Carmel and I go back a long way. We met at boarding school when I was twelve years old and Carmel was eleven and a half.  I mention this slight disparity in our respective ages because Carmel herself never fails to, especially since our first significant roundy birthday.  “Of course I’m that bit younger than you…” or “What do you mean at our age.” Yes, Carmel and I go back a long, long, long way, perhaps too long, or certainly longer than I care to remember, and I do believe I may mean that in more than one sense of the word.
 
Let me describe Carmel to you.  Carmel is a nurse, a community nurse. She was born with white shoes, rather large and very flat, and black stockings, not too sheer. Carmel is a ‘managing’ type of person, physically strong, emotionally tough. She is never a day sick, never tired, always on top of things.

 Not for her a raging flu’. “ No, not at all, it’s just a slight chill.” “A broken shoulder? “ she expostulates, “ Surely not, why it’s a mere twinge.” I expect one day to see her with a ten-foot arrow through her vitals and hear her dismiss it as a “wee splinter. Pass me the tweezers”. The problem with stoics like Carmel is that they demand the same high standards from everyone else.
 

Carmel is, I believe, quite fond of me, but she thinks I’m a malingerer, and, worse, a bit of a woz. Take for example, what I can only describe as her cavalier attitude when I was in the early stages of pregnancy with my only child. To describe the ‘slight discomfort’ – her exact words, I went through in the first trimester is to err grossly, on the side of excessive restraint. For days I lay in bed, unable to eat or drink without agonising spasms of sickness, until finally my GP insisted I be admitted to Mount Carmel Hospital and place immediately on a drip. There I remained for seven days without one morsel of food or one drop of liquid passing my lips. On the eight day I was finally permitted to have sold food again, tea and toast. Let me tell you, no meal prepared by a Michelin star chef, has ever been so anticipated as that humble tray of tea and toast.
 
When the care assistant brought in the tray and placed it carefully beside me, I sat up in bed, brushing away tears of gratitude discreetly from my cheeks. Trembling with anticipation I began to pour that the beautiful red gold liquid from spout to cup, then to smear the crisp triangles of perfection with a creamy dairy spread when I heard a deep chuckle coming from the direction of the doorway.

 I recognised the sound. Carmel never laughs; she merely chuckles. “Well, I have to hand it to you for originality at least. You are the only woman ever to be hospitalised for morning sickness, and here you are basking in all the attention!” 

 
Now, I think you have some little idea of Carmel’s personality and disposition, so perhaps it’s time to fill you in on a few details about myself. I am Head of the Guidance Department in a rather famous private girl’s day and boarding school in South Dublin. We count several ambassadors daughters among our numbers, and this year we have an Arab Princess, lovely girl, but a security risk, none the less.

 Many of my colleagues in the Institute envy me the conditions I work under, but I assure them that I have just as many stressful situations to deal with on a daily basis as they have.   My girls have such high expectations of me that there are days when I leave the College absolutely shattered. The amount of organisation that a guidance counsellor has to cope with in a school like mine is quite phenomenal. And the most unexpected things can happen. Take, for example, my visit to the Belfield campus last February.
 
I cannot stress sufficiently the enormous responsibility involved in taking a group of students out on a trip. There is the bus to be ordered, money to be collected, permission slips to be distributed and collected, registers to be taken…..the list is endless. I never make an issue out of any of it, of course; after all, it’s all part of the job. Our visit to the campus began inauspiciously.

The girls chatted happily on the bus, the boarders in particular, delighted to escape the College for the afternoon. I did notice the rather lowering sky outside the bus window and made a mental note to park as close as possible to the Arts building where the tour began and ended. If the weather turned inclement we wouldn’t have to walk too far to the bus. Oh yes, I had everything planned down to the finest detail.

When we reached Belfield, the first few flakes of snow began to fall. I rushed the girls to Lecture Theatre L in the Arts block and the presentation began. It was excellent as usual. UCD, and my girls were engrossed. When the presentation ended, I looked for Gabby, the secretary, recently moved from Student Counselling to Student Affairs, to see about arrangements for the tour.  She’s a nice woman, and very efficient, though her pronunciation is a tad eccentric on occasions.

This time, however, she was not smiling. She looked quite flushed and she was trembling visibly. “We’re all inarticulated with rage here in Student Affairs,” she squawked in strangulated tones, “that dreadful school, Blackstown, is ahead of your. They’re already causing merryham in the engineering building.” My blood froze, and I could feel my reflux problem reasserting itself.
 
Now how to do justice to a description of the Blackstown hooligans? Well, for a start, Blackstown is a breeding ground for viperous young criminals, situated north of the River and from there, due west.  Since it opened its doors in 1979, it has terrorised all the schools in the greater Dublin area, and its graduates may be visited on a weekly basis in some of the best incarceration centres in the city.

“Girls, Girls,” I cried urgently, “Get into line immediately, the tour has been cancelled.” We dashed towards the door and headed down the steps of the Arts building, the girls’ distinctive brown capes flapping in the air.  It was a white world outside and the Belfield campus was under several inches of snow. It looked simply magnificent but this was not the time for imbibing the beauty of the landscape. My reflux was acting up badly and I was utterly shattered. We were within a hair’s breadth of the bus when the first ball hit. A menacing cloud of malevolent teenagers swept into view.

They’d obviously noticed the flapping College capes and recognized the girls. Suddenly the air was filled with the sound of a primeval howl of rage, and the air turned blue with expletives.  Snowballs the weight and size of cannonballs were hurled brutally at my defenceless girls and at me.  By this state I was wet, dishevelled and freezing. My exquisite D&G camel coat was streaked with mud, and I’d lost the left heel of my Christian laboutin boots. “
 
Campus security was simply helpless in dealing with the situation, so several units of the Gardai were called. It took them two full hours to restore order. Words are inadequate to describe the state in which we returned to the College. Needless to say I had to run the gamut of Incensed Principal and Deputy Principal, and Very Angry Parents before finally staggering to my car and driving home. 

Throughout the whole ordeal, the only thing that kept me going was the thought of home. A vision of a boiling hot bath, silk pyjamas, a hot meal, a roaring fire and a glass or three of Chablis made my eyes water. And to top it all, it was Friday evening. My husband, Bartholomew was at Cheltenham, my daughter was having a ‘sleep over’ with a friend, and even my little shiatsu was doing his duty by a lady shiatsu, and had been collected for that purpose this morning by my cousin, Tomas, a shiatsu breeder. Best of all, my brick of a husband had set the fire, put the casserole into the slow cooker and put the Chablis into the cooler, before departing for Cheltenham.
 
I limped into the house, dropped my ruined coat on the floor, kicked off my boots and headed, first of all for the drawing room where a magnificent fire was laid. I lit the fire and then wearily climbed the stairs to the bathroom. Oh, the sheer joy of a soak in a whirlpool bath after the horrors I had suffered that day. Out of the bath and into my LV 100% silk pyjamas. Is there anything more divine than the feel of silk against one’s skin?

 I do love tasteful lingerie, and these pyjamas were an absolute steal in the Harvey Nicks summer sale. It was my first time wearing them; I suppose I’d saved them for just such an occasion as this.
 
Downstairs, the fire was blazing away and the casserole was just waiting to be eaten. I served myself a generous helping, poured myself a large, very large glass of Chablis and settled down before the fire to indulge in the sheer luxury of an evening on my own, with nothing, whatsoever to do. But it wasn’t to be. I no sooner had my first gulp of wine than I heard a knock at the door. I froze.

“It’s probably the pool’s man, if I ignore him he’ll go away,” was my first thought. And then I heard the cacophony of sound that heralds the arrival of my friend Carmel and her hulking great dogs. The penny dropped like a stone, and my heart with it. Carmel was here for her bag of horse manure! 

Did I mention that Carmel, as well as ministering to her patients in Rathglenayre, and taking care of a family of twelve, runs a small, but thriving organic farm? Yes, indeed. She grows all her own vegetables and fruit and tends to a simply enormous menagerie of farm animals. My Bartholomew had promised her a bag of manure from Ballymaconnell, the leading stud farm in Ireland. Its contents were excreted from some of the finest bred horses in the world.
 
With a lump in my throat, my evening in ruins before me, I dragged my weary feet to the door. When I opened it, Carmel took one look at my pyjamas and chuckled, “Don’t tell me you’re in your pyjamas at this time of the day?” Now of all constructions in the English language I detest that one the most, and it happens to be the one that Carmel uses a lot, especially to me. I mean, how is one supposed to answer it? “No, of course I’m not in my pyjamas, you are obviously hallucinating. I should see a doctor if I were you!” But I was simply too shattered to rise to a riposte, and Carmel needed her bag of manure and the bag of manure was in the garden shed.
 
Grabbing a jacket and my green wellies, I squelched my way down the garden path to the shed, followed by Carmel in her green wellies, which I’m absolutely convinced she wears to bed in case there is a husbandry emergency in the middle of the night. Carmel was suitably impressed with the calibre of manure that Bartholomew had provided for her peas and beans etc.

In one swift move, she had the bag across her shoulder and was heading to her four by four as if she was carrying a bag of sweets. The strength of the woman! Everything was going quite smoothly, the bag was shoved into the boot, the dogs were in the back and it was time for me to return to my fire and my dinner and my Chablis. This evening looked as if it could be salvaged after all! The car turned, the front wheels spun, I waved gaily at Carmel, and then it happened. She drove into the  biggest, dirtiest, most evil smelling puddle of water.

 It absolutely drenched me from head to toe. My beautiful LV pyjamas were ruined, utterly ruined. As for Carmel, the last sound I heard was  her deep low chuckle of laughter.