Maurice’s Mother here. It looks like I’ll be writing this for the summer; Maurice is out in Lisnapookybawna studying for a course that should have finished in June. He believes tomorrow is a great day, that’s until tomorrow becomes today.

With Maurice locked away, I’m released from my mothering and driving duties, and can do what most women of my vintage seem to do in summer: take day trips here, there and yonder. Lily Mac in the post office, Madge McInerney, Nell Regan and myself have been taking advantage of our age and turning up at the local bus stop for all kinds of tours and outings.

Lily is beginning to hand over the post office to the next generation and takes a few more days off than she used to. Madge McInerney has finished raising a family of sons and says she would happily spend the rest of her life in a bus going somewhere, “anywhere but beside a cooker or near a washing machine”. In fact, when she hears a washing machine in the spin cycle she breaks out in a cold sweat. It’s hard to blame her, she reared a clatter of sons and they couldn’t boil an egg, her only salvation were the fags, she was a closet smoker. Whenever the husband, Mannix, was gone out and the youngfellas off playing a match, she’d sneak down to the shed at the back of the garden for a quick smoke and a quiet read of Woman’s Way.

Her days as a closet smoker ended abruptly one day, when the young lads came home early and seeing the smoke billowing out of the shed grabbed buckets of water, threw open the door and drenched poor Madge.

Nell Regan, was housekeeper to a generation of PPs here in Killdicken. The current PP, Fr Roche, lives in a flat over the post office and so Nell is happily redundant. She’s our resident tour guide and expert on everything. No matter where we’re going, she’ll have detailed research done in advance.

She’s also a great woman to have around if you buy a piece of furniture or a contraption of any kind that arrives unassembled with instructions, a ‘flat pack’ I think they call them. Nell will lay out all the parts and follow, word for word, the directions on how it is to be put together.

Myself and Maurice are a disaster in that regard, we ignore the instructions, believing a monkey with a sore head would assemble the item in question.

We inevitably end up in a blazing row when the thing won’t stand straight and nearly go mad trying to figure out why we are left with an extra panel and 15 spare screws. Nell is the woman I send for whenever I get one of those flat pack things.

Lily Mac is great for the bit of gossip, she has news about everyone from the four parishes and what’s more, no matter where we go she’ll point at a door, or a pub or a gateway and with the words: “There was a fella lived in there”, and she’ll proceed to give us chapter and verse of a tale that could be tragic, hilarious or, how do I say, a bit on the steamy side – she can make an epic out of the spilling of a cup of tea. Madge is sceptical about Lily’s stories. “What she doesn’t know, she’ll make up,” Madge says. “I’d hate to think what stories she tells about us.”

Meanwhile, Nell is the bane of Lily’s life and forever fact-checking her stories, she’s a divil for it. They could do with her to keep an eye on Trump.

Once when we were on a day-trip to Waterford, as we passed this derelict old Georgian house, Lily gave us a detailed and colourful history of the family that once lived there. At the beginning of the story there were four sons and two daughters, but by the time Lily finished at least seven sons had affairs with a clatter of women that included the local headmistress and the sergeant’s wife. For good measure, another ran away with the local vicar. Of the two girls, three of them became nuns and another married an Indian prince.

“That doesn’t add up at all,” says Nell.

“Erra,” says Lily, “the next time I tell a story listen with your ears and put away the calculator.”

“Is that what you do in the post office?” says Nell.

Ouch. There wasn’t a word for hours. CL