Today is our last stretch of sun before the rain hits. I bunged off work and sat on the concrete steps of our prefab office, sunning my legs while reading Laila Lalami's The Other Americans, which is engaging and good and makes me think about my family's history as refugees in America, but it's not great literature.

What distinguishes a good novel from a great novel? I can't say for sure. I think the story is interesting so far, but there aren't those great stretches of prose that scintillate and surprise; prose that makes me sigh and wonder and puzzle over the intricacies of history and feeling and memory (for ex., Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy). But maybe this is a book that can't do that, in the way it mustn't linger in that manner but move along in terms of plot and story. Or maybe I have terrible taste in literature. Oh well.

Anyways a friend sent me a message by fb: I think the anti-covid guy is protesting in front of your place. What?! The anti-covid guy had spent most of lockdown standing at the crossroads in a mummer or strawman suit, banging a drum and shouting this or that nonsense in the mornings until gardai waved him along.

The husband went to check out the situation, and it turned out to be some locals protesting the removal of cash services from the last bank in town. In rural Ireland, banking is a vexed issue - the banks keep withdrawing services (hell, two banks left in the decade or so I've been here, one just last year), which means people have to drive out to the bigger towns, or depend on the local post office. But even post offices are closing down: the postmaster may retire and An Post decides this village no longer needs a post office.

The protestors shook their posters, cars beeped, even the anti-covid guy was present, albeit as a bit player, fully suited, playing his flute in the shade like a melancholy revenant from a (mostly mythologised, and therefore suspect) Gaelic past. I signed a sheet of paper that was dropped off into the bank, and then I got roped into posing for a photo for the county paper because the husband said I was the nice-looking one in the family. Gah! I didn't know if I should smile or frown—everyone else smiled!

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