Act of dog

Dot writes: yesterday was going pretty well until about 5.45pm, when I was driving along and hit a dog. I don’t think I had much chance of missing it; I wasn’t driving fast – maybe 25 miles per hour on a parked-up residential street – but one moment I saw him on the pavement and [...]

Brief hooray

Hooray! Those books I was fretting about last week have been printed and bound and arrived this morning. They look lovely. Dr Conrad-O’Briain and I solemnly signed a copy each and gave them to each other.

Tool-using mammal

Dot writes: Hugh is a tool-using mammal. He uses his parents as tools. When he is having difficulty pressing a button (for example, the small, fiddly one that turns on his toy laptop) he takes hold of my finger and applies it to the problem.

Congratulations

Dot writes: this morning I got a card from a lady who evidently has her mind on higher things:
I just want to say 1,000 congratulations! (I’d no idea you were expecting another baby; how on earth do you do it?)
Tee-hee! Shall I tell her?

And back to Hugh (and Sprout)

Dot writes: just to correct that anomalous swerve towards my work…
Hugh is a little hell-fiend at the moment. He has tantrums, he throws things, he flails and flings himself backwards and blames us when he hurts himself. He has entered the terrible twos about seven months early. And also, quite without malice, he is perilously [...]

A rare work post

Dot writes: I don’t post much about my work. Ken posts about his, but his involves having deep and interesting thoughts, or at least shallow and interesting thoughts, whereas my daily routine goes like this:
a) leave house. Plan activities for day, which will involve reading an article on the train, finishing that pile of marking, [...]

In search of warped Catholics

Dot writes: in the latest London Review of Books there’s a piece by Hilary Mantel on Miri Rubin’s new book about the Blessed Virgin Mary. The book sounds highly interesting and I’ve ordered it. Hilary Mantel’s review, however, spends rather a lot of verbiage on reflecting on how the reproachful perfection of the BVM terrorized [...]

Ideas for parents

Dot writes: back when Hugh was new I had what was actually rather a good idea about supporting first-time parents. Here it is in case anybody out there has the energy to implement it. (I don’t think I blogged it at the time.) These days it’s quite common for people, perhaps especially people like us [...]

The Two Patricks

Ken writes:
I have just read a wonderful pamphlet by Thomas F O’Rahilly entitled The Two Patricks and published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1942. My copy was the 1971 reprint.
O’Rahilly contends that the St Patrick of myth, celebrated on March 17th every year, is actually a conflation of two distinct Patricks; [...]

Kilkenny Castle and Brown’s Hill Dolmen

Ken writes:
On Saturday, Dot, Hugh and I drove to Kilkenny. It’s a really pretty and surprisingly built-up town and as it happened our visit coincided with a mini-festival celebrating a 400 hundredth anniversary of something (being a town? being a town of certain kind? receiving a royal charter? –Dot observed that there are statutes [...]