch marks inside the lid… I’m for cremation.
On those long-ago Sundays, ma flicked to the Digest’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” – a quiz on words. Off you go, she’d say, anyone who scores 20 gets a prize.
Did she increase our word power? Probably yes. But perhaps what she did more was instil a love of words. So that now, when I fall down that rabbit hole called Twitter or X, strange words have a magnetic pull.
Pianet is an old word for a magpie thought to come from the glitter of bling and oddments the bird brings to the nest – a pie filling of treasures… a pianet.
Emacity is the desire to buy things. We live in a world full of emacity.
But it is the Scottish word croochie-poochies that makes me smile. It means a vague but uncomfortable feeling of restlessness. Retirement has gifted me the croochie-poochies… I’m finding it hard to relax.
Susie Dent, the Countdown queen, is a lover of words. She loves beautiful words like thunderplump… a sudden downpour of fat raindrops that drench you to the skin. Or elf-locked, an old word that suggests how elves come out at night and play havoc with your hair. She also believes in respairing – the opposite of despair, the offer of hope.
On dull Sundays, we light the fire, cook, read and respair… we dream of beyond the greyness to brighter days.
