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Róisín Ingle: My speech was just like me – short, wine-fuelled and all over the place

One hundred candles, two women and one party to celebrate entering our sixth decade

‘It was a shared, intimate celebration of two very different women who later in life have become great friends. Late friends, I’ve found, make great friends.’

Róisín Ingle's face
Róisín Ingle
Wed Oct 20 2021 - 06:00

Leaning against a wall in her home, looking fetching in a black dress and Cinderella sparkly heels, my friend Elish sang a song of herself. We were making speeches for our joint 50th birthday gathering. My speech was just like me – short, wine-fuelled, messy and a bit all over the place. Her speech was just like her – soulful, surprising and unsentimental. A speech I’ll never forget.

It was a shared, intimate celebration of two very different women who later in life have become great friends. Late friends, I’ve found, make great friends. We know ourselves better by now. We recognise the friends we haven’t yet met as soon as we see them. And we can see them from a mile off.

Elish’s husband, Gerry, operating like Liam Neeson in the Taken films or Churchill during the second World War, conceived and created the whole bash, making the food and the cake and organising every single detail, starting with the invitation, which he composed as a glorious parody of a popular fiction novel he called 100 Candles.

The gallivanting years were behind them. The whoring and touring, the friends with benefits, the recreational drugs, the booty calls with ridey, toxic bastards, the dance-floor murders in Lillies, the press-junket benders in LA, all done

I reproduce some of the invitation text here because (a) it’s stunning and because (b) I’m still hungover from the party several days later and could use his help. And also because, in addition to starting a new micro-bakery called Bread Man Walking, Gerry, if asked nicely, is available to write party invitations for all occasions, in all genres from Sally Rooney to science fiction:

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“100 Candles. Two women. One Party. They came from different lives and different continents. One flame haired and fair of skin, a writer coming to terms with being momentarily eclipsed by a mother’s talents, the other raven tressed and musky, an equatorial creature far from home, terminally shy yet improbably working in social media. It was true that both had hair cascading over an impressive decolletage and onward down to their abundant arses, but lately there were ominous filaments of grey, and there was nothing frivolous now about the frequent trips to the local salons, D3 and D8 respectively.

“The gallivanting years were behind them. The whoring and touring, the friends with benefits, the recreational drugs, the booty calls with ridey, toxic bastards, the dance-floor murders in Lillies’, the press-junket benders in LA, all done. Motherhood had seen to that. Yes, they were settled, and turning 50 was undeniable, but the pagan wildness in them refused to lie down. They had appetite. Truth was the prospect of a sixth decade had them scared sh*tless, but they were determined to ride out and meet this new enemy as one. A party was called for, but adult responsibility would not be receiving an invite…”

Our friend Simon created the book cover complete with a review quote: “Hormonal. Hangry. Homicidal” – Irish Independent. (Yes, The Indo – a deliciously controversial and provocative detail.)

Incredibly, the party lived up to the invite. There were restrictions-respecting – mostly outdoor – levels of gallivanting including bellydancing, ukelele playing and La Vie en Rose sung with preternatural delicacy and emotion by Gerry and Elish’s 13-year-old daughter Amalia. The speeches were charmingly eclectic. The address from one of my daughters featured a revelatory story about a toasted sandwich she had ordered once. My partner told an equally random tale about the now-dead loyalist paramilitary I was chatting to when we met 21 years ago.

Uncle Walt and poetry came to the rescue. He wrote: 'These are the days that must happen to you.' And it helped Elish to realise that if those days hadn't happened, she wouldn't be here now

But back to Elish leaning against a wall as though for support, singing that song of herself. She spoke with a vulnerability I hadn’t heard from her before. She quoted “Uncle Walt”, which is how she refers to Walt Whitman, who she discovered aged 17, especially his 1892 poem Song of Myself, a poem she said had sustained her through life’s vicissitudes.

Before that, she talked about meeting Gerry 25 years ago. He was playing saxophone in Cafe En Seine and Elish thought, “I just have to have that boy.”

“I went up to him and the first thing I ever said to him was ‘will you marry me’. “Sometimes you ask for something and you get it.”

A few years after she met Gerry they were renting an apartment and every Saturday she’d read a column in this newspaper “by this Róisín person” and think, ‘I’d like to be her friend.’ “And look,” she said, glancing over at me. “Life and karma are just amazing.”

Elish, who writes a lot of blogs for other people, is a great woman for a take-away message. Her take-away from turning 50 was that she is content although, she said, it had taken a long time for her to get there. “I worked through a lot of imposter complex,” she said. “I’m from somewhere else and it was really difficult. I’ve been poor in the early part of my life and I used to really resent it, all the hardship, and I used to think, why the hell are you doing this to me, whoever you are?”

But Uncle Walt and poetry came to the rescue. He wrote: “These are the days that must happen to you.” And it helped Elish to realise that if those days hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t be here now. If they hadn’t happened, none of us would be here now. “I know,” she said. “That some of you know this already. But I’m here just figuring it out.”

Her takeaway is what Uncle Walt says about existence in Song of Myself. I leave it here for you to ponder and process as my unending hangover ebbs and flows the way they do when you reach a certain age.

I hope it leaves you feeling better about everything and anything that ails you.

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content,
One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.

roisin@irishtimes.com

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