. . . . on famous friends
I AM INVITED TO a charity lunch thing. They say I can bring my mother because it’s a mothers and daughters charity lunch. While neither of us are archetypal ladies who lunch, the Immigrant Council of Ireland is a worthy charity plus the invite mentions “live entertainment”. I ring them up to accept and then I forget all about it, apart from occasional moments musing about the menu.
One day I get an email from my friend who does some work with the council to ask if I need any help with my speech. With what speech? You know, your speech, she says. The speech you are going to give because you and your mother are the guests of honour at the lunch. I go back to the invite to double-check. “We would like to invite you and your mother to join us, as our guests, at a special event to fundraise for victims of human trafficking in the Royal Marine Hotel . . .”
I don’t think they mean that there’s any actual human trafficking going on in the Royal Marine Hotel, but anyway, the main thing is that there’s nothing about being guests of honour or making speeches. I decide my friend must have got it wrong. I go back to pondering the menu, wondering if it will be one of those hotels that serves soggy vegetables. Then a press release arrives announcing that my mother and I are “guests of honour” at the lunch and there will be speechifying. Suddenly soggy vegetables are the least of my worries.
On the upside, the other thing I discover from the press release is that my friend The Famous Comedian will also be at the lunch, providing the “live entertainment”.
I am the kind of person who keeps her friends close and her famous friends closer, in case any of my other friends (famous or non-famous) attempt to steal them off me. I was at a book launch the other evening chatting to The Famous Comedian when one of my other friends, The Famous Author, tried to get an introduction.
Luckily I was able to steal The Famous Comedian away before The Famous Author could introduce himself and regale the comedian with one of his arsenal of world-class witty anecdotes, which would inevitably result in them becoming friends and me ending up with my nose pressed up against the window of this cosy, mutually famous arrangement. Yes, the comedian probably didn’t want to stand outside a bakery during a book launch, but she probably wouldn’t have minded had she known the very survival of our friendship depended upon it.
When I get to the lunch, The Famous Comedian, who has clearly rumbled the fact that I am slightly on the possessive side, says she has to tell me something. “Just so you don’t hear it from anyone else first, I met T this morning,” she says. T is another friend of mine that I’ve been trying to stop the comedian from becoming friends with. Apparently, “it just happened”. T asked her to hang out and she felt like it might be fun. And was it? Was it so-called fun? Apparently it was “great . . . she is really nice isn’t she?”
I won’t lie, it was awkward, but I couldn’t think too much about it because I had a speech to make. I decided to focus a bit on my mother and all the wonderful things she has done. I told the story of my mother and George Humphries. George was a chef and sailed around the world on Irish ships. He swam almost every day in the Forty Foot and he made the finest blackberry and apple tarts, which he sometimes used as bribes. My mother had helped put together a little memoir of his time on the ships, but it was never published. Then George got cancer and my mum knew he didn’t have long left, so within a week she’d got the book printed and organised a launch. George was allowed out of the hospice for the event a few weeks ago, and sitting there in his wheelchair in the Dublin Port building, he looked like the happiest man alive. He died two days later, a published author.
The only problem with telling this story was that I couldn’t get through it without several Kate Winslet moments where I attempted to “gather”. I was crying about lovely George. Crying about my lovely mother. Crying about all the lovely people at the Forty Foot who signed a card for him that was presented at the launch. My “speech”, during which I could barely talk, pretty much summed up why nobody should ever ask me to make speeches. Of course, the ladies who lunch were all very kind and pretended it didn’t matter. Then The Famous Comedian got up to do her turn.
She is the funniest person in Ireland. At least I thought so until the end of her set when she made some unnecessary crack about how what she actually should have done to win the audience over was get up, tell a sad story and cry a lot. Between that betrayal and the incident with T I can’t see the friendship lasting; I actually don’t care how famous she is. On the up side, I have to report that the vegetables in the Royal Marine Hotel were al dente, and I didn’t spot any human trafficking going on.
In other news . . . If you are in the Dublin area tomorrow afternoon and fancy a leisurely stroll, join the Care Local team for their annual fundraising walk up Howth Head. The charity matches older people living alone or in nursing homes with volunteers who visit them once a week. The walk starts at 2.30pm and there’s a donation of €10 to take part. See carelocal.ie or tel: 01-6128000