RM October 26 - Young Love

I am skipping one or two of the columns because they have been posted here already in one form or another, here's the latest.

A CHILL isn’t the only thing in the air as the nights are getting longer; romance is very much all around me (not mine I might add) as the Young Wan has met a lovely wee fella.

It’s been going on now for a couple of weeks and it could have been a disastrous beginning considering he was her pal’s boyfriend first for a few weeks. God teenagers are so fickle and it was clear to me anyway that the Young Wan had a little glint in her eye over this fella.

I warned her ‘friend’s boyfriends are untouchable, don’t go there’. But she did and thankfully the pal didn’t take umbrage or fall out with her, it was all resolved amiably and the romance was on.

He will meet her after school and walk her to her bus, he meets her after her drama class and presents her with credit for her phone and he has met me already, poor lad.

I had one of those pulling-hair-out frustration and anger building up moments over the weekend. The Young Wan was in drama and I was working and the arrangement was to phone when she was finished. Only her phone was on its last power legs and so was mine, a bit of a disaster really.

The end result was when I finally heard from her, an hour late, I asked her where she was. ‘The Number 1 shop in Temple Bar’. ‘Where?’ I said. Well actually it was more like ‘WHERE?? FOR *£$£% SAKE’.

She repeated herself and I told her to get to the Central Bank but not before the line went dead. Now it is a long time since I hung out in Temple Bar but the Number 1 shop is not a landmark that I know. Is it a landmark that anyone knows?

To cut a long story short I scouted around all the black-clad teens at the Central Bank hoping that she had heard me, of course she didn’t and I headed down to the main square wondering how on earth I would find her. At this stage it was starting to get dark and while she is not stupid she doesn’t get out at night and I was starting to panic.

Then we had one of those moments where I was outside a shop when she phoned again. She said she was outside the Centra, I replied ‘you are not I am outside Centra and you are not here’. I could kinda hear her replies not only in my phone but also to the side of me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her at the other side of the shop’s entrance. Giving out for Ireland I stormed off and she followed.

Through the red mist that descended on me I realised the tall good looking lad that had been standing beside her must be the new beau, only I was too annoyed to realise it at the time.

Once I calmed down I felt guilty, what an introduction, so I invited him over for Sunday dinner and even cooked a home-made apple pie.

And he is lovely, chatty and polite not to mention helpful. He insisted the Young Wan start the dishes now and helped clean up after dinner. Unlike some of the sullen nothing to say for themselves teenagers, he is a charming credit to his mum and dad. I think I made a better impression on the second meeting than the first, not that it was a meeting more like the beginnings of World War 3.

This is the first ‘real’ boyfriend the Young Wan has had, well in my definitions anyway and she made a good choice, someone nice to treat her well. The fact that she won’t see him over mid-term because she is grounded and not allowed phone calls is a story for another day.

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