Colm O'Regan: I can’t wait for this EFFING lockdown to end so I can walk around Cork
Over the coming weeks, Cork City Council will begin to give permanent effect to pedestrianisation. Colm O'Regan is looking forward to a trip to Cork with his family so they can have an amble around. Pic: Larry Cummins
The little ones are starting to grow into actual people. When do you notice that? Is it when they have opinions? Tastes in music? Or is it about toilets? Toilet training is a victory. A liberation. Better and cheaper than them learning to drive. But it does mean they now have extra rights. Like the right to dawdle in a toilet with a book cutting down the time I can dawdle in the toilet with a book.
It also means that our terrace neighbours are treated to hearing, through the wall, regular shouted conversations up and down the stairs about the need for/the likelihood/progress/post mortem of a poo. And it’s even worse when the children are actually in the house.
The Two have transitioned from mouths to be fed, to housemates who eat. In early childhood there are the various milky things, then childy foods, then nibbles of adults’ food. But then you start to notice their impact on the groceries. We have ‘growing children’ now.
Certain items are just bought without needing to appear on The List. Sliced pan rarely goes mouldy anymore. Apples, don’t get me started. I haven’t begun a new apple since late 2018. My main job now is House Pig. Just cleaning up apples from the floor and disposing of their browned remains down the chute under my nose.
And now we have a new pair to go for a walk with. Going for a walk was usually just part of Project Tire Them Out. (Project Tire Them Out starts every day about half a minute after they get up.)
But now, their little legeens are hardy. So tiring them out requires some serious mileage. We are walking, not just to a playground or park, but ambles. Roughly going somewhere. Would you call it Mindful Walking? Or Mindingful Walking.
Gently moseying somewhere with a child has made the city more interesting. (The city of Dublin. Sorry Irish Examiner natives, I couldn’t make a go of it in Cork). We have walked into town a couple of times now.
They are mini-epics, vaguely moving East with a rough destination in mind. Literally on some occasions. Two Saturdays ago the goal was chips from McDonalds on Jervis Street which we ate in the little park across the road under the trees. We watched a fight outside the temporary public toilets, all the while being harassed by pigeons. But it’s not about the destination, enticing though it may be. It’s the journey.
We’ve played on the stepping stones in the Croppy’s Acre, looking through fences at building sites, a cup of tea on a bench while they made friends in a playground in Smithfield. Or on the second trip, the Grand Canal basin, seen someone setting off on a canoe, a playground in the Liberties, sitting on a pavement in a deserted Newmarket square eating a hot cross bun in the sun, St Patrick’s Cathedral Park, playing in the Peace Park near Christchurch, scuttling down Winetavern street, my spidey-sense eyes noting the drug-dealer counting his fivers.
The children can travel at the speed of an average slowish adult but that slowing down means I notice more. They stop and point and ask questions and I stop and look and fudge some answers. I can also blatantly stare and nose at people’s houses which I can’t do alone. It’s like canvassing in the referendums all over again.
I can’t wait for this EFFING lockdown to end so I can walk around Cork. We two and our two new chums.
Especially on the seventeen new pedestrian streets. So they can ask questions and I’ll say, “Actually, I don’t know. All this time I’ve walked here and I never noticed that before”.
