Colm O'Regan: Playing with my daughter, I learned I can make do this year
I really didn't want to help. I just wanted to be left alone with the more important task of checking my phone.
But she was insistent. "Daddy: Help me make a dollies' castle." My daughter wanted me to 'make and do'.
Apart from laziness and self-absorption, there was another reason I wanted neither to make, nor do.
I was shite at it; the last time I tried, anyway, which was in primary school. I never got to grips with it. Nothing turned out quite as good as everyone else's. It never felt like I had the right gear. My Sellotape was off-brand and not sticky. The glue was gone-off. And there were no cereal boxes. When we were growing up, we ate porridge in our house, instead of cereal. Porridge is cheaper, healthier, great for the slow-energy release of waiting three years to get enough tokens for a towel. But for keeping up with school-based or Mary Fitzgerald 'make and do', Flahavan's packets are useless. We also never had washing-up-liquid containers. I can't remember what we used. There were definitely suds. But it wasn’t Fairy. So when Mary said: 'For this, you will need an empty Cornflakes box, a washing-up-liquid container, and some pipe cleaners, I would just sigh and switch the telly over to . "Like, who has pipe cleaners?" I asked Henry Wilks, rhetorically. Mr Wilks puffed on his pipe and said nothing.
Not everything was a disaster. There were always pom-poms. I don't know why we all made pom-poms for years. It must have been their mental health benefits. I don't think anyone who has made a pom-pom forgets the magical metamorphosis from woolly, useless doughnut into a bouncy, woolly ball.
So, against this mixed background, I reluctantly started helping the eldest with her castle.
Within minutes, I was hooked. My tongue was out in concentration. I took over the whole enterprise. I expertly attached towers to the main keep, with the cutting of ingenious slits. Ingenious is an exaggeration. I have set the bar low. I wasn't good at collaborating, though.
"No, you’ll ruin it that way," I helpfully encouraged, as my daughter wanted to do something the wrong way. "Just wait until I've cut out the turrets and then you can glue them."
"But I want to do it this way," she said. We had reached an impasse. Then, it seemed like she saw the focus in my eyes. "I'll let you do it by yourself, Daddy," she said kindly. I think she understood this would be similar to the time we did colouring together and I was WAY better at staying within the lines. She went to tell the dollies about their new castle. I made the turrets my way. I lost all track of time. I didn't check my phone for bad news for a whole hour. The castle started to take shape.
It wasn't all plain sailing. Time has not been kind to me. I'm not in the same physical shape I was, either because of the crown on one of my molars or else some tectonic palate has shifted: My bockety front teeth have extra bock, so I can no longer easily cut Sellotape.
But when it was done, I had a perfectly serviceable place for aristocratic dollies to live. The youngest then took it apart, because it was the wrong colour, but I didn't mind. I was just happy to feel the old powers of concentration reawakened. Remember concentration? Jigsaws, colouring, writing a story without an internal editor, playing with dinkies, and Hector Grey animals? 2020 might have knocked us all for six and 2021 looks iffy for a while, but I think I'll find it easier to make do.
