Jennifer was down from Dublin for the weekend. Without Declan this time, thank God. Although we might have to get used to him. Deirdre texted me yesterday to say things are getting serious. Jen and Payphone are now in a relationship on Facebook. Daddy will have to get new coins.

(She calls him Payphone because he collects coins and do you remember I was telling you how he was fairly blunt about Himself’s coin collection when he met us first? That’s all water under the bridge now, so long as we don’t have to meet him too often. He’s OK in small doses.)

The first thing Jennifer did when she landed in was to give us an envelope.

“What’s this?” I said to Jennifer.

“It’s from all of us.”

“For what?”

“For what, she says. YOUR ANNIVERSARY MAMMY! Your 40th wedding anniversary.”

“Is that today?!

“Mammy! That’s a sad indictment of your marriage.”

“There’s a bit more life in it than your one anyway. How are you getting on with Declan? Have ye found yere love nest yet?”

“Still looking for a place. We’re making the best of it Mammy, despite our role models.”

I looked over at Himself reading the paper.

“Did you remember this?”

“I don’t keep track at all Ann. I’m so happy the years mean nothing to me,” he says winking at Jennifer.

“I never heard of a big hooha over a 40th. Twenty-fifth and 50th were always the big ones.”

“Maybe they didn’t think we’d last till the 50th,” says Himself.

Jennifer points at the envelope.

“Well we’re sending you to Killarney anyway, It’s where Daddy proposed to you. Or have you forgotten that too? You can recreate the moment.”

I remember it well. We were down there for a Johnny Fitz show. He was a fierce lively sort of country-western singer that used to be very popular around that time.

If you weren’t dancing he’d come down off the stage and drag you up. He had a catchphrase: “A pound to get in, lose 2lbs inside!” (I think he’s still on the go now after he had the bypass.)

My mother was furious at the time.

“AND WHAT ARE THE SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS?” she says. “Are you going to scandalise me in front of the parish?”

We had to bring my sister Geraldine and Denis’s brother PJ along for decorum. As if Geraldine knew anything about decorum. Mammy didn’t apply the same rules to her at all. She could have built a harem with Lord Lucan in the garden and Mammy would have let her off.

“Beyond redemption,” she used to say about her. Poor PJ (lordamercyonim) thought he had a chance with Geraldine and bought new flares trying to impress her. And PJ and Denis’s people weren’t the type of people who’d buy flares.

“You’ll get them caught in the PTO,” says the father. It was all for nothing anyway, because Geraldine met some English fella who claimed to be a movie director and we didn’t see her for the weekend.

PJ put the flares in bicycle-clips and went walking in the National Park.

“A man needs to get away at times like this,” he said. Like he was Clint Eastwood.

Jennifer said Killarey is where Denis proposed to me, but proposed is a strong word. We were eating an ice cream sitting on the wall near Muckross House. Himself had his eaten long ago and he was eyeing up mine as usual.

“Are you finishing that ice cream?”

“I’m eating it at my own pace. Enjoying it. You just bite into it like it was an apple.”

He said nothing then for a while.

“I suppose we might as well get married at some stage,” he says.

The romance! It won’t take long to recreate that.