I was doing nothing in particular the other evening when what should pop into my head but the well-loved prayer Our Father. I recited it a few times to get the rhythm right and in doing so it brought back happy memories of summer holidays with my grandmother and uncles.

My mother’s family lived in the townland of Scarnagh, which is only about 12 miles from home but it was still an almighty excursion when my sister Carmel and I were packed off there for the first few weeks in August every year.

Granny was the eldest of a large family and was widowed when in her late 20s with a family of seven to rear. The youngest was only a few weeks old when my grandfather died.

Granny was tough. She had to be to survive and farm successfully. She had come from west Cork sometime in the 1920s with her parents, brothers and sisters when they bought a farm in Wicklow. She married locally and after the death of her husband – and with no connections in the county – she depended very much on her sisters for support.

I well remember them all and a formidable bunch they were. There was nowhere to hide when Auntie Joan, Delia, Ellie and Nancy along with granny and St Albius turned their attention on you.

They were regular visitors to Scarnagh and I used love it when the cards came out and the fun began. These women took their cards seriously and our job was to keep the tea and sandwiches coming and the ash trays emptied. From memory they all chain-smoked Sweet Afton and remarkably all lived into their late 70s and 80s. When the cards were over it was down on our knees for the full five decades of the Rosary. Carmel and I never “gave out” a decade – that was reserved for the adults. Then there were the “trimmings” and all the people to be remembered, which lasted nearly as long.

There’s a lot of talk now about mindfulness and being in the moment. But long before it became popular to fork out €60 or €70 an hour to learn how to be mindful, people were already doing it and it was called the Rosary. There is a rhythm to the prayer. A familiarity that allows you respond automatically, while emptying your head of all thought.

It’s a chance for the me time people strive so hard to achieve in a busy world. It reminds me of the Cistercian sisters in St Mary’s Abbey, Glencairn, who pray seven times a day beginning with vigils at 4.10am. I’ve visited several times and there is no better place to get a full understanding of what mindfulness is all about.

Mind you, the Rosary hasn’t always had the best of memories for me. It was never a prayer we said at home so I got a right land when on the very first visit to my prospective in-laws everyone knelt down to say the prayer after supper. I was in a right panic in case I would be asked to give out a decade. I whispered to Sean that he’d have to join in with me if I was asked. I was and he did, and I can tell you I practised my prayers before visiting a second time. CL