'My father died of fun'

Jean's Journal with Jean Farrell

"Patrick Pearse was the patron Saint of Ireland. He had holes in his hands and feet. Every Friday he used to rise up off the ground. One Easter he rose up outside the GPO. Then Ireland was free."

Every time I hear of teenagers sitting their exams, I think of this answer and it makes me laugh. An examiner came across it on an examination paper.

Wouldn't you wonder was the question about Patrick Pearse, St Patrick, Padre Pio or Jesus Christ ascending into Heaven?

It must be very difficult to supervise exams these days? How can supervisors be certain that the teenagers don’t have their mobile phones, on their person, in the exam hall? Or, if they ask to go out to the toilet, couldn’t the student have one hidden there?

My eldest grandchild is sitting his Junior Cert this year, aged 15. There is an array of cards on sale, wishing them well.

There was absolutely no such thing available when we sat our exams, long ago. I smile when I hear the loads and loads of advice given to parents on how to help their teenagers with their stress, their diets and more.

I honestly don't think that our mother (a great woman with a great interest in education) even knew that we were doing our various exams, back in the 1960s. She was much too busy.

In fact, in 1966, when my oldest sister, Sheelagh, was doing her Leaving Cert and I was doing my Inter Cert, our mother had just given birth to her 10th child. She was 39 at the time.

I mentioned that there have been 8 popes in our lifetime. Here they are: Pope Venerable Pius XII 1939-1958, Pope Saint John XXIII 1958-1963, Pope Saint Paul VI 1963-1978, Pope Blessed John Paul I 1978, Pope Saint John Paul II 1978-2005, Pope Benedict XVI 2005-2013, Pope Francis 2013-2025 and Pope Leo XIV 2025.

I found these facts online. How easy it is to find out information nowadays. Most of the world has a small device in their pockets that is capable of accessing all the knowledge known to man.

Many use their phones to know who has died! I wrote about this new 'hobby' lately of following RIP.ie. Readers identified with it.

"You could have been writing about my husband," one woman wrote. Another said, "Even though your article was about death, it made me laugh out loud."

This woman went on to tell me what her husband's hobby is. "His hobby is his health," she told me. "He spends the day on his phone, reading about every illness under the sun, and he has decided that he has them all," she said with a sigh!

We know about how to look after our health. We have the facts, what we lack is the inclination to heed them, a lot of the time. I know many husbands who choose to completely ignore sage advice given to them by their doctors.

And I know other husbands who walk miles every day, eat no fattening food and drink no alcohol. They are terrified of dying of heart attacks, like their fathers.

"My father died of fun!" wrote Vogue WillIams, in her new book called Big Mouth. I was highly amused by this. She wrote, "He was always out drinking and smoking, having the absolute time of his life, with zero concern for his health."

Wouldn't this make you think? Shouldn't we all want to 'die of fun.' Wouldn't that be much better than spending years in a nursing home, not knowing who we are or where we are?

Back to the land of the living. Remember 'exam weather'? We baked with the heat as we sat in exam halls trying to remember all we knew. Let's hope the sun returns. Concerns about our weather are merely first world problems, however.

How awful it must be to live in Gaza. We learnt the saying, 'The pen is mightier than the sword.' Sadly, this is no longer the case.

The 'pen' (the media) has written much about the horrors of war. However, the amount being spent on 'the sword' (deadly ammunition) is very frightening indeed. What kind of world lies ahead for our little grandchildren? Don't we feel SO helpless as we listen to accounts of all the people starving in Gaza?

And I feel it is flippant now to be writing about another food-related topic. Two women were telling me what they feed their dogs and I was astonished. One dog gets scrambled egg mixed with cooked chicken every day. And, he will not eat it unless she grates parmesan cheese on top.

The other woman buys three raw chickens every week just for her dog. She cooks these and mixes the meat with mashed carrots. And her dog will not eat his dinner unless the carrots are mashed properly!

Our parents would say, "Are they MAD?" When we were young our dog ate scraps like potato skins, cold porridge, and worse! As a young housewife, we bought tins of dog food for our Jack Russell. Now, we feed dry hard nuts to our Labrador and his black shiny coat is magnificent. A fortune is spent on dog food, in Ireland, every year.

I'll end with interesting advice I came across. 'You start dying slowly if you do not travel, if you do not read, if you become a slave to your habits, if you do not, at least, once in your lifetime, run away from sensible advice.'

So, let’s decide to 'die of fun'!