Ah well, despite everything, it was a nice Saturday. I walked with the husband's cousin to the woods, chatting about the weird Christmas last year: he had gone over with wife and child to visit family in England, where the country went into immediate lockdown, and they had to get repatriated back to Ireland, and afterwards the wife went into premature labor on the kitchen floor, with only himself as midwife. Later my friend and I went to the theatre for what was my first time since February 2020, when I saw Paul Mescal in The Lieutenant of Inishmore at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. We watched a play about gay people fighting for their rights in 1970s Ireland, when being a gay man was illegal and being a gay woman, well, women weren't even considered sexual beings.

Afterwards we went into the bar. I wore a suit, put together from this and that, all waiting for that moment of sartorial kismet: gold-dotted cream button-up shirt, baby-pink flared trousers, cream blazer, and silver ankle boots. The husband said the get-up reminded him of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. We stayed up late (well, for these pandemic times), sneaking cigarettes and drinking gin and sodas, while a man played his guitar and sang so beautifully, the mother-in-law remarked upon it at breakfast. He was the childhood buddy of another friend, in the bar to celebrate his 60th birthday. When I was 20, I thought anyone over 30 was ancient. God. Now at 44, I think 60-year-olds are young.

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