The husband's cousins have been visiting, one after the other. Their parents have bought a house in the town, and will move in after they settle their affairs in Trinidad, where they have lived for the past fifty years. The cousins spent summers in Ireland in their teens, were educated abroad, and now live, dispersed, in Manchester, Dublin, Inverness, a small town in Germany.

The other day we drove a cousin to Sligo, where he is staying the night before he heads back to Manchester. Over drinks we chat about his writing, four unpublished novels so far, written in the early hours before his day job as a neuropsychologist in the public sector. His main theme is displacement, a consequence of a peripatetic upbringing that has left him not feeling he has ever belonged anywhere. He’s rootless, but okay with that. (Shades, I suppose, of V.S. Naipaul.) The cousin is amiable yet detached and extremely self-sufficient, for whom friendship is not a necessity of life.

On the way home, the husband and I decide we might turn back to go to the cinema, which we haven't done in years, since the pandemic. As we look up cinema listings, there's an announcement on national radio: Suhadat' Sadaqat, formerly known as Sinéad O'Connor, had passed away at the age of 56. Melancholy now, we head home, listening to her singular voice, song after song, on the John Creedon show: “Whatever it may bring, I will live by my own policies, I will sleep with a clear conscience, I will sleep in peace.”

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