Last night the husband and I had dinner with Uisce in a small seaside village. Uisce can't stand the people here: one half is cliquey, who look down on you because your great-great-great-great etc grandparents were not born in the village, and the other half wore fur coats with no knickers.

Anyways we ate at a restaurant that specialises in tapas, Spanish ones but also Southeast Asian ones, with the occasional Irish (featuring seaweed) or Italian dish (gnocchi?!) thrown in. It was all very delicious, but my stomach disagreed with this Babel of cuisines. Uisce of course knew the owner and the servers and a few of the patrons. In Uisce's company you are always waiting for him to finish a conversation with yet another person he had just run into.

A natural raconteur, Uisce had stories about everyone, and he and the husband gossiped about so and so, the scandals behind the personalities that inhabited this small part of the world. Listening to Uisce, you sense that he is a walking (albeit on bionic knees) record of local history; he knows what was there before it became that, and whose father did this or that.

After dinner, we went to his pub in the Town, which was full of older men (I was the only woman) in the bar. Upstairs there was apparently a fortune in old books and rare whiskeys. Uisce himself did not drink, except to taste a new wine or whiskey. He drank lemonade at dinner, and tea in his pub, and by the end of the night, I felt self-conscious as reality shifted inexorably.

It was a nice night but I was relieved when he dropped us off at home. One didn't want to squander the attention of someone like Uisce with bad manners due to intemperance… or to be the object of such keen-eyed attention for too long.

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