Julie Jay: Losing my cool over Cúl Camp summer places

When I saw that our local Cúl Camp course had been sold out my soul immediately left my body. As mammy fails go, this was a biggy

'Playing football' in my five-year-old’s world consists of me standing in goals, but not being allowed to actually stop any goals. File picture

AS I SCROLLED through the various Cúl Camp locations, my heart filled with dread. Still spaces available in Abbeydorney, I consoled myself, as I went to the next page of Kerry towns. 

Still some spots in Ballydesmond, I noted, mentally making a back-up plan, because on some level I knew what was coming before I even got there. Finally, my tremulous thumb landed on it: Dingle, sold out. And my heart sank.

I am embarrassed to say that the tears came quick and fast. Who do I have to shift to get my child onto a Cúl Camp course? I asked myself. 

Though the sad truth is, anyone even remotely involved with the Cúl Camps has their WhatsApp picture of themselves, their wife, and their kids at a family confirmation — so the odds of a shift buying a coveted spot were sadly slim to none. Especially since my perimenopausal chin hair is much like an Italian man on a first Tinder date: Coming on strong.

The small matter of my little fella not expressing any interest in actually doing this camp didn’t enter my brain as I scrambled through my contacts to see if anyone could help me.

Sadly, although some names of TV presenters and well-known global comedians were impressive, they were all useless to me, because even the recently roasted Kevin Hart couldn’t buy his way into the Dingle sports field without having signed up well in advance.

The thing is, my five-year-old was all about Dingle football when they were having their matches, parades, and band marches. He really got caught up in it, but the football training has, much like my short-lived obsession with cucumber salad, gone by the wayside.

While I haven’t wanted to force the issue too much, it’s confusing because every time I pick him up from his childminder, he has a ball in his hand.

Similarly, his Saturday morning wake-up call consists of “Mammy, can we go outside and play football?” 

This might sound endearing, but “playing football” in my five-year-old’s world consists of me standing in goals, but not being allowed to actually stop any goals.

However, I still need to pretend to look as though I am trying to stop the balls without actually doing so, a tall ask demanding an Academy Award-level acting performance from me, all before I’ve had my morning coffee. Even David Clifford would be hard-pressed to feign enthusiasm.

All of this makes his resistance to training a little trickier to comprehend, but also compounds my determination to get him back up to that pitch again before he’s doing the Junior Cert.

I do feel like once we get back up there, he will get into the swing of it, and I also don’t want him quitting at the first obstacle — or being put off by his last training session in early February, which didn’t see any of us at our best.

Without going into it too much here, I think a combination of frustration at my five-year-old for not being able to get the hang of some of the skills right off the bat and a lack of dinner (he had refused to eat for me before we went) led to such a stressful hour that both himself and myself made a silent pact to never darken the doors of Dingle GAA again.

I would love to get him into the training again, not just for the football side of things but for the craic of it too, and I had been fully sure Cúl Camps was the way to do it.

Still, a lot can change in a few months — just look at what is now my aversion to cucumber salad.

As such, I would love to get him into the training again, not just for the football side of things but for the craic of it too, and I had been fully sure Cúl Camps was the way to do it.

Of course, because it’s so important to maintain my sad-clown brand, I went straight onto Instagram Stories to weep, losing a few followers as a result. To be fair, they had come here for the lols, not to send messages like, “have you considered emailing them?”, which many people kindly did.

I went to bed defeated, feeling like the worst mammy in the world — but knowing, on a rational level too, that this was really just because I was tired, very, very tired, and so my capacity to keep this non-problem right-sized and not catastrophise was low.

The next day, I woke up feeling rested. The kids, miraculously, had slept well, which meant I had slept well and was now able to apply some perspective to it all.

We’ll do an art camp, I told myself, banishing recent art camp disasters from my mind. We will do a poetry camp! Ceramics! I told nobody in particular, before double-checking the Cúl Camp website to confirm Dingle was still full.

And there it was. A miracle: One space available. My hands were shaking so much I could barely type my card digits, feeling like someone who had gotten through at Ticketmaster to purchase Oasis tickets.

He’s in. And I didn’t even have to shift anyone to get him there, much to everyone’s relief — especially my husband’s.