One day, Daniel went into college looking very smart. “You look nice,” I said. He laughed, “It’s Halloween, I’m dressed up as one of my lecturers.” Fine.
He keeps giving me strange little insights into the attitudes of his college friends. For example, one asked him how to clean a window. Peculiar, but sure why not? Daniel said that you need to wash it with soapy water and then polish it with newspaper. Thank you Covid cleaning rota for this insight. But then his friend said, “We don’t have any newspapers in our house.” And even though intellectually I knew that, of course, that must be the case in many households, having always lived in households with an alarming surfeit of newspapers, I was quite startled.
He said that a bunch of them were passing Kilkenny design (a nice shop with Irish made design items but one in which he has previously had zero interest) and they all commented, “That’s the dream.” “What’s the dream?” I asked puzzled. “To have a house and be able to afford to buy things from Kilkenny Design,” he said. Alas, strangely poignant.