The Sigla Blog

If, like many people, you plan on putting your feet up tomorrow and reading the papers, you have even more reason to coerce your menfolk into running the hoover around and washing some clothes. Tomorrow January 6th - as mentioned last year - is Nollaig na mBan or Women’s Christmas. Celebrated chiefly in Ireland and Italy, men are supposed to undertake all manner of housework and domestic stuff, giving their wives/girlfriends/significant others a day off. The fact that it falls on a Saturday this year means you can have no truck with “Aw, but I’m in work” type excuses. My advice is to commandeer the coach, scoff the last of the Christmas chocolate supplies (to me that’s half a box of Butler’s Chocolates and a solitary Curly-Wurly left over from a selection box) and read a book/watch Celebrity Big Brother or just bask in the knowledge that you don’t have to clean the toilet this weekend. In between work, I’ll be switching between John McGahern’s Creatures of the Night - New and Selected Stories and Mary McCarthy’s The Group while Disco Fred tries to catch chocolate off me by doing his best Dickensian orphan routine. This involves looking starved, sad and holding up a quivering paw (the ‘Oliver’, I call it).

Newstalk’s Splanc programme from 10pm-12 tonight will be doing an item on Nollaig na mBan. A producer was kind enough to ask me to contribute but I had to decline on the basis that my rusty Irish would be an offence to Gaelgoirs everywhere, so I suggested Conn.