Before she broke her hip, my mother was going through old letters. She rang me and asked whether I wanted to keep my letters to her. “Nope,” I said, “I didn’t even know you still had them, throw them out.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my parents’ house since then and I found the big black bag of letters in the dining room waiting to be sent for recycling. I started to leaf through them. The first thing that astonished me was that there were so many of them. I wrote a lot of letters from airports. And then from when I lived in Brussels and before that in Rome. I seemed to spend every spare minute I had writing letters [and I know that I wrote to friends as well - I was clearly a writing machine]. They had, I regret to say, no great literary merit but thematically they seemed to cover: looking for jobs; asking for money and thanking my parents for money already received. I was certainly reminded of the extent to which my loving parents had bankrolled my early years in the work place. No wonder they were so relieved when I finally managed to get properly paid employment as opposed to my time doing traineeships and internships.

I let the letters go into the bin. I suppose they stopped when email got going, sometime between 1995 and 1998. Imagine, I am from the last generation of people who routinely putting pen to paper to share news. Who would have thought?

This event is likely to send me to an early grave. I was trapped into joining the organising committee and I am just not cut out for this kind of thing. It’s like a continuation of work by other means. At the lengthy meetings we usually fail to reach conclusions and all of the real work seems to be done elsewhere [how much have I enjoyed dropping in requests for funding, cakes and spot prizes to struggling local businesses?]. The parish priest keeps coming in and being anxious about insurance. We can’t have a stage, lest someone should fall. We will have to know the provenance of all cakes for insurance reasons. I can’t for the life of me see why. He says we can take names and phone numbers of the little old ladies who make cakes and if anyone gets ill we can show we made reasonable efforts. The parish priest and I had words on this point. I was tempted to say that this will make us “data controllers” but wiser counsels prevailed. He also insisted that no unaccompanied children under 18 should be allowed to attend. How we are supposed to police this is beyond me.

Worst of all though, I had to make an announcement at mass about the forthcoming excitement. This did not seem particularly challenging. Doesn’t my 10 year old daughter go on to the altar every Sunday and read a prayer of the faithful? Am I not used to making presentations at work? All I had to do was read out the printed text in front of me. I am good at reading. I bounded up on to the altar and surveyed the church. Do you know what, those Victoian gothic churches are built on massive lines. It was the largest space I had ever addressed. And although congregations are falling I thought, as I surveyed the large numbers looking up at me, they could do with falling a bit further. I started to read. I was quavery and short of breath. It was terrifying. I returned to my pew, absolutely mortified. Herself hissed at me, “You were terrible!” Worse, the little old lady beside me said, “You did fine.” After mass, I said to Mr. Waffle, “Tell me honestly, how bad was it?” “Well,” he said, “remember everyone has forgotten about it now except you.” Pause. “It was just the way you sounded like you were going to cry and that the announcement was really sad when you were talking about a party; that was a bit unfortunate.” Oh the mortification. And, of course, I have to go back and see the same people every Sunday forever. Oh horrors. I think I will cry now.

We have been in the new house for ages now. It still seems extraordinary that it belongs to us. It is so lovely. The Princess and I went back to inspect the old house, the other day and she shed a few tears. It is hard to move and it still feels a little bit strange.

But I hope that we will all settle in well in our new house. The neighbours have been in with wine, champagne and scented candles and have children of appropriate ages who are company for our lot. The mirror has been hung up over the fireplace. The cat is settled. She has managed to lose her collar and magnetic yoke to open the cat flap. We have taped over the magnetic bits of the cat flap so that she can come in anyhow. A strange cat has taken advantage of these new arrangements and wandered up to the landing to have a look around. Michael spotted the strange cat and shouted loudly, and unhelpfully, “Cat!” Nevertheless, cat collar difficulties aside, all seems very promising.

For the Princess’s birthday, I took her and two friends to Milano’s in Temple Bar for pizza. I might digress here and say that I quite like Temple Bar, it’s always full of tourists being cheerful and it feels a bit like being on holidays as there are never any Irish people there. Mr. Waffle and most Dubliners avoid it like the plague. Mr. Waffle always refers to it as “Dublin’s cultural quarter” in sardonic tones. And though, I concede that it is a bit pub heavy for a cultural quarter, I quite like it. So, if you are ever in Temple Bar and meet a real live Irish person it will be me because I am the only one who ever ventures in there.

That was a digression. I just wanted to record my unluckiness in choosing to go there on the day when all of Europe’s finance ministers were meeting in Dublin castle (just adjacent), when an anniversary performance of Handel’s Messiah was taking place around the corner on the site of the original performance (Messiah, first performed in Dublin, you know) and concerned citizens were marching against the new property tax (protest unavailing, it seems to be here to stay). It was bedlam. Alas.

I went into town with herself and we had a look at the National Gallery and then we got back into the car and drove to the Queen of Tarts. Just as we were settling down, my work mobile started to ring. I looked at it balefully. Unknown number. I answered coldly. The caller asked my name. I told him, with increasing coldness. “It’s just that I’ve found your purse on the road and your card is in it.” The saintly finder dropped it into the local Garda station and I was able to go and pick it up (everything still there) even before I had realised it was lost. It is quite true what my mother says, “People are mostly very nice.”

When I was in college my then boyfriend’s brother [try to keep up] had a lovely girlfriend. She was a delightful person. Everybody loved her. My own mother was a good friend of lovely gf’s mother and she loved her too. My sister was in lovely gf’s sister’s class in school and she loved her. I didn’t dislike lovely gf,- how could I, she was lovely? – but I did mildly resent the way she was utterly perfect. She got her boyfriend’s parents [also my boyfriend's parents, if you see what I mean] an orange tree for Christmas. Who buys presents for a boyfriend’s parents? Not me, alas.

As I went in and out of the hospital over the weekend visiting my poor mother, a big shiny board with names engraved in golden letters caught my eye. It was a list of interns of the year and alongside it winners of a medal for youthful brilliance. Who was on the list of interns of the year? Lovely gf, that’s who. Who was the only intern featured on the list who also won the gold medal for being brilliant at medicine and lovely [possibly not actual title]? Oh yes indeed, the lovely gf. I’m not jealous, no really, I’m not. It’s just that she’s haunting me.

Before I ended up staying in Cork for the weekend, we had planned to go to Northern Ireland for a day trip. The children were not enthused. Mostly because they, quite rightly, scented the prospect of a health giving walk. The Princess however began to plough a particularly fertile furrow. “I’m scared, we’ll be bombed,” said she. “Don’t be daft,” we said pointing to the Belfast agreement and, more practically, the people we knew from Northern Ireland and the fact that the sixth class school tour was going there; she knows that her school principal is not a man for taking unnecessary risks. It was at this point that Daniel felt inspired to intone from the back seat “Ireland unfree shall never be at peace!”

I think we may have to look a bit more closely at his reading material. Mr. Waffle tells me that Daniel has been reading a “very green” children’s history of Ireland and Mr. Waffle feels that peace and reconciliation may not be among the themes addressed. All the more reason to take them off to see the glories of Northern Ireland where they can see swords being beaten into ploughshares with their very eyes or, more likely, have a walk followed by tea and a bun in a National Trust property.