Learner Dad: Tune into classical music to tune out the children 

Gougane Barra: Our most recent family day out. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

I ORDERED a set of cheap wireless headphones from China last month . I like the sense of anticipation, checking the tracking information every morning, feeling a bit better about myself because the package has made it as far as Düsseldorf. 

As usually happens with new gadgets, the anticipation is better than the actual device. They’re just earphones without cables. My life was pretty much the same after I got them. And then I discovered Be e thoven. I’ve never been a fan of classical music. 

But I’m not a fan of trying to write either when the kids are going ballistic out the back because the sun is shining and kids are solar-powered as far as I can see. So I put in the new headphones and picked a Be e thoven playlist from Spotify.

At the start, it was more distracting than the kids because advertising agencies love Be e thoven and I ended up playing ‘what TV ad w as that on again ’ for the first couple of melodies . 

And then I just got lost in it and kept on writing. Every now and again I’d stop and notice how subtle and rich the music was, before putting it back in the background and getting back to work. 

If you’re finding working from home tricky because of child-noise or another distraction, then I’d recommend some low volume B e ethoven. Treat yourself to a gadget from China while you’re at it  if you can get past the carbon footprint problems.

Booze guilt  

We had a party out the back on a balmy Saturday night recently . It was just the wife, myself, the two kids, a blue-tooth speaker and at least two bottles of wine. (Put down the phone – the kids had apple juice.) 

First of all, I’d like to apologise to my neighbours. I’d stand over our music choices up to 10pm, but by the end of the second bottle of wine, we were getting stuck into Meatloaf. 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light' can be a tricky listen, particularly when you have to listen to it three o r four times . 

Anyway, the kids stayed up late, lying on the trampoline and looking up at the stars as the bats flew overhead. It was one of those perfect evenings, slightly ruined by the worry we’d fail to get out of bed the next morning and people would think we’re bad parents. 

Never mind that the ‘people’ in question were just us, loading ourselves up with guilt like the good little Irish Catholics we were reared to be. ( The kids were hardly going to judge us - they’d be too busy playing Super Mario Run all day .) 

Anyway, we made a ridiculous boozy pledge to get up the next morning and head for Gougane Barra. Here’s the funny thing. It worked. I guilted myself into going to Gougane Barra. 

It was 20 degrees and crispy clear down there , our hangovers drifted away with the breeze coming over the mountain from the Kerry side . And they said Catholic guilt was good for nothing.

Making our kids wear masks in shops is more than virtue-signalling; it's one less worry for staff

Mask virtue

Is anyone else virtue signalling by putting a mask on their six-year-old? The new regulations that came in on August 10  say that we have to wear a face-covering in retail settings. They also say this doesn’t apply to people under the age of 13. This seems a bit arbitrary to me. 

I can’t find any evidence suggesting that people under the age of 13 are less likely to infect someone else in a retail setting, or anywhere else for that matter. The ECDC website (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) has a page on kids and Covid-19, suggesting there is some evidence that kids are less infectious, but there is nothing definitive yet. 

My six-year-old hates his mask and gets very stroppy in a shop unless you’re in there to buy something he really wants. 

That said, we’re not in there for long, and I can tell by the reaction from the staff in any shop we visited, that they appreciate the effort. 

They pretend to love the fact that his mask has Marvel characters on it, but my guess is they’re glad that it’s one less avenue of infection for them to face. So I’m more than just virtue signalling by making him wear a mask.