Beaming

Full exciting story here

It had been a while.
Close to a year actually. When Mimi successfully scored 1,000 points in her Good Behaviour Chart.
The prize? The accessory of her dreams: her own beam to do gymnastics in the back garden.
I did have a glance at gymnastics equipment websites and decided quite early on that EUR2,500 for a professional beam may be on the extravagant side as a reward for managing two whole months of being how-she-should-be-without-a-reward.
I found out that three Ikea wooden stools and a 5 meter length of 4×2 would just as well do the job.

I was surprisingly efficient when it came to the stools and they were purchased in September last year, just a little over a month after the successful completion of the I-can-be-a-good-girl-if-I-want-or-if-there-is-a-beam-up-for-grabs challenge.

By the end of November, all three had been assembled.

By the beginning of December, all three had been adopted by Mrs Raheny as hers, in the obvious absence of a beam to anchor onto them.

Today, I got my act together and decided that I would be a man of my word*, albeit late.

Mimi and I went to the Builders Provider store on Patrick Street (superb customer service guys, I mean it, you had to untie a whole bundle to sell me one length of extra-quality imported 4×2, for the very reasonable price of EUR11) and somehow managed to get back home in the Daciamobile without beheading pedestrians or destroying the boot door by ramming the beam into a parked double decker bus. The length of 4×2 stuck out by so much that we looked a bit like a cheap modern version of a demented knight jousting on his gleaming white destrier (I can’t quite imagine Sir Lancelot mounting an as-cheap-as-it-gets Dacia Logan…)

I was bracing myself for a distinct lack of enthusiasm from Mrs Raheny once she realised the actual size of a 5 meter length of 4×2 and its impact on our already small back garden.
But she was surprisingly cool about that aspect of the undertaking.
She was too busy grieving the disappearing of her three multi-purpose stools…

As for Mimi, she was beaming!



* unlike Nana and Pepe Jean-Claude who promised Uncle Martin and I an inflatable Marsouin boat (I can still picture it in all its magnificence in the 1982 CAMIF catalogue) but never actually followed up on their promise… I forgave (Nana was obviously sleepless with worry at the idea of us drowned or drifting helplessly in the middle of the Atlantic eating the odd flying fish – or each other), but I never forgot.