'She opens the Lidl bag and her face is lit up like a Gay Pride rally'

Not even a borring order could keep me away from Sorcha’s 30th porty – but she’s having, like, a premature mid-life crisis?

I WAS NEVER much of a boyfriend slash husband. A beautiful face – as Yeats, or one of that crew, once said – is a terrible thing to waste.

One thing I was always amazing at, though, was choosing presents.

For Sorcha’s 30th this week – this is an example of what I’m talking about – I got her a pair of Elie Tahari gold leather Victoria sandals that she’s been banging on about for ages and made a €10 donation on her behalf to Vital Voices, an organisation that empowers women worldwide.

See, being married for as long as we have, you tend to pick up on things and I know that they’re two of her, I suppose you’d have to call them, passions – in other words, clothes and caring about stuff that doesn’t really affect her.

And so it was with an extra confident spring in my step that I headed for the actual porty on Friday night, despite repeated warnings to stay away from her old man and, well, a judge. It’s in, like, the champagne bor in Ron Blacks and the place is vacuum packed.

Of course every conversation stops when I suddenly show my boat, like a baddie turning up in a saloon bor in one of those westerns the old man loves – except with a few more Oh My Gods, obviously. I tip up to the bor, order a pint of the old Preparation H, discover that Sorcha’s old man has put two Ks behind the bor, then change my order to a bottle of Moët.

I'm looking around me, and see some familiar faces from the past. I reckon I've covered about two-thirds of the girls in here. Out of the corner of my eye, I cop Sorcha's old man, staring at me like a man who's just walked out of the dole office to see Seanie Fitz running his nose the length of a 12-inch Romeo y Julieta. He's obviously thinking, where does this kid get the nerve? The thing is, roysh, I can handlenotoriety? He'd know that if he'd bothered to spend any time in Donnybrook back in the day.

He’s about to walk over to me when Sorcha suddenly appears. She’s like, “Ross!” clearly delighted to see me. “You came!”

“Nothing could have kept me away,” I go. “Not even your old man’s threats of violence.”

She air-kisses me, twice on either cheek, and I hand her the presents. She opens the Lidl bag they’re wrapped in and her face is suddenly lit up like a Gay Pride rally.

"That crowd there," I go, "they had an ad on during Jeremy Kyle. They supposedly empower women. I don't know if that means guns. In some ways, I don't want to know?"

She smiles at me like she’s never even heard the words “legal separation”. I point at her Kir Royale. “Another Knickerdropper Glory?”

“No,” she just goes, “let’s go somewhere else. I can’t talk with my father staring at us like that.” So we tip downstairs to the main bor, grab another Barton there.

“So,” I end up going, “the big three-oh! It’s all over now!” and I suddenly regret it because she’s immediately sad. She says she’s, like, so depressed at the moment. Some days she feels like just taking off and doing something totally mad. I remind her that she’s been talking for ages about trekking the Annapurnas to raise money for river blindness, but she just, like, shakes her head.

"I'm talking, like, reallymad," she goes. "Just dropping out of the whole, I don't know, rat race. Maybe backpacking around Thailand, Vietnam and Laos . . ." She shrugs, then takes a sip of her drink. "Claire did it," she goes. "And – oh! my God! – the experiences she had."

“Experiences? As in?”

“As in, loads, Ross. I can’t give you specifics. I’d have to re-read her e-mails. But I know, for instance, that she got some Asian writing tattooed on her arm.”

I’m there, “Claire’s from Bray, don’t forget. Those people can carry that kind of shit off.”

“I’m not saying I want a tattoo, Ross. I’m just saying that sometimes I want to just, like, flip out and do something wild. Like, another day, she got talking to this guy who was just reading a copy of The Sorrow of War outside an internet cafe in Hanoi. It turned out he was from, like, Greystones, Ross. Can you believe the coincidence of that?”

“It is pretty amazing.”

“It’s more than amazing – it’s, like, fate? Because now they’re back here and they’re, oh my God, madly in love. They called into the shop yesterday – Barry’s his name – and she looked amazing Ross, even though she was only wearing this, like, printed tea dress from Urban Outfitters?”

“But you couldn’t just take off like that,” I suddenly go. “We’ve got an actual kid together, remember?” She looks immediately guilty for thinking about it and I feel immediately guilty for bursting her bubble.

“It’s just, I’m suddenly 30,” she goes, “and what have I achieved?”

Of course I won’t sit there and listen to anyone run Sorcha down – even if it’s Sorcha herself. “Er, loads?” I go. “You’ve a beautiful daughter. You’ve a shop that used to be successful. Plus, America has – and I have to say the words – a black dude as President. That was always one of your ambitions.”

She sorts of, like, stares into space. “I suppose. I mean, I was the one who supported him – like, way before anyone else in Ireland had even heard of him.”

I’m there, “Well, then.”

She smiles and says she should go back to the porty. I tell her I should head off as well. Her old man is probably fit to be tied at this stage. Of course the real reason is that I’ve a date with a Jordana Brewster lookalike, who I’m planning to put over the jumps. I don’t tell her that, though – it’s called being a gentleman.

“Happy birthday,” I go, and I stay long enough to watch her disappear back upstairs.

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