Maternal advice should include the nugget: ‘Don’t turn into your father’

ONE of the sure-fire stocking-stuffers this Christmas is a little paperback called My Mother Always Used to Say, a collection of truisms gathered by Valerie Bowe, with all proceeds going to charity.

It’s already been reprinted three times.

Some of the bits of maternal advice contained in it are mysterious to outsiders. For example, celeb solicitor Gerald Keane says his mother constantly told him, “Always remember you are from Cork.” I wouldn’t have thought, myself, that if one was from Cork, the location of one’s birth would readily slip one’s mind, but, hey, I’m not only a Dubliner, but a northside Dubliner, white socks and all.

What’s been striking about reaction to the book is the number of people, particularly women, who claim that as they get older they find themselves repeating the irritating remarks their mothers used to make, despite the fact that they swore, as kids and teenagers, that they would never, ever, utter them.

“Were you born in a barn?” they ask their mystified children when those children leave a door open.

“This is not a hotel, you know,” they huff when nobody cleans up after a meal.

Then, despite themselves, they go on to articulate all the other old saws, including “Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know”, “Don’t get too big for your boots” and “If you can’t say something nice about someone, say nothing”. (Alice Roosevelt’s version of the latter had a lot going for it. “If you can’t say something nice about someone, come sit by me,” she would invite.)

I can’t figure why women get upset when they start sounding and acting like their mothers. What worries me is that I’m beginning to act like my father.

My father was the quintessential Recession Man. Waste not, want not. Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves. He saved rubber bands in one little container and string in another. He had separate containers of nuts, of bolts, of paperclips, of drawing pins, of nails, of screws, of odd-denomination stamps. Everything got saved.

Most irritating of all, having used a match, he would put it back in the box, on the basis that the unburnt bit might come in useful, some day. The rest of us would forget this, and, when we needed to light the fire, would drive ourselves nuts fruitlessly striking a spent match off the sandpaper bit of the box.

Spent matches, though, were in the ha’penny place (you should pardon the reference to an outdated currency, and I’ll come back to saving the pennies in a minute) compared to the brawn. Brawn was a gruesome form of pâté involving a sheep’s head in a bucket. (I use the past tense in the hope that it no longer exists, anywhere in the world.)

I’d arrive into the breakfast room first thing in the morning, singing happily to myself, and behind the scullery door would be this bucket with a sheep’s head floating in it. Nothing will put your singing into minor key like an early morning encounter with the submerged countenance of a dead sheep.

I’m still not clear what the purpose of sheep’s head steeping was, but when that stage was over, Dad would, I assume, save bits of meat and then press them into a bowl. The final product tasted like old socks mixed with sawdust and marinated in Bovril. You spread it on toast. As I spread the thinnest film possible on my toast, I would promise myself that, once freed of childhood, I would never, ever eat brawn again. It joined the list of awful stuff from which adulthood would emancipate me, including porridge, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and Gye.

Gye was a brown slimy by-product of Guinness, called Guinness Yeast Extract, which tasted like Marmite, to which it was related in a third-cousin-once-removed sort of way, with the added disadvantage that, while you couldn’t eat Bovril on a Friday because it had once had a passing fling with meat, you could eat Gye, and you did. Well, I did. My father pushed Gye like a drug dealer.

He also promoted walking. Whenever, as a child, I walked with my father, the mortification stayed for days, because he picked up things. It could be an abandoned coin, a stick he thought would be useful for the fire, or a slip from a plant he thought would be good in the garden. The shame, the shame…

Except that, these days, I take a plastic bag with me when I park the car in the morning and pick up sticks as I walk to the office. How pathetic is that? It’s not even good environmentalism. I should be cycling to work. But that would prevent me bringing home the black sacks of newspapers and office documentation I spend the weekend soaking, squeezing and turning into paper briquettes.

Up to last week, it was one bag a day, but it’s two since the shredder got sick. Our head of training used to spend hours, every day, feeding the shredder beneath her desk, like someone slipping food they didn’t want to a dog under the table. Except a dog would shut up, whereas the shredder moaned constantly. It had such an industrial whinge, the rest of us were delighted when it died. We convinced her it had been eating power and therefore was not green. Now, she stuffs the paper into a bag under her desk and I drag it home with me.

Some days, the second bag is filled with coffee grounds. They’re good for the soil, I discovered when I noticed Starbucks give you bags of them for free. Since visits to Starbucks are few and far between these days, it seemed logical to save our office coffee grounds and spread them at home. Quite apart from gaining nutrient-rich soil, this raises the ground level. In a few years, I’m going to be living on a coffee-flavoured hill with daffodils the size of trombones.

My father was a great advocate of haybox cooking, too. Hay stores heat, and so if you stuff a wooden box with it and then stick your saucepan full of porridge, just at boiling point, into the hay and seal it up, by morning you will have piping hot fully cooked porridge.

The modern equivalent is to put a casserole into one of those Styrofoam-padded coolers. I haven’t got around to it yet, but I’m at the design stage.

Taking care of the pennies, on the other hand, has been a disappointment. I inherited my father’s bag of coins and added to it down the years, convinced it would be a valuable reserve when money got tight. A week ago, I asked a pal to take the bag to the Central Bank. She came back with €5.73 and a lot of rejected currency.

The Central Bank doesn’t take British coins.

I’m now committed to storing bockety threepenny bits for another few decades, trying to persuade myself it’s a good thing by repeating one of my father’s phrases.

You never know the day nor the hour…

* My Mother Always Used to Say, edited by Valerie Bowe, is published by Currach Press.