Joey and Mikey are beginning to niggle at each other. A full fight is brewing, this is something that happens with children when they are faced with the prospect of being cooped up in a car with each other for any more than ten minutes. I reckon that we should be within the grounds of Glendalough within an hour and a half and I ask them to stop and to think of my patience. I often describe my patience as something that is wearing thin or fit to explode and I am aware in my heart that I shouldn’t bother expressing my frustration to them because it doesn’t get me anywhere and if anything it frustrates all of us. I think that they get at each other because they cannot help themselves, because they recognize that Jenny and I are trying to hang on to some semblance of love and it isn’t easy. My mother told me that she didn’t have it particularly smooth with my father and she told me that I oughtn’t to be unrealistic in terms of my expectations. I wonder if my kids can pick up on my disappointment.

I am a nature man myself, the landscape in all its variety evokes significant pleasure in me. I tell Jenny often that we have such a beautiful country and we should appreciate it. It starts to rain, it pisses down. I rather enjoy the rain myself, it dispels bad feelings as well as old streaks of urine, dog fouling and sick and other detritus found in gutters across the country. Jenny complains about the rain. I find her negativity difficult to accept and I decide to ignore her observations on precipitation.

Mikey wouldn’t eat his Coco Pops this morning, she says.

I keep my eyes on the road. It seems like a small thing. As a father I should probably be grateful that a child of mine is resolutely refusing to eat a cereal which I know in my heart to be extremely non-nutritious, but I am not happy. What worries me is the fact that he won’t eat any cereal at all. Frosties, which I imagine to be a dream for most children, are left to go into a soggy, autistic-beige pulpy mess. I have resorted to boiling Mikey an egg in the mornings, timing it so it’s still runny, ochre yellow. He has been happy with this but lately I’ve noticed that he’s not finishing it off and the yolk of the egg is allowed to dribble out on the plate and I have to use a scrubber, with a certain tenacity, to remove the stains.