Rathgar in the rare oul times ( yet again !!!!)

My mother was Kathleen Nolan , daughter of Tom and Kate ( nee Howard ).She had only one surviving sibling , a sister , her brother Jack k.i.a. in the Balkans in Oct.1916 , another sister died of TB .
She had seven children .Although she spent all her married life as a 'housewife' she was always deeply interested in the happenings in Dublin of its day . Because of the large family no matter what happened in the city at the time , one of us was sure to have an inside track on the news of the day , either through direct experience or through a work collegue or a friend or a neighbour .
She had studied the Irish language ( before Irish became compulsary in schools , under Art O'Griofa ,an Croibhin Aoibhinn ) and was proud of her knowledge .
She attended 10 o'clock Mass each day in St.Joseph's in Terenure . Shopping for a big family , after mass each day , before the advent of supermarkets , meant having to visit the butcher ,maybe the pork butcher , or the ''baby beef'' butcher , the fruit and veg shop , the dairy , sometimes the fish and poultry shop and other provisions . This meant meeting friends and neighbours and passing on information ( she never let us use the word ''gossip'').
Bread , milk , and laundry were delivered ( in the earlier days ) by horse drawn vans or drays . So the mid-mornings on Rathgar Ave. were very busy indeed , with women coming home from mass or shopping meeting and greeting one another , the deliverymen knocking at doors , horsedrawn vehicles parked by the roadside , the clanging of trams or some of the newly-arrived motor vehicles roaring past .
When the family came home from work/school in the evenings our meal was ready piping hot , a stew , beef or chicken or even rabbit , ready to eat , followed by maybe , a freshly baked Madeira cake , or hot apple or jam tarts , maybe a huge deep apple pie , with whole cloves of course .
Sometimes we would have pancakes or delicious potato cakes baked on the huge black frying pan on the 'hob', big dollops of REAL butter and mugs of hot , sweet tea (from the best blended tea leaves ....none of your 'owl' teabags )......Let me pause for a moment to savour the past..........
Now where was I ????
I remember many of my mother's sayings , which presumably SHE heard from HER mother , but one of her sayings always mystified me ......If we told her what SHE considered to be a tall story that she didn't believe she would say '' Very like a whale ''. It was only in later years when we were studying ''Hamlet '' in school and we came to Polonious's humouring of Hamlet as they looked at the clouds , Hamlet said something like '' look at that cloud up there it's shaped like a camel '' and Polonious ''yes , indeed it looks like a camel ''and then Hamlet said '' but it is backed like a whale '' and old Po..agreed '' Very like a whale ''.....I guess you had to be there ....
The point I'm getting to is that in my mothers time many many people used lines from Shakespeare , often in daily conversation....maybe due to people like Anew McMaster and his fit ups bringing Shakespeare as well as Irish drama to everyone....
I was married in January 1973 , my mothers younger sister and only surviving sibling , died on Easter Monday of that year , my father's sister died mid year and my mother died on the 18th Dec 1973 , exactly a week before Christmas and two months before our first child was born....