#003 - A day in the life of Majella Moran

She might be a soft touch in the classroom but nobody messes with Maj's boot room and gets away with it

Under pressure to get the ball rolling on the time capsule, public relations manager Aisling persuaded her best friend, local teacher Majella Moran, to submit A Day in the Life. Majella was uncharacteristically quick to produce the goods as she’s avoiding a meeting with the school board to discuss a sos beag* that went on for seventy minutes while Maj was on yard duty. The kids were thrilled with the extended playing time though and isn’t that all that matters?

ARTEFACT #003: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MAJELLA MORAN

Thursday, March 14th 2024 

6.32 am

My husband, Pablo, wakes me up with a cup of tea (Barry’s, half a sugar, good drop of milk) and two verses of ‘Bamboleo’, as always. Today is a big day for us – we’re finding out if the planning permission for our forever home on the site we bought last year has been approved. I put on my LED mask and say two ‘Hail Marys’ while it stimulates the collagen in my face and improves the skin’s elasticity.

I’m the deputy head in St Anthony’s National School in Santry, for my sins. The school is about an hour and fifteen minutes away so I need to be on the road no later than half seven because traffic on the M50 is cat in the mornings. Baby Aisling is going through a sleep regression so she’s been up since 5 am practising her Spanish with Daddy. Pab is full sure she said “chicharrón” the other day and I haven’t the heart to tell him it was clearly a belch. She can barely focus six feet in front of her yet.

7 am

After a quick shower (I only wash my hair on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays because it’s in bits, along with my pelvic floor, since the baby was born) I feed Aisling and we sit down for breakfast. Then I get a text from Pat Curran to say he’s leaving the sorting office and there’s nothing in today’s post for us. Feck it anyway! He says he heard from someone at bingo last night that there was a last-minute objection to our planning permission application. I feel like I’m going to pass out. This can’t be happening! The site is on the Knocknamanagh Road just before the Rathborris crossroads. We got a good deal because there was a rumour about a fairy fort in the field, but we got Chap Conlon’s granny out for a look. She’s a seer and for fifty quid she’ll inspect your land or do you a one-room exorcism. She found no trace of a fairy fort so we felt safe to go ahead and apply for the planning. When I tell Pab there seems to be a hold up he’s so disappointed he can’t even look at his Coco Pops.

7.30 am

I stick on a true crime podcast to try and relax and point my Peugeot 106 towards the N7. It’s not that long since I passed my test so I still close my eyes when I merge onto the motorway, but I’m getting better. Big Aisling says that confidence is half the battle and she’s not wrong.

Pablo is a stay-at-home dad. He works in the bar of the Mountrath Hotel in the evenings and in Filan’s Garage on a Saturday, so it’s a great feeling knowing Baby Aisling is with him while I’m in school. I have a student teacher this week so I stop at a Circle K for a few bottles of PRIME to bribe the children into being good. I clip the wing mirror of a Skoda Octavia because all I can think about is this bloody planning permission. There has to be something I can do but what?

9 am

I arrive at school, slightly shook after getting bipped by a white van for being in the wrong lane getting off a roundabout. It’s always a white van, isn’t it? They forget they were only learning once too. Prick.

11 am

I’m wrecked after a difficult morning of teaching fractions combined with planning permission stress. I eat a sausage roll at my desk for my sos beag while I’m waiting for my turn with the photocopier. We buy the sausage rolls par-baked from Carol Boland in BallyGoBrunch café downstairs from our apartment. Having an air fryer in the staffroom has truly changed the game. I’ve been trying to talk Carol into doing the cooking slot on Ireland AM for the publicity, but she says she’d get too flustered talking about sausages in front of Alan Hughes. 

12.30 pm

When I open my phone at sos mór,** there’s a picture of Pablo and Baby Aisling at the site. Pablo is on his knees. We have to get this house built – I’ve spent so long thinking of names for our Instagram account. I like “Home is Where the Gin Is” but Pab prefers “Mi Casa es Su Casa”. Last Christmas Mammy gave us a book of house plans. It took us ages to settle on one but we’re going for a four-bed dormer bungalow with a walk-in pantry and a boot room. When I told Denise Kelly about the pantry she turned green. I can’t understand why anyone would object to it, it’s in the backarse of nowhere. It almost feels … personal.

2.30 pm

I have an arrangement with Bean Uí Mordha that I can leave shortly after school finishes as long as I do my deputy head admin at home. I ignore the daggers through the staff room window and am straight back into the car and listening to my power ballads playlist for the drive. Maybe channelling Celine Dion will help. She’s been through a lot too.

3.45 pm

Pablo has work at 4 pm so he’s getting ready to go as I arrive in. It’s hard not seeing each other much now that I’m back at work after mat leave, but I’m hoping to get a job in the new Educate Together they’re building in Knock, which would mean no more communion prep. The dream. I’ll miss the glamour of Santry but I’m looking forward to saving €80 a week on petrol. He mentions it’s all hands on deck this evening because there’s the afters of a funeral at the Mountrath. Peadar Doran, who played on the county team that got into the All Ireland semis in 1958, god rest his soul. It’ll be huge. That gives me an idea.

4.30 pm

I throw Baby Aisling into the pram and power walk into the village –  I need mince and a brown envelope. The mince is for dinner and the brown envelope is for Dinny Delaney, the local councillor who wouldn’t miss a funeral this size for love nor money. I bump into Terry Crowley at the Lotto machine. Of course he’s already heard about the planning permission and offers his commiserations. I tell him not to count us out yet and dodge Una Hatton who’s trying to decide between extra soft or balsam tissues and is holding up the whole queue in the process. Eamon Filan tells me they have no brown envelopes and tries to placate me with a white one. I tell him to get real and end up forgetting my mince in the melee.

5.30 pm

Baby Aisling watches an episode of Dora while I ring my mother. She doesn’t have a brown envelope and neither does Tessie Daly, who had called in to borrow a watering can. Tessie tells me she’ll ask Mags from Zumba with Mags if she has one at home and will text me if she does. I normally wouldn’t let Baby Aisling have this much screen time but these are extreme circumstances.

6.30 pm

I eat my dinner on the floor with Baby Aisling. She gets great craic out of this DJ Bouncin’ Beats she got from Santy, so we play with that while I receive twelve different messages from various people around the village who don’t have brown envelopes either. I feel like crying. Baby Aisling deserves a boot room even though she’s started pulling chunks out of my hair and has broken two necklaces so far this week.

7 pm

It’s time for Baby Aisling’s bath. Afterwards I dress her for bed and feed her and we read the book of house plans. I cry when I show her which room was going to be hers and point out the garage for the little Range Rover Pablo bought her after she rolled over for the first time. She whinges for a second when I put her into the cot so I hum her favourite song, the Canary Islands national anthem, until her eyelids get so heavy she can’t stop them closing. I make sure she’s fully asleep before I crawl out of the room on my hands and knees.

7.30 pm

I tidy up all the toys and shite that are all over the living room and load the dishwasher. Then I ring the one person I know I can turn to in a crisis: Big Aisling. When I tell her my brown envelope plan she’s absolutely horrified although she does admit that desperate times call for desperate measures and it’s great to see me showing initiative. I text Pablo at work to see if Dinny Delaney is there and he confirms he is. I ask him to find out if he’s on Revolut. He’s not.

9.30 pm

It’s my turn to get up with Baby Aisling tomorrow and I’m already wrecked after everything today so I decide to hit the hay. She’ll be awake at least twice in the night too looking to be fed. Mammy keeps telling me that I was on baby rice when I was three months old and I slept through the night but I just smile and nod and try not to mention she also smoked the whole nine months she was pregnant.

11 pm

Pablo arrives home and wakes me when he breaks down looking at kitchen islands on Instagram. I make us both cups of tea and we curl up on the couch with our phones. Ireland’s foremost influencer Colette Greene has an ad up for a built-in air fryer. When I google the price I nearly fall off my seat, but I add it to my Pinterest board anyway. Maybe I can manifest it. And a house to put it in. We get into bed and I rub Pablo’s hair until he falls into a fitful sleep.

11.30 pm

A text from Helen O’Brien! I went to school with Helen but haven’t seen her since the night of our Debs when she nearly lost her eye in a food fight. She says sorry for the late text but she works in the county council planning office! Aisling was in touch earlier to explain my predicament and between her, me and the wall someone DID try an object to our planning application yesterday but they wouldn’t leave a name so it was rejected! The planning is approved, she put the letter into the post herself today! She said she heard I was looking for brown envelopes so she’s going to send me out a few tomorrow now that she has my address if I’ll forgive the GDPR breach.

We’re really building our house. I consider waking Pablo up to tell him but decide to surprise him in the morning instead. If he doesn’t get eight hours of good REM sleep he can be pretty emotional and there’s only so much I can take. As I’m drifting off I can’t help but wonder who would try and stop us building our dream home, and why…?

*My greatest fear is that the Irish language might have died out in 100 years so I try to use the cúpla focal where I can. Sos beag means ‘little break’.

**Sos mór means ‘big break’.

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Coming next week: 20 years since its last sighting, the Beast of Ballygobbard is the lead story in the golf club newsletter