Life

Nuala McCann: Yes, I'm getting older but at least spring will soon be here

I had a hearing check this year and bizarrely enough, I am slightly deaf for lower tones. As the woman in her 90s who was told she was losing her hearing said, maybe I have just heard enough

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

My dear friend and gardener presented me with a pot of budding hyacinths last week
My dear friend and gardener presented me with a pot of budding hyacinths last week My dear friend and gardener presented me with a pot of budding hyacinths last week

BY THE time you read this I shall have marked the year of my birth well over half a century ago and endured those “old fart” cards and the ones that make a joke about how your hearing fails with age.

“Is it Wednesday?”

“No it’s Thursday.”

“So am I. Let’s go to the pub.”

In the interests of shutting up those closest to me, I had a hearing check this year. Bizarrely enough, I am slightly deaf for lower tones and, said the man, it is strange this was never picked up at school.

As I share a house with two men, both of whose voices have well and truly dropped, there is no wonder I never hear them guldering down the stairs.

My mother recalls a certain child who lived locally. Somebody on the street nicknamed her the “Judas child”.

“She whacked you across the ear with a toy gun when you were three and burst your eardrum,” sighs my mother.

I reply that perhaps, as the woman in her 90s who was told she was losing her hearing said, maybe I have just heard enough.

Also, given that time is flying by, I shall have dipped deep into the pot of miracle birthday facial moisturiser I bought to celebrate.

And no, there is no miracle cure for the hippy hoppy crow’s feet around the eyes. Let’s call them laughter lines.

I shall also have dealt with desperate pleading from those around me about what they could possibly buy me to celebrate another year of my being on Earth. A sainthood, I might say, tongue-in-cheek, but they’re having none of it.

To my knowledge, there is no Saint Nuala yet. Some might argue that a certain person carries a whiff of sainted martyr. I may have to start my own perfume label. Buy me anything, nothing, I tell my beloved, just get the two holes in the roof fixed and we’ll be rolling along, four-wheels-on-my-wagon style.

This is the truth.

The other day, I came home to a worried man standing in the middle of our street squinting up at our roof line.

I haven’t heard him sound so concerned since he rang me in a panic some years ago to report: “There’s a bird in the attic.”

“You hum it and I’ll sing it,” I quipped from the safe distance of a friend’s house in Donegal.

But he didn’t find the “bird in the attic” Irish jig joke so very funny.

The bird had got in through a hole in the roof and had built a nest. As it was springtime, there was a law against evicting fledglings. So we waited and we tholled.

After they had all fledged and the chirpy, chirpy, cheep, cheeps had died down from the attic, we got in special plastic beak-proof fascia.

“Did you see the size of that nest?” said the fascia man and, indeed, he removed a wigwam of sticks from the roof. It was a nest that had clearly housed great grand daddies of birds.

All was well until the following year when our birds returned to home sweet home, only to find they had been evicted.

They pecked like crazy at our plastic fascia, then retreated to the telegraph wire and squawked furiously, dive bombing us every time we opened the front door.

It was like Hitchcock’s The Birds. That’s 10 years ago and we still duck on exiting our front door.

Despite the hole in the roof, spring is in the air. My dear friend and gardener presented me with a pot of budding hyacinths last week. I have murdered so many little seedlings and flowers that she has entrusted into my care that her kindness never fails to astonish me.

Even the hardy bamboo that should have survived World War III, went limp and died in my garden.

But my good friend and I have a love that spans over 40 years. She still has the letters I sent her from my summer minding the countess’s babies and making nettle soup in France. Quelle horreur.

The first snowdrops are poking their noses up in the front garden and a weak yellow sun is edging in at the window. I put the hyacinths on the hearth and carry the first sight of this year’s snowdrops in my heart.

I know that come summer, we shall stroll round to my friend’s beautiful garden and sit and drink in the peace and the gin. It won’t be long.