Biking in Baja

The Start: No 22 stands out from the crowd - probably because I focussed the camera on him

 

Husband crosses finish line

 

Portrait of testosterone: Jase, Andrew, Mark

 

Testosterone is sticky up close

 

Andrew: vogue

Parsnip yield of Eritrea

In early December, I went to Montpellier to visit Daire and his family. Daire is the proudest of fathers - all he wants to do is show off Ceara to the world whereas I got the distinct impression poor Jasmin wanted to curl up in a dark room and never see anyone ever again.

 

Both parents are absolutely smitten and extremely conscientious. Dr Spock appears to be as out of fashion as a leg-warmer, and now one must pick ones child up at the first hint of noisiness or risk social rejection. I always thought you let ‘em screech till they fell asleep, so that was the start of my education. The amount of time and effort that goes into a six week old baby was a real eye-opener.

 

Although I was enchanted by my new niece and could spend hours just holding her and watching her scrunch up her little face and blow bubbles, I have to admit it was a relief handing her back to her parents at the end of each day. I was exhausted just watching them.

 

Obviously, the recent and frequent Johnson’s Baby Oil scents, the clench of tiny fingers, and the lines of babygros strung out on washing lines have all made me consider the prospect of motherhood.

 

On the other hand, the squall of little lungs and the malodorous whiff of nappies has made me think about other things entirely – like the parsnip yield in Eritrea and the life-cycle of the fruitfly, for instance

The Joneses

Things have been pretty quiet since the revelries of the holiday season. My obsession with home appliances continues; we recently acquired a coffee making machine which looks like it has more business taking pictures of the surface of Mars than sitting on our kitchen bench spitting out coffee. Husband said:

 

“Isn’t it a bit BIG for a coffee machine?”

 

(I’ve noticed he’s been very preoccupied with size recently.)

 

I am distressed that post-marriage, Andrew still fails to acknowledge the importance of Keeping Up With The Joneses. Not that we know any Joneses, but if we did, our coffee machine would show them what’s what. The fact that it takes up half our kitchen makes our apartment look a bit pathetic, but that’s another matter

Freakily large minced pie

We had a few friends around for Christmas. Being Irish, I over-catered by a factor of roughly twenty-five. We could have comfortably fed a football team along with their wives and mistresses.

 

For a week prior to the event, there was plenty of bulgy-eyed, tongue-clenched concentration applied to almond paste, frosted icing, and pastry the lightness and fluffiness of which defied all laws of physics and human expectation.

 

Unfortunately, I applied a little too much ambition to the minced pie production. Having prepared the mince, I spent hours trying to wrestle flour, castor sugar, butter and eggs into something resembling pastry after which I decided I really couldn’t be arsed twaddling around with pastry cutters and bun-trays. I therefore – sensibly, I felt – decided to fashion a Freakily Large Minced Pie, as opposed to several individual pies.

 

When I proudly presented my Freakily Large Minced Pie, Husband found it almost hilarious enough to merit its own stand-up comedy show. But – “Seriously though, Niamhie” - he decreed that individual minced pies were compulsory for Christmas Day.

 

He got very Hollywood-In-Its-Heyday Movie-Star-ish about it: “But you can’t, Darling, you simply CAN’T. I won’t HEAR of it.”

 

Not to be dissuaded by my argument that there is no difference between a Freakily Large Minced Pie and several small minced pies except, well, the SIZE, Andrew bought some frozen shortcrust pastry that he spent ages pressing ever-so-precisely into bun-cases.

 

[He made a right mess of my kitchen].

 

[What is it about men? All Andrew has to do is step into the kitchen and there are crumbs over every level counter top, evil viscous brown drips adorning every receptacle, and a mountain of crockery quivering in the sink].

 

Unfortunately, he neglected to cook the pastry cases before spooning in the mince (I wasn’t about to suggest pre-cooking, since I was still sulking over his mocking my Freakily Large Minced Pie) so the bottoms were soggy.

 

With a maximum of confidence allied with a minimum knowledge of the operation of an oven, Andrew decided the most effective way of eradicating sogginess was to grill the pie bottoms.

 

I’m struggling to remain objective here, but really: when it comes down to a choice between a slice of Freakily Large Minced Pie and a Freakily Crunchy Minced Pie With Char . . . well, all I’m saying is: I know which one I’d choose.

 

On the day itself, we drank our way through several gallons of mulled wine, crunched down copious amounts of chestnuts, and gnawed our way through a vast Christmas Cake (with real almond paste and shiny white icing, you will note). It was not exactly your traditional Christmas – although in Dubai it never is. The sun shone. John and Andrew smoked hubbly bubbly on the balcony. The minced pies were crunchy.

 

However, we did eat far too much food, and there was a Christmas tree, and presents. So some things were pretty seasonal.

 

I had awful difficulty buying Andrew presents, and being Andrew, he wasn’t dropping many hints. We had a big “What do you want for Christmas?” discussion, and apart from a Ferrari, a property in Monte Carlo and an adjustable steering dampener for his motorbike, Andrew was spectacularly unforthcoming. I tried to acquire the latter on a trip to London since you cannot buy steering dampeners here, but no joy. And knowing Andrew, I’d have got a steering dampener with a single helix dual-spring action, when in fact he actually wanted one with triple side-motion bevel-swivel. Or, you know, whatever.

 

In the end, I stuck to some fairly simple options: a leather sports bag, a Disk Doctor for repairing scratched CDs and DVDs, a rather Andrew-looking aluminium CD case and a portable mug.

 

Embarrassingly, Andrew had about twice as many presents for me, but in my defense I had dropped several well-placed hints along the way - along the lines of:-

 

“Can you get me a 7mm wetsuit please, size ten, thanks.”

 

Which was altogether more helpful than Andrew.

 

Mind you, he’d also – bizarrely – got me a tub of bath salts, so he evidently struggled at some point.

 

On New Years Eve we went around to John and Hazel’s for a fairly relaxed dinner. There was a lavish amount of wine consumed. At midnight, we climbed a ladder onto the roof of their building and watched the fireworks go off around the city. It was a magical, magical evening – as demonstrated by the fact that nobody broke their necks coming back down the ladder. That might have been more a miracle than magic