Last week, when I visited Mary Cummins in hospital, she remarked that there were certain advantages to being terminally ill with cancer. At least she wouldn't have to learn about the Internet "and all that rubbish", as she described the miracles of Information Technology which, we are constantly told, will open the way to a better, brighter world.
She sat on the bed dressed in white silk pyjamas and a black embroidered kimono which her daughter, Daisy, had brought her from Malaysia, where she was working on a film. Her short hair was a deep plum colour and she looked beautiful, like a portrait of one of the Bloomsbury Set. She was, of course, smoking non-stop, in open defiance of the hospital regulations.
Mary was always a stylish fighter and one with little respect for conventional rules. She knew, as did the doctors, that it was far too late for tobacco to inflict any further damage on her ravaged lungs. But her comments on the Internet were typical - blackly humorous, sceptical of the received wisdom and, above all, aimed at making it easier for her visitor to be at ease in what we both knew were pretty bleak circumstances.
When I telephoned people on Monday what most of them said was: "But Mary can't be dead - she was so much fun." Her beady-eyed, iconoclastic view of Irish life and society stood her in good stead to the end, from her comments on the various tribunals to the nurses' strike which, as a former nurse herself, she wholly supported.
I met her first at the very end of the 1960s. She was a part of that glittering, if somewhat unlikely, array of women who had been hired by Donal Foley to write for The Irish Times. Foley's Babes (as they would surely be described today) included Maeve Binchy, a schoolteacher; Mary Maher, recently arrived from Chicago in search of her Irish roots; Nell McCafferty, hot-foot from riots in the Bogside; and Mary, the Sergeant's Daughter from Ballybunion. She was striking in appearance with long Titian hair.
She was also a brilliant writer. Colleagues this week recalled her account of climbing Croagh Patrick in her bare feet, each step an agony, and the reports on canvassing in Dublin with Charlie Haughey.
From those days I remember best the lunches at the Harp restaurant on O'Connell Bridge, where Donal Foley held court far into the afternoon. At that time I was covering Northern Ireland and making visits to Dublin whenever I could think of an excuse. But I was based in London and it was there that I really came to know Mary, to value her courage, her gaiety and her savage indignation.
She worked for a while in the London office of The Irish Times and we met at press conferences and other functions. It was after she left the paper briefly, in the early 1970s, to strike out on her own, that we became friends.
What brought us together was that we were both pregnant. I was expecting my second child and was in some trouble with the pregnancy. Mary, who was back working as a nurse in London, was a completely supportive and cheering presence in my life.
She had problems of her own, for she was unmarried at a time when words like "illegitimacy" were still part of the national vocabulary back home in Ireland. We spent a lot of time together. It wasn't always plain sailing. Mary could be, well, combative. I suppose there were two of us in it. There were escapades. A policeman arrived on the doorstep of my house early one morning and asked what I could tell him about a young Irish woman who had been causing "a fracas" in the Kings Road and claimed to be a friend of mine.
There were also many days and evenings of laughter and craic. She had read more widely than anybody I've known before or since, from American detective stories through Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf to the classics. I begged her to go on the BBC's Mastermind programme to answer questions about Agatha Christie, thinking it would be a delicious irony if she became Brain of Britain. Another of her special subjects was Napoleon and weeks before she died she said that one of her few regrets was that she had never got to the island of St Helena where he died.
Mary was an instinctive feminist, mistrustful of institutional political structures, but firmly on the side of the underprivileged. She could be scathing about men's physical and mental inadequacies (often to their faces, which sometimes caused problems) but she was also sympathetic, for example to our colleague, John Waters's, argument that men also suffer discrimination.
Her column About Women was marvellously readable but also exercised an important political influence. Will anybody who read it forget her article about the Labour Party's treatment of Bernie Malone at a time when it was trying to get Orla Guerin elected to the European Parliament? It added to the piquancy, of course, that Dick Spring came from Kerry and that his father and Mary's had been good friends.
As ever, I return to our children. She wrote a piece about Daisy's 21st birthday which chronicled with tenderness and humour the often difficult experience of bringing up a child on her own in Ireland. It combined Padraig Pearse's "Lord, Thou art hard on Mothers", with Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe". Daisy was her lasting pride and joy. But my god-daughter has been fortunate too, not only in her mother, but in her grandmother in Ballybunion and Mary's brothers and sisters and their love for her.
When I think of Mary and myself now, it is always with our children in tow: in a grotty park in north London feeding the rabbits and the deer, trying to convince our sceptical offspring that this was, indeed, a real zoo.
PS: I am deeply aware that this is a crucial week in the peace process, the most important in many months. Some Irish Times readers may feel that I should have used this space to write about it, in which case I ask for your indulgence. We will return to sequencing in the North. But the point of the peace process is to help us all to build relationships that are rooted in trust and respect for each other. And who can replace for us the friends of our youth and golden days we spent in their company?