May 2021…I’m looking at the date but it means nothing to me. Where did Christmas go? and all of the months in between ?!!Time has just passed with very little distinction between months. I know Easter was recent. It was just another day but with chocolate. Lots of it. I’m not a chocoholic but I’m not a saint either so if the tinfoil wrapper comes off a chocolate bunny, it isn’t going back on. It’s all getting eaten, preferably with a hot cuppa tea for melty dunking. I could’ve just put all of the chocolate in the bin but an upbringing of never throwing food out because of all the starving people in the world prevented me from going there, so instead I had the genius idea of melting all the bunnies down, pouring them into ice-cube moulds and making them into little chocolates instead. In reality this meant two things; (1)I was incredibly bored. (2)I ate all the chocolate anyway, just in instalments and a different shape.
So here we are in May and I only know it is because there are pretty Cherry Blossoms everywhere but without the anticipation of a summer holiday to look forward to. I’m in week 18 of enforced idleness, but when Uncle Tony finally decides its safe to have your hair done again, I won’t see the light of day for months so any travel may be out of reach for a while yet certainly not abroad until it’s safe. For years I was slightly put off domestic travel by the memories of eight of us being wedged in car every year for a pre-motorway 5-hour trip to west Cork.
On one occasion, my mother threw caution to the wind and brought my brothers friend along as well, so that made nine of us. It was also before people carriers, seatbelts in the back and apparently any kind of health and safety considerations. We were all shoe-horned into a Renault that overheated regularly, and bumped all the way to Cork with the bottom of car almost scraping the road from the weight of us all, but spite of the psychological damage inflicted on me I might give it another go.
Preliminary research is telling me that a Chi-Chi Air BnB in Dingle for a few nights will cost a mere €5000, (A luxury week in Portugal!) but we can shop around and we could rent bikes, and it might be fun. We rented bikes in Portugal before, the rest of the family got nice mountain bikes and I got a High Nelly (not by choice) that I couldn’t control resulting in a verbal altercation between me and a local young man who yelled at me in Portuguese., which I didn’t understand, but I yelled back with equal passion in English, which judging by his shocked face, he did understand, but hey! I’m not put off, and If cycling around greenways is all that’s on offer this year, I’m up for it.