Adare

Home again, home again, lickety-split! We’re all just back from a too-short trip to Ireland.

‘Twas Ireland, this time, because twenty-odd of my Cambridge classmates held an unofficial reunion at Adare Manor (county Limerick), and secured us some nearly-decent group rates in lodgings whose price is otherwise the opposite, i.e. quite indecent. Sure, Adare Manor is a stately place, and stately never comes cheap, but those folks specialize in surprising, nay, shockingly high prices — such sums as will prompt a man to spray his mouthful of Lapsang Souchong across the table when the bill is presented.

Needless to say, our precious little Boo-Boo was in her element. And I’m only half-kidding. You see, there’s 847 acres onsite, much of it impeccably landscaped, which means that for every perfectly-manicured box hedge, there is a corresponding bank of white river pebbles laid nearby. And Emmie is really, really fond of pebbles, at the moment.

It was, in fact, impossible to cover any middling distance at Adare Manor without Emelyn suddenly going horizontal in your arms, wee arms clawing through the air, trying desperately to reach the stones crunching underfoot.

Digression: our child is a bona fide squirmer, now; at this point she’s simply perfecting her technique (a combination of going rigid and then quickly relaxing her entire body) in an apparent bid to break the world record for ‘extricating oneself from a parental grasp’. Don’t believe me? You try holding her.

To make a long story short, the wily and wriggly Emelyn spent her posh weekend at Adare sitting on the ground, playing happily with the pebbles. Moving them about, mostly - pebbles that were on the ground were moved to the stairs, pebbles on the stairs were moved into the hedge, and so on.

I could’ve sworn she admired the view, once or twice, though she might just have been scanning for more Irish pebbles. Hard to say.