"I listen to Lyric FM, I worry about my friends, I own plants and I watch subtitled documentaries. I know when to leave a party and what to say at funerals, I use contraception and I’m good at my job. I have a pension, I think I know best, I am good at making conversation with people I dislike, I drink too much coffee and say that often. I give my parents advice, I gave up being a Catholic ages ago, I pay for quality in clothes" wrote the almost-thirty-year-old
Maeve Higgins in the Irish Times last January. She was about a year ahead of me in the maturity stakes, but I'm catching up (I just need to stop shopping in Penneys).
I turned thirty one recently. I've been telling everyone about it. “It was her birthday the other day. You forgot it” says my passive-aggressive Twitter blurb. Yes, I’ve succumbed to Twitter. We’ll talk about that some other time. FOCUS.
You know that hoary old cliché that says women lie about their age until they hit their eighties and then boast about it relentlessly, all jabby arthritic fingers and spittle? I've got that at thirty one. Look, everybody! I've made it to thirty one unblemished by tattoos, STDs or a criminal record! For the first time in years, I celebrated my birthday with friends in a pub instead of hiding under the duvet with my self-pity. It was about €2k cheaper than flying to New York for a week to hide under a duvet in a Manhattan hotel room so that nobody could throw me a party, like I did last year. And it was fun. People brought presents. The pub gave me a free pint. The postman brought cards and some of them were handmade and an alarming number of them had pictures of cats on them and the one from Andrew's mam and dad said I was a Special Daughter-in-Law and the one from my nana told me I was the Best Granddaughter in the World and all of them said "love". I've decided to take them literally.
I don’t know what’s brought about this change in attitude. I suspect I might be maturing. Even my palate’s come on in leaps and bounds; I’ve started drinking stout and eating fish, though my face when Andrew plonked a plate of sea bass that wasn’t even smothered in breadcrumbs or batter or something else to mask the taste down in front of me last night was just like the one the cat makes when I brandish the syringe of medicine for his ringworm. I ate it though, and it was delicious.
I’ve also taken to coffee like a teenager to pornography. I never liked it, always complaining that it tasted bitter and burnt. Now I realise that it doesn’t matter what it tastes like because it has lots of caffeine in it. Yay! I estimate that I now spend 86% of my working day thinking about coffee and when and how I might next acquire some. I've been told that drinking the instant kind would be to the detriment of some of my friendships, but our facilities here don't stretch to anything more. Should I cross the campus to the café to buy some? Even though there's a recession on? DILEMMA! DISTRACTION! What sweet torture, to have something uncomplicated to focus on as all around me the fires in the Irish education system rage on while I sit here, flicking sand at them from a little plastic bucket.
It's probably for the best that I didn't discover the joy of coffee until now. Otherwise I might not have a job. I think the one I have at present is playing a part in my coming-of-middle-age, as for the first time (two and a half years into my contract) I feel like I'm competent enough to warrant having it. I should tell my boss, she'd probably find that very reassuring. I'm also settling in to my role as a wife, a year and a half into that contract. "How's married life treating you?" asked the IT guy when he visited to fix my colleague's disaster of a PC the other day (another sign of my maturity: I am no longer offering my amateur IT services to my colleagues in order to avoid doing my own work). "Really well" I said, "I'm happy".
And I am, most of the time. Not all of the time, that would be creepy. The radio makes me cry, but a little
weltschmertz in the car on the way to and from work is no harm. Like Maeve, I worry about my friends. They've lost parents and become parents themselves in the last year and it's a lot for me to take in, so I can only imagine how they're coping. Sometimes the cats eat all the leaves from my plants and they die. The plants, that is. The cats just vomit. Sometimes I leave parties when I know I wouldn't have just a year ago, but mostly I throw my own and revel in the good company I've collated over the past thirty one years. You pick your battles.
Where Craig Doyle's headed
