(Damien and Nat are organising a Flamenco Festival in Dublin 23rd to 31st July www.dublinflamencofestival.com)

The de-clutter is continuing slowly, and today (Sunday) we went to Ikea. Not entirely sensible, because we might have been tempted to buy more clutter. Fortunately we were not tempted… and we came home with only what we went for… drinking glasses. But we were tempted by the restaurant.

(An Ikea glass?)

Well, Denis was tempted by the fifteen meatballs. Yes, exactly fifteen, there’s a choice, you can have ten, fifteen or twenty. He choose fifteen along with potatoes, gravy and some fruit sauce… Watching the woman speedily scoop the meatballs onto his plate, I couldn’t believe she had time to count them. She didn’t. When we sat down and he went off to get a knife and fork, I counted. Only fourteen…. Oh no, we would have to do something… what? Ask for an extra meatball? Would they need to check the cctv footage to make sure we hadn’t eaten it? As I contemplated our position Denis returned. I told him about the problem. He took out his fork to investigate further.

(Blue benches along the pier in Dun Laoghaire)

And he found the missing meatball… along with its friend. He had been given sixteen meatballs! Noooo, now we had a different problem. How would we return the extra meatball? And which one was it anyway? I seemed to be handling this problem on my own and expected some help from Denis. But he hadn’t let me down, he had formulated an inspired plan and had even executed it, while I was panicking.

He ate the extra meatball!

(Orange worms spotted near the pier….)

And it made me wonder…. is it possible that we sometimes make a mountain out of a meatball? Maybe it’s just a meatball? What if all our problems were just meatballs?

It’s just a meatball, Mairead.