Queuing for grapefruit segments and hard-boiled eggs at the 6am breakfast after the all-night summer ball; leaving the oven door open on winter nights to help heat the place; listening one evening to a ‘splat, splat’ sound on the landing outside my room, accompanied by a loud and exuberant ‘count-out’ – “12! 13! 14!” – as a marauding army of bluebottles were whacked during an infestation.
When it comes to Jane Austen, I can take or leave her. Despite some memorable characters and a clutch of life lessons being offered up in oh such a gentle and circuitous manner, I’m afraid, dear reader, I find a lot of Miss Austen’s story-telling, well, just a bit too cloying for my taste.
It was an August morning in 2011 and I was in the garden of the Glenview Hotel in Co Wicklow, drinking tea and shooting the breeze with a woman who had been sitting opposite me for a couple of hours. Despite never having met each other before, there was a lot of laughter and a great deal of rolling the eyes to the heavens as we chatted about the joys – and demands – of being a mother.
Whether battling to vanquish the flames of the fires rampaging across the Greek islands this week, charging up the stairs of the World Trade Centre to bring people to safety on 9/11, or plunging straight into the burning inferno of a house fire here at home, that’s what firefighters do.
My car is yellow. Not a delicate shade of lemon or even a subtle primrose colour; nor, indeed, is it a classy muted mustard with a metallic glow. When I say yellow, I mean yellow as in the big bright sun in the sky in the top corner of a young child’s drawing.