Horrid Craic With Apple Pies

Grrr. I'm having a bad crochet week. I have lots of ideas for new projects but everything I touch turns to ... rubbish. One project took me ages to make but has turned out useless: it's 25% too big, due to a mathematical booboo on my part. Yes - maths = my nemesis.

In any case, the husband and I returned to Germany on Tuesday, flying east over the continent and away from a brewing storm so big that it later that day dislodged a bus shelter and whacked it against a plane at Edinburgh airport. As you know from previous posts, disaster follows when we travel (volcanic eruptions, blizzards, tsunamis and nuclear reactor meltdowns), so a flying bus shelter was relatively mild, given the previous catastrophes unleashed by our wanderlust.

A teddy bear not having the craic.
(It's a gratuitous picture. I just liked his knitted sweater. Bear with me. Haha)

Our stay in Ireland was - to use a bit of Hibernian English - great craic. Craic is a very useful Irish word, it means 'fun' or 'a laugh' (as in, to have a laugh) and its intrinsic link to fun and general frolics is only underlined by the fact that it's pronounced 'crack' - which means you can frighten the wits out of non-Irish people by saying things like, "I had great craic last night!" or "I don't think it's possible to have too much craic!" or the ecstatic declaration that something was "the best craic I've ever had!"

It's a wonderful word and has many different meanings. For example:
What's the craic? = Is there anything newsworthy you wish to share, my good fellow?
The craic was mighty! = Jolly good fun was had by all!
We were only having a bit of craic! = No ill-will was meant, we were simply having a spot of fun.
There are regional variations to craic - in some places it has been awarded a definite article: the craic (as in "Are you having the craic?" = "Are you enjoying yourself?") and in other places it has even earned supplementary (and baffling) adjectives, like horrid craic. My brother James assures me that having horrid craic is all the rage in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. Having spent two days in Sligo, I am willing to believe that just about anything is possible there.

Anyway, Mr Gingerbread and I had many interesting discussions of the following variety:
Me: I'm going to visit my Auntie Dell (= or substitute name of random relative here)
Him: Is that the one with the two sons?
(I'll just interject at this point to tell you that my mother is one of - brace yourself - fifteen children. They in turn are a rather fertile bunch. Having two sons really does not narrow it down and he should know this. He was at our wedding, after all. He has seen - nay, he has participated in - a number of family photos.)
Me: She has lots of sons. You know my Auntie Dell, you've met her a dozen times -
He holds up his hand to stop me.
Him: Wait. Does she live in town?
(Again, this does not help. My mother's family has multiplied rapidly but in a geographically-restricted area. Most of them still live in or around the town they grew up in.)
Me: No, she's -
Him (triumphantly): Wait! She bakes the apple pies!

I pause. He's right - kind of. All of my aunts bake apple pies, or apple tarts, as we call them. But my Aunt Dell makes my favourite apple tarts. Each aunt has a tiny variation on a standard shortcrust recipe, some add cinnamon or nutmeg to the filling and some don't, but every pie is different and unique to the piemaking auntie in question. And sometimes - genetics are a funny thing, my friends - the children of the piemaker commit the heresy of preferring the pies of an aunt to the pies of their mother. I am one such evil child. I love my mother's apple pie, I swear I do. But I also love my Auntie Dell's apple pies just as much ... and on some days a tiny bit more. This is something my mother and my aunt are both aware of and when I visit my Auntie Dell, it is not uncommon for her to produce a freshly-baked apple - or rhubarb, I won't say no - pie, which she'll place on the table with a flourish that might be a shade more triumphant than strictly necessary in the presence of my indignant mother.
"Hrrrrmph!" my mother snorts, as she helps herself to a slice of appley nomminess. I know she's thinking: Ungrateful wretch.  But it doesn't stop her eating the pie, though. She'll even have a second slice to confirm to her own self that her apple tarts are better.

However, this Christmas we dropped by unannounced for a quick visit and there were no apple tarts - not even a paltry rhubarb tart, for that matter. I don't want to make a big deal about it but, quite frankly, I was utterly devastated - it has taken me a full week to recover from the disappointment and blog about it. A poor start to 2012 indeed.

Happy New Year!

 

After many days of excessive eating (whine - there are so many delicious things to eeeeaaat!), Daddy Gingerbread, the husband and I decided to take a walk in The Nature. We went up to the remains of a great big hill fort called the Rock of Dunamase, with spectacular views over the surrounding countryside:

 

The walls are more than two metres thick in many places and, standing in the bitter wind atop a high hill on the first day of January, we shuddered at the thought of the hardship people endured when the fortress was inhabited.

 

Having had a brisk walk up the hill, we headed home for a cup of hot tea and a slice of toast.

Exciting Times in Ireland

Hello readers!

The Gingerbread Lady finds herself at home in windy Ireland in the bosom of her enormous family. All of the Gingerbreads send you their best regards, but I've already received dire threats to my well-being if any of them feature personally and named on this blog. Frankly, though, none of them have done anything interesting enough yet to feature in a blog entry ... with the exception of one brother who has a new girlfriend and is refusing to produce her for us to check her out. Apparently, the gimlet glare of eight mischievous Gingerbread siblings is the trial by fire that no young relationship wants to endure. Which is a pity, really, because we've already compiled a list of Interesting Things In Our Locality to show the new girlfriend :


1. The Swing
We have a pear tree with a frayed rope swing on it. It's very exciting. You can see it from the kitchen window, but nonetheless it's worth walking down to the bottom of the garden to see it in all its glory.

My nephew and niece, enthralled by the cattle grid.

2. The Cattle Grid
A cattle grid is a shallow pit covered by bars at the entrance or gate to a home. They're quite common in this part of the world, because local farmers often herd their cattle down the country roads when moving them from one field to another. Theoretically, they're supposed to deter frisky bullocks from paying you a social visit, though we've had occasions when a bull or bullock, hopped up on the excitement of a jaunt down the road, take a flying leap over the cattle grid and come thundering down the avenue of my parents' house (this is v. scary). In any case, a slow, ambling walk to the top of my parents' lane often culminates in an examination of the cattle grid, mostly because local wildlife falls down it quite a lot. Thus a simple stroll might even up in an emergency rescue operation to retrieve e.g. a recalcitrant hedgehog. This used to involve gardening gloves and a lot of bad language (hedgehogs like to roll up into balls, did you know that? And they're rather spiky, the little devils. And in their roundy state they're very hard to wriggle through the bars of a cattle grid.) Nowadays we would just build them a little ramp and sprinkle it with food and hope to goodness their little hedgehog brains figure out the rest.

3. The Place Where the Water-Pump Used to Be 
Our local attractions were slashed considerably when the villagers of Ballyroe took our water-pump (our = it was at the crossroads down the road from my parents' house). It was a quaint, functioning water-pump from a time before indoor plumbing was common, when local families had to drag buckets of water from this pump at the crossroads. I'm sure it was the centre of all kinds of gossip and malarky, but in recent decades it had become a curiosity rather than a necessity. One day the local council removed the pump and - coincidence? I think not - a remarkably similar pump turned up at the recently-renovated village centre at the heart of Ballyroe, five miles down the road. Aside from bitterly muttering, "That's our pump!" or "They stole our pump!" when cruising through Ballyroe, little else was done to recover our stolen property or, indeed, to even establish whether that pump really was ours. So nowadays we walk down to the place where the pump used to be and stare mournfully at the stump it stood on. We take visitors with us to indoctrinate them into this culture of begrudgery, so when they pass through Ballyroe's smart new village centre, they know they have to grumble at the thieving wretches who stole our pump.

And because Irish country people have elephant-like memories, people from our crossroads will still be whining about the stolen pump several generations from now.

4. The Big Tree
It is, as the name would suggest, a big tree. We like to walk visitors down the road to look at this tree. It often ends in confusion, as the Big Tree's attraction isn't instantly identifiable: it's a tree, people. And it's big. Look on it and be awed.

No doubt you need a stiff dram of whiskey after all of that excitement. You probably have to smooth your hair down after this rollercoaster ride of a post. Perhaps you're even thinking of booking a flight over here as soon as possible to view the swing and the stump of the pump with your own little peepers. So why oh why doesn't the Gingerbread brother want to show his girlfriend all the delights of our locality? She just doesn't know what she's missing.

A Day At The Beach

All the people on the beach stayed in one place. To the right of this photograph there are about 100 people on blankets. And the rest of the beach was deserted. Very strange. They obviously knew something we didn't.

When we were in Ireland, the Gingerbreads took a couple of outings to the beach. The first one was to a beautiful sandy beach in the south-east of Ireland, in County Wexford My husband was bemused by this: it wasn't particularly warm by Central European standards, but the Irish were out in force because - well, because by Irish standards it was a lovely summer's day. Mothers and fathers were trying to make wriggling kids stand still long enough to slather sun cream on them, while other holiday-goers set up windbreakers and laid out blankets to lie on. Mr Gingerbread and my brother William sat down in the sand dunes but the other Gingerbreads - Mammy and Daddy G. included - made a beeline for the water. We stood in the water, trousers rolled up, with an army of small children and surveyed the skyline. Very nice.

Following that, and in need of some excitement, we decided to compare feet. The Gingerbread Family is split down the middle on the subject of feet: roughly half of us have inherited the yeoman's feet of my father's family (me included. Thanks, Da), while the other half have feet that look like transplanted hands, with long, wavy toes. This phenomenon was captured on film to horrify the world via the Interwebz. Voilà:

Recovered? Sorry about that, but it had to be done.

Then on to Co. Cork, where I managed to get the worst sunburn I've had for years on this day, at this beach, in this weather. Yup. For realz. No one knows how a redhead suffers.

My father took dozens of photos as reference for his paintings. I know you all reel in wonder when you behold my fantastic cartoons, so it will not come as a surprise when I tell you that my father is an artist. I express myself through stickpeople, he chooses oils. Whatever. When I was small, I sometimes used to get out of bed to watch him paint. I found out that if I stood very still and very quietly, I would be forgotten (or discreetly ignored). Nowadays, I don't have to - my father has set up his own YouTube channel. Really! He has his own little cyber-world going on in the background, which occupies him while my mother is watching Downton Abbey and other period drawmas. I think it's safe to say that the separation of the parentals during my mother's evening television binge has done wonders for their marriage, as my father is now no longer compelled to give a running commentary on the preposterousness of her viewing choice. Instead, he is at one with the Muses and the Internet. Peace reigns once more.

This is his photo of the steps leading down to the beach above:

And this is how it was transformed into a painting. Obviously, it could have done with a few stickpeople and at least one vampire, but all in all, I think he did a good job:

One of my favourites, though, is this still life. I love the way the glasses seem to appear out of the darkness.

And now I can watch him paint as much as I like, without being told to go to bed.

The Green, Green Grass of Home

Towards the end of the school year, I showed my students some photos of Ireland. They asked if I'd photoshopped them because the colours were "unnatural". I looked at the photos again - "No," I said, "That's just the way it is in Ireland." This luscious, vivid, unnatural green is ... well, it's just Ireland.

In German they say that green is the colour of hope. Because we're having an optimistic August, here are some pictures of eye-popping green:

Adventures in Ireland - Part II

I Bought New Underwear for My Boobess

I wish I were one of those women who can stroll into a lingerie shop and whip a few bits of lace off a hanger. My chesticles are more of the bombastic variety and finding a receptacle for them is akin to trying to bag two piglets. After a year of denial, I finally accepted that I had put on weight and needed new underwear, so Joyce, my kindly sister-in-law, offered to head to the nearest large town with me on a girlie underwear-buying session.

The shopping centre was nearly empty. Ireland is in the depths of a dark recession and shopping as a recreational sport - previously an Olympic discipline in boomtime Ireland - has taken a nosedive. That's the reason why the young Polish shop assistant in the fancy lingerie shop was thrilled to see me when I walked through the door.
"It's very quiet out there," I said, indicating the silent concourse, where tumbleweeds blew past the empty shops, the clerks leaning on the countertops, bored, or engaged in chat with their fellow workers.
"Is awful," she said earnestly. "Today most exciting thing is visit from cleaning lady."
Poor girl.

I explained my predicament and her practised eye swept over my bosom.
"We not have your size," she said, "but I am measure you anyway. Okay? Then you go department store and buy there."
"Do you mind?" I asked.
"Nothing to do," she said and shrugged.
In we went to the cubicle and she whipped out a measuring tape.
"This bra all wrong," she said, "You are have four boobess because too small. You want two boobess."
She held up two fingers. I nodded. Yes, indeedy. Two boobess would be preferable.
"Important with bra is," she said, "must separate boobess - " she made an elegant sweeping motion, like Moses parting the Red Sea, " - and also to keep down."
With that, she patted the air energetically. I understood immediately. Those of you who are generously endowed know how spooky it is to have your boobess try to sneak up and smother you.

She worked out my size and sent me on my way, after giving me a little lesson on style ("Lace look very nice, but here this grandma style ugly but much better under t-shirt") and form ("This pretty but make uni-boobess, remember we want to separate.") Armed with this knowledge, I went next door and bought half-a-dozen miracles of engineering and then popped in to show her my purchases.
"Very good!" she said, beaming. And, distressingly, added: "Good luck!"
With my chest, I probably need it. But for now, I think I have the girls under control.

Adventures in Ireland - Part I

Well, after twelve hours of travelling, I'm back in the Gingerbread House with my husband. He'd even vacuumed. The man is truly a gem.

Those of you who read this post will probably begin to suspect that whenever I travel, disaster follows. If I were very narcissitic - or slightly paranoid - I would start to become concerned that my desire to fly unleashes some natural catastrophe, this time the earthquake in Japan, subsequent tsunami and the reactor meltdown. I not only feel very sad and quite shell-shocked about the whole situation (I can't watch any more news reports - too distressing), I also have lingering feelings of responsibility. I think I'll stay put for a while.

To take our minds off terrible things, let me tell you what I got up to in Ireland:

I've Got a New Baby Niece
Baby Erica arrived on Pancake Tuesday, my brother and sister-in-law's first child. Naturally, much rejoicing was had, and Mammy and Daddy Gingerbread even decided to brave a trip to Dublin to see the new baby - and I got to go along. This might not seem much to you, but it involved major trauma for the Gingerbreads. My parents do not like to travel. Anywhere. And although Dublin is only an hour away, getting from the depths of the countryside (where they live) to Holles Street Hospital in Dublin city centre is no less stressful than a shuttle launch.

Needless to say, we got lost. Dublin is devoid of road signage, which had a significant role in this development, but let's just say that it came as no surprise to any of the car's occupants that we ended up driving in circles. My parents' forty-year relationship teetered on the brink of destruction as snippy comments flew back and forth across the gearstick divide about someone's driving skills and someone else's navigational talent. Finally, I was sent to ask a taxi driver for directions.

When I returned, my brother was on the phone, frantic. The visiting hour was ticking by and no relatives had yet turned up to admire the fruit of his loins. I tried to give my father the taxi driver's directions, but these were intercepted by my mother, who was trying to simultaneously calm the new father and calm my father - and trying to amplify the instructions for my father, who suffers bouts of selective deafness when concentrating on the road:

Me: "The taxi driver said you drive straight on till the traffic lights, turn left, cross the bridge over the canal and turn right after the third set of traffic lights."
Mammy: "TURN RIGHT AT THE CANAL AND TAKE THE THIRD SET OF TRAFFIC LIGHTS ON THE LEFT. Yes, Michael, I'm still on the phone. Just giving your father directions."
Me: "No! Drive straight on till the traffic lights, turn left, cross the bridge over the canal and turn right after the third set of traffic lights."
Mammy: "Okay. Did you get that? DRIVE THROUGH THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS AND TURN LEFT AT THE BRIDGE WHEN YOU'VE PASSED THREE SETS OF TRAFFIC LIGHTS. Yes, Michael, we're on our way."
Me: "NO! Drive straight on till the traffic lights, turn left..." etc.

But we finally found the hospital, which was tucked away in a busy side street, and gathered around the cot to admire the little sprog. She was passed around like a swaddled parcel and declared to be perfect.

Glendalough

On Sunday, the pater familias and I decided to Get Culture. And, after a huge family reunion that involved obscene quantities of food, we thought it mightn't be a bad idea to Get Exercise and Get Fresh Air as well. So we headed off to Glendalough.

Glendalough - which means the valley of the two lakes - is an ancient monastic settlement in east of Ireland, not far from where we live. This 6th century monastic settlement is nestled in the valley that is now the Wicklow National Park. And although it was a foggy, cold Sunday morning in March, there were hundreds of walkers and tourists out and about. Not only Irish people, but also several dozen blue-lipped southern Europeans and brightly-clad Germans and Dutch, revelling in The Nature. For my father, the most fascinating of all was the young Asian man who was wearing an interesting pair of pants with the crotch situated at knee-level.
"Do you think he knows that his trousers are falling down?" asked my father, concerned.
"I think they're supposed to be like that," said I - fashion expert that I am.
My father was astounded. Gobsmacked, in fact.
"He wants to look like that on purpose?" he said. "Those trousers are deliberate?"
I had to break it to him gently that they were indeed a fashion statement and not just a very unfortunate sartorial oopsie.

With the patience of a preying mantis, I waited till they'd wandered off to the side to get you, dear readers, a selection of tourist-free photos:

St. Kevin's Church

St. Kevin's Church and the Round Tower in the distance

Round Tower and graveyard

The Wicklow Mountains and the remains of an early Christian settlement

One of the loughs (lakes). Guaranteed Nessie-free!

Home, Home on the Range

Hello Readers!
After a surprisingly disaster-free journey, I find myself back in the bosom of my family. Yesterday I returned home from a trip to the nearest town to the sight of my second-youngest brother's bottom bared as target practice for a toy gun that fires soft darts. Youngest brother and three teenagers of the gangly&pimply variety (standard issue, in other words) were taking turns to aim at the lillywhite bum-cheeks of William Gingerbread with a child's gun. There was much guffawing as the darts flew in every direction but his posterior, and a squabble ensued about whose turn it was, who'd had it the longest, who saw it first etc. If you have five brothers, as I do, you tend to pretty blase about such shenanigans (though I must admit that I'm fighting a desire to wash my eyeballs with industrial-strength cleaner, but this will pass.)

The Gingerbread Homestead is an old stone house in the middle of nowhere. It looks quite idyllic, even on a dull and foggy day like today.

The grid at the front is a cattle grid. It's a pit with bars across it to stop cows from running down my parents' lane. Cows and bullocks are not particularly smart but they shy away from cattle grids. (Although the occasional bullock actually leapt over the cattle grid and took a trot down around the garden, trampling my father's daffodils.) However, frogs and hedgehogs do not have very good depth perception and often ended up trapped down the cattle grid. Naturally, we children felt compelled to "rescue" them. Many's an afternoon I spent on my stomach by the cattle grid with a pair of super-strength gardening gloves, trying to coax a sulky hedgehog through the bars. It's not easy: hedgehogs, as one may have heard, don't take kindly to human help.

Aside from that, we don't have an awful lot to offer in the way of entertainment. In fact, the highlight of the neighbourhood is The Big Tree. It is - brace yourselves - a big tree. This is it, in all its glory (plus a passing tractor pulling a foul-smelling slurry spreader. A romantic pastoral scene, indeed.)

The Big Tree

Such is our lack of local landmarks that a visit to the Gingerbreads inevitably includes a walk to The Big Tree. We walk down the road, look at the tree, turn around and come back. Exciting stuff. Well, actually, it is if you're small, because a walk to The Big Tree also involves checking out the progress of the crops in the fields, any passing farm machinery, status check of the grazing herds of cows and bullocks, looking for blackberries, dandelions and any other seasonal fruit or flora, culminating in a 365 degree inspection of The Big Tree itself. When my husband first visited my family, my little brothers were much littler. Naturally, they were dying to bring him out on the roller-coaster ride that is a trip to The Big Tree. Off we went, Robbie, Wilmie and Jimmy Gingerbread in tow. With much fanfare we presented to him The Big Tree in all its glory. 

He looked it up and down and said, "Oh, I see. It really is just a tree. From all the fuss, I thought that was just, like, a code name for something else. Something more ... spectacular. But it's actually just ... a Big Tree."

Duh, my little brothers' faces clearly said. He's not the brightest, is he?

An Unexpected Christmas

 

Hello everyone - and a very merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!
Our Christmas has been very adventurous and unexpected so far. We had a horrid week - just horrible. Heavy snow meant that we had to get up at dawn to clear snow, then I had to trudge-slash-slip-slash-slither to work in snow and ice, teach in wet clothes, turn around and trudge-slash-slip-slash-slither home in the early darkness of midwinter. Our washing machine broke down. My keyring - with all of my keys - was lost-slash-stolen, and I spent all of Wednesday walking from shop to shop in sleet and rain, trying to retrace my steps from the previous day, hoping that some kind soul had handed them in. On Thursday morning, yesterday, I got up early, worked, came home, threw my (actually, our) stuff into two suitcases and we flew out the door to the train, on our way to Ireland for Christmas, leaving behind a filthy house and a dishwasher stacked full of dirty dishes. Oh, the stress. The sickening stress.

None of this was made any easier by the fact that Ireland is under cover of snow. Dublin airport had been closed for days due to heavy snow but reopened yesterday. However, shortly after we arrived in Frankfurt, Ireland's airport authorities closed the airport again due to unexpectedly heavy snow. Our flight to Dublin was cancelled and thus we found ourselves stranded at Frankfurt airport at 11 p.m.

I'll spare you the gory details of being herded through Frankfurt's vast terminal with two or three hundred other frazzled strandees, the endless queuing, or the confusion, just let me tell you that the nice people at Lufthansa put us up for the night and offered to put on a special flight this morning, Christmas Eve, to Dublin. I mean, they offered it, but due to a forecasted blizzard, they couldn't actually guarantee that it was going to take off. The chances were 50-50 that we'd actually get to Dublin. And if we didn't, the chances of getting back to Gingerbreadtown were almost null - nothing much happens after lunchtime on Christmas Eve in Germany, so we had the choice of chancing it and hoping we wouldn't end up spending Christmas snowed into Frankfurt airport's Sheraton Hotel, or just giving up and going home. And at that point, exhausted, sweaty and defeated, we just wanted to go home. Home, home, home. So we got up early this morning and took a train home to the Gingerbread House.

Under normal circumstances, I would have been devastated. And, truth be told, I am disappointed not to be at home in the bosom of my family. But the reports online about travelling conditions in Ireland make scary reading - I'm glad that the Gingerbread Brother and his Lady Wife didn't have to make the hair-raising journey to Dublin to pick us up. I'm glad we didn't end up on a flight that was diverted, like the Lufthansa flight to Dublin before ours (it was diverted to Manchester. Can you imagine being nearly home - very nearly - but stuck far away enough to know you've no chance of making it for Christmas?) And I'm very glad that we had time to get to a supermarket to re-stock the fridge that we'd so diligently emptied (the horrors of this week were compounded by my husband's insistence that we eat all the leftovers in the fridge before we leave. It's hard to cope with stress on a diet of scrambled eggs and pickles.) So now we're in the Gingerbread House, sitting in the reflected light of candles and Christmas oleander, listening to Christmas music and watching the snow drift past the window. It's our first Christmas in our house. And, all things considered, we're very lucky.

In Ireland there's a tradition of lighting a candle and placing it in the window on Christmas Eve. As a nod to the Holy Family who found no room at the inn, it's supposed to show travellers that they'd be welcome to find shelter in your home on Christmas Eve. When you drive through the pitch-dark Irish countryside on Christmas Eve, you can pick out the light of the candles in people's front windows - a beautiful tradition, a lovely symbol.  This evening I lit four candles and put them in our window, thinking of all the people who travelled across rough seas, snowy skies and icy roads to get to their loved ones. And a small token gesture for all the people stranded at airports and ferry docks, spending a Christmas of sorts on a camp-bed or in a hotel room.

And they call it Zuppy love...

Christmas has become a complicated event. We have to tread carefully, so as not to insult any family members - and inevitably we fail. Neither my mother nor my mother-in-law is willing or able to understand why we cannot (will not) spend Christmas at their respective homes. In the interests of fairness, we divide our Christmasses up between countries. This year, we're going home to Ireland for Christmas. One of the reasons for this is the encroaching seniority of Zuppy, my parents' dog.
"He's twelve, you know," says the husband. "He mightn't be around for much longer."
And a tear glistens in his eye.
Okay, maybe not, but I cannot emphasise enough the special bond that Mr Gingerbread and Zuppy share. It's astonishing that Zuppy even recognises me - after all, he only sees me two or three times a year for a week or two at a go, but he knows who I am and knows that I'm a soft touch for treats. And although he's pleased to see me, this is nothing compared to the near-orgasmic joy when he's reunited with my husband, whom he sees even less frequently. And the joy is mutual. As the car pulls down my parents' driveway, Mr G's nose is pressed up against the windowpane, waiting for the sight of the dog.
"Zuppy!" he hollers.
Zuppy freezes, then - bang!
Off he goes, bounding down my parents' yard with ears flapping, tongue lolling out and teeth bared in a joyful grin. And that's just my husband. The dog looks just as happy.

It's been like this from the start. Back then, when dog and man were younger, fitter and more energetic, they liked to play together in the yard. It was quite an extraordinary sight: Very Big German Man and Very Small Jack Russell. Their favourite game was 'That's My Stick!': my husband threw the stick, the dog caught the stick, then they spent twenty minutes playing tug-o'-war with aforementioned stick.
"That's my stick!" my husband would yell, waving the stick (and the dog attached to it) in the air.
"That's going to end badly," said Gingerbread Daddy one day, looking out the kitchen window. Husband and dog were nose to nose, husband on all fours on the grass.
Gingerbread Daddy looked over at me. "That's going to end badly," he repeated in A Significant Tone.
"Don't worry about husband," I said, "He won't let the dog hurt him."
Daddy rolled his eyes. "Yerra, I'm not worried about that eejit," he said, "It's the dog. He might lose a tooth hanging out of that stick."
"I'll talk to him," I said. To the dog or the man? Probably both, I thought. I looked at the window: at that point, dog and man had become a tangle of limbs and I just didn't have the heart to break them up.

Which is a pity, because seconds later my husband ran into the house, his hand aloft. He was bleeding heavily from a gash in his hand.
"It wasn't his fault!" he said, "I swear, it wasn't his fault. I put my hand in his mouth. He was expecting the stick - he was just over-excited."
I cleaned the wound (it wasn't deep) and affixed an appropriate plaster. Obviously, I gave him a telling off for playing rough: husband hung his head in shame. That done, I went outside to give the dog a telling off - but Zuppy had gone underground, hiding in the woodpile with only the stick for company.

They were not allowed to play together for a while till they'd both clamed down and learned to play nicely. Then they skipped off down the yard, waving the contentious stick, and within minutes they were rolling around the grass again.
Oh, the joy. Mr Gingerbread just can't wait.

Pass the tissues. We're stranded

I was sitting in the school canteen, eating my rice stirfry and chatting to my colleague about our rascally students. Suddenly, the school secretary appeared at my elbow.
"Gingerbread Lady," she said solemnly, "I have some bad news. Your husband just rang to stay that your flight has been cancelled because of the volcano in Iceland."
I winked at her. "Oh, really?" I smirked. "A volcano?" Wink, wink.
You see, this morning I called into the secretaries to check that everything was okay for my day off tomorrow and they'd been envying me because of my impending trip home. They got details of the location, my Brand New Posh Dress, my Impossibly High But Incredibly Sexy shoes, etc and it was generally agreed that I was, indeed, a lucky duck. So when she turned up to tell me that our flight'd been cancelled due to this - well, let's face it - preposterous excuse, I thought she was pulling my leg.

But she wasn't
Woe is me. Or, better said, woe is us.
We're stuck fast in Gingerbread Germany. If it were to help in any way, I'd cry. Or smash something. Or scream. But unfortunately none of the afore-mentioned helps disperse volcanic ash. Luckily, we found out about it before we set off for the airport in Frankfurt, so however bad it is, it could have been much, much worse. At least tonight we'll be sleeping in our own beds and not on a plastic chair in an airport terminal.

But I'm missing the Gingerbread Brother's wedding and my little pile of Gummibears sits forlornly on the dresser, next to my Brand New Posh Dress, which is hanging in its plastic wrap on the wardrobe. The sight of them is so pathetic, I can't even bear to look.

I'm off to scoff a bar of milk chocolate and feel sorry for myself.