I had a notion that myself and the General might spend some time walking this summer, jaunting up and down the hills of Leitrim and along the beaches of Donegal, eating salads and nuts and maybe swimming in the sea and thus we might loose some weight.
Not that the General gets into the sea. But I was foolish enough three years ago to buy a wet suit in Dunfanaghy, which has been hanging in a shed now for three winters.
Years ago we used to talk about all we could do in summer, such as climbing Sliabh Liag or Sheemore, or visiting some famous fairs. I always felt the climax of summer came in the middle of August, with festivals such as the Puck, the Lammas and the Fair of Muff, a horse fair in Cavan that the General liked to attend in the old days, although he didn’t do much but stand on the street, eating ice cream cones and getting stains all over his waistcoat.
But nowadays we talk about what we have done in the past rather than what we are going to do in the future, and how the weather was always better in the old days.
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There was a time when we used to go boating. I possessed a small fibre glass-dinghy with an outboard motor that took us from Spencer Harbour to Drumshanbo, from Battlebridge to Carrick-on-Shannon and occasionally to Dromod.
At the time I had a black Labrador who always dug his hind legs into the ground at the jetty and stuck his arse to the floor trying to avoid the boat. There were two things that dog feared: me playing a flute, and the General pulling a cork from a wine bottle.
‘When I am showering I find it difficult to reach my feet,’ he confesses
We used to pack lots of wine on that boat, and off we would go down the river waving at Germans as they passed on cruisers akin to small ocean liners. We would wave with wine glasses in our hands and they would glare back with mighty indignation.
Sometimes we moored on an island and listened to the birds and cooked steaks on small trays of charcoal. We urinated in the wilderness and the General would quote from The Wind in the Willows, saying that there was nothing half so much pleasure as “messing about in boats”.
We tied the boat up at a canal lock one day when the water was at the highest mark and went off to the pub. When we returned someone had opened the lock, letting the water level fall to the lowest mark, which was a difference of three metres, and the boat was hanging by the rope like a bar of soap on the side of bath tub.
But all that was long ago.
When the General comes calling nowadays we sit on the patio like characters in a Beckett play. The only thing that remains the same is the Bordeaux wine.
And I am growing stiff. I have pains down each leg largely due to surgical interventions of one kind or another over the years.
“But you’re not as stiff as me,” the General declares. “I have great difficulties in the bath.”
I ask him to explain.
“When I am showering I find it difficult to reach my feet,” he confesses. “I can’t bend without falling over. And I can’t sit on the edge of the bath because it’s thin enough to go up my arse. So I am obliged to raise my foot on to the edge closest to the wall and then bend over and scrub the foot, and I use the wall to balance myself.”
“So what’s the problem?” I wonder.
“The bath is beside the wall,” he says. “I can lean on the wall for balance and place my foot on the edge of the bath in order to wash it. But the only edge I can use with safety is on my left. So it means I can only wash my left foot. If I were to rest the other foot, the right foot, on the other edge, I would fall and break a hip.”
I ask him does he never think of turning around in the bath, instead of facing in the same direction all the time.
“When you have finished with the left foot,” I say, “just turn around. Then the edge nearest the wall will be on your right. So you can wash the right foot.”
“You never cease to amaze me,” he declares acerbically. The General was never good at taking advice.