The Grass Is Greener...Right Here

Trying To Get By In Dubai

My husband Marcel used to travel for work rather a lot. I was always left holding the babies. When he was away, I would picture him in rooms that were clean and tidy, eating meals that were relaxed and prepared by someone else, and feel resentful. He told me it wasn’t the experience I imagined and that these trips weren’t usually much fun. Time passed, the children grew, and Marcel’s work commitments involved less travel, just as mine started to involve lots of it. I soon realised that Marcel had been right all along: intense work schedules, lots of tedious travelling in buses and across airports, solitary nights in underwhelming hotel rooms, food not cooked by a mother. I soon tired of it, and realised that while exploring new places is nice, being in your lovely home, curling up on your lovely sofa and eating your own lovely food beats work travel any day.

Marcel travelled for work last week for the first time in ages, to Dubai. He would gladly have taken a trip on a bus and an underwehelming hotel room, if he could. But no such luxuries were to be on the itinerary.

He arrived in Dubai after an overnight flight, an “energetic” child in the seat in front preventing sleep, to the worst storm the country had experienced in 75 years. The plane couldn’t land and circled for an hour and a half. Then local floods meant there were no taxis, and 200 people waiting for any that might arrive. Marcel decided to get a metro, but his data was gone in an instant when he turned on his phone, so he didn’t know where to go. After an hour he found himself on the wrong side of Dubai. He walked for an hour, past submerged, abandoned cars, and found himself in a tram repair yard. Two workers took pity on him and invited him into their hut (as my brother said, “when you have just landed in a new city and you’re in a hut with two workers, you know things have gone wrong”). They tried to call him a taxi, to no avail. After another hour, Marcel decided to walk to his hotel. “You can’t,” said the hut workers, “it’s 9.5km.” But Marcel trudged off anyway pulling his suitcase behind him, the rain now torrential – heavier than he has ever seen, he says, and he has lived in the tropics and, of course, Galway. The road occasionally disappeared beneath vast puddles. “I could not have been any wetter, Ro,” he said, “had I hopped into a bath with all my clothes on.” A taxi driver pulled up after about 5km of walking and took him most of the way: finally he called me from his hotel, interrupted by a bang. The hotel was directly hit by lightning and filled with sparks. Over the following 24 hours the weather returned to normal (desert sun and heat) and his conference went well, but the travails of travel, whether for work of play, were once again brought home to me, and I was grateful for my humdrum life in Galway.

In Galway, and the country as a whole, we’ve had wall-to-wall rain during April (no flooding though), and it’s been very cold. The first few days of the week that Marcel was away, my terrier Reuben and I enjoyed our alone-together time. Halfway through the week I travelled to Bray, to stay with my father while my mother spent a few days away. The day after I arrived, I arranged to meet my younger daughter in the Natural History Museum in the heart of Dublin City. To my enduring shame, I didn’t take her as a little girl, but in my (feeble) defense it was closed for a few years and then I forgot to check after it as open again. She is nearly twenty now, and she adored it: the musty Victorian nature of it, its great mahogany cabinets, its elaborate cast-iron heating vents underfoot, the original black and red chequered tiles on the floor, the bedraggled taxidermied animals that have been gazed upon by visitors to Dublin for nearly two hundred years.

On the way in, I sketch this man on the train. It’s a messy and thoroughly inexpert sketch, and the ink didn’t behave in a waterproof manner, but I like how the pink ink ran into the paint, and that the man has two hands.

The Faraway Hills Are Greener…

Two days later my mother made a welcome return, and brought the equally-welcome sunshine with her. On Saturday morning we drove into the Wicklow Mountains, past the entrance to my childhood home and further towards the woods. Our house, a classically 1960s split-level bungalow built into the mountainside by my parents, was beside Powerscourt Waterfall, the highest waterfall in Ireland or Britain and a popular tourist attraction. Our neck of the woods was a natural paradise for a child to grow up in, and my many siblings meant my childhood was a cross between The Waltons and Tom Sawyer. We spent lots of time roaming the woods, and my parents were very keen on mountain hikes en famille. Powerscourt Waterfall was always busy at weekends, but the hill paths were usually fairly under-patronised. Only at weekends might there be ten cars in the car park, itself a recent-enough development. On the Saturday that my mother and I visited, well over a hundred cars were parked on both sides of the car park and down the middle, with a constant stream of cars exiting, having abadoned hope of finding a spot. The hill descending to the Waterfall entrance was a solid line of cars that snaked its way far back up the hill. I realised how lucky we were to have arrived when we did, before it got so busy.

This is a sketch of my mother and her little dog Babette. We were right on the edge of a babbling brook, very Wicklow in its peaty brown colour, with crystal clear water coming straight from the mountains. My kids and I revere this water and always try to fill flasks before we leave. My mother has always been a svelte lady and is half the size that I have depicted her, but she is also the world’s most animated painter and all her limbs flash furiously as she paints – including her face – so I am very grateful to have got even this shape down on paper, inaccurate or not. The hills didn’t move though, and I caught them just as I hoped.

As a child and young person, I stared and stared at the tree line surrounding our mountain home, longing to be able to draw them. Now I can. An ambition realised. I’ll take that!

Making The Most Of A Sunny Morning – In A Car Park

Back in Galway a few days later, I hung around in a car park, partly because my elder daughter was heading back to Dublin and I wanted to make sure she was on her bus safely (she’s 24 but the ticket wasn’t certain) but mostly because I had paid for 24 hours and I wanted more than the 45 minutes I had used to have coffee with her. So I drew the cars in front of me. The sun, as you can see, was back with a vengeance and I should have been at home in Kilcolgan lolling on the lovely green grass but I am desperately fond of getting my money’s worth. Ha!

Free Class Alert!

I did my free taster class on Monday 22nd April, and if you would like to do it it’s right there on my website under Free Samples, I think. If you have watched it and have booked a space on the course 4th-8th June then make sure to have all the materials you’ll need on the day. You have time now but it will go fast…

There are still places available on the course but they all sold out last year – twice – so don’t leave it too long. I can assure you of loads of skills in watercolour, as well as in drawing in ink, by the time you’re done. Playtime in art for grown ups! This si what we did in the taster class. It was designed to fit into two hours, so I tried to pack everything in a brief fashion, but there’ll be lots of fun stuff on creating your own recipes, cards and illustrations during the week-long course. After it you should be confident in approaching life as a whimsical watercolourist – the best life I know.