I WAS seriously miffed to open this paper at the letters page the other day and find myself characterised by Michael McDowell TD as someone who wouldn't "upset even a vicarage tea party".
Me. Who thought I was sometimes exciting, who pathetically believed I might occasionally put the boot in with enough force to attract the attention even of Senior Counsel. I was properly humbled, so I was.
Genteel, I am Dull. As it happens fairly sensational things have happened to me in one vicarage in particular, and I could make Mr McDowell blush with stories of episodes involving tea ...
But I see what he means by his metaphor and I fear if I may use one as sparkling myself that he has hit the nail on the head. I am in reality so dull or so afraid of becoming dull that I am taking active steps to do something about it.
As a matter of fact, the very morning after I read Mr McDowell's devastating letter, you could have seen me on my genteel way to my Wednesday morning bridge class. I'm trying to learn bridge so that I'll have something to offer to people.
I was chivvying my recently vandalised nine year old Bluebird along the street towards the triangle in Ranelagh. It cuts out if it has to go slowly, infuriating me and everyone behind me, so I was hoping to get through the lights without stopping.
But, no from out his gateway came Mr McDowell in a big macho Mercedes. I was honoured to stall my car to let him precede me. If I hadn't known my place before his letter, by God I'd quickly learnt it.
Luckily, I was able to forget how disappointed Mr McDowell is in me at the class. For one thing, it is very demanding, for another, it is sometimes hilariously funny. We're all novices. We sit in the clubhouse of a rugby club with our mouths open in disbelief as the teacher assures us that there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to remember exactly what cards have been played from each of the four suits and exactly where the remaining cards are likely to be.
We have so little confidence in our grasp of the game that we'd believe anything. One week he asked. "What number is smaller than one?" "Two?" was one of the answers humbly piped up from the class.
And last week, I forgot the pain of being dull when I heard a woman in the row behind me cry out with feeling. "It's like Irish grammar." The teacher had been telling us that the third player always plays high, except sometimes. "It's like Irish grammar," she groaned, "there's always an exception."
I FEAR I'm going beyond the beyonds of dullness altogether, talking about bridge When I could be talking about something really exciting. PD thinking on EMU, say, or whether the PDs are likely to pick up the floating vote in the Gallanstown area. But bridge, is, in fact, an extremely important element in the national life far more important than party politics in many, many lives, particularly in women's lives, and particularly in ageing women's lives.
(That was another thing Michael McDowell went to all the trouble of writing in to charge me with that I've "had the run of the place for so long". Was this chivalrous, I ask you? I mean Mary Harney's been in the Dail for 18 years but you'd never hear me making remarks about that.)
The world as it is arranged at present hems women in. They can't, on the whole, wander down the road for a pint and a comfortable chat with the lads. First of all, they're expected to be at home minding the man and the kids. Secondly, they'll get at the least talked about and, at the worst, raped and murdered, if they try to take the modest liberties with social life that men can take without even having to notice what they're doing. Bridge card paying in general A provides housebound people with a way of meeting each other and with a thing to do that uses the mind. And believe me, bridge does use the mind. I can clearly see that I may never be able to learn to play it. Even if I do, I could spend the rest of my life trying to play it well.
We can't all be as witty and charming as Michael McDowell. Some of us will need to have something to offer, socially speaking, especially as we get older. It was put to me, a few years ago, that if a person can play bridge, they'll never be altogether alone. This is especially important in the city, where the spectre of total loneliness hovers so near.
I know an old fashioned grocery shop that still delivers messages. They could tell you. They deliver cleaning stuffs and biscuits and so on in quantities they couldn't possibly need to solitary women who have ordered them just to have someone come to the door.
Again if these lonely people were male they could chat up strangers in pubs without attracting comment. But the twin deadly forces of "respectability" and misogyny can condemn women to lives not very different from imprisonment.
IN A small town or village there might be the option of whist or "25" as games to play, but I didn't know of any game I could go out and try to learn in in Dublin, except bridge. I knew it had the image of being middle class and, therefore, boring (there I go again, Michael I suppose a bore finds her own boring milieu) but I don't believe in that link. I don't find the middle class any more or less boring than any other class.
In any case, at the "introduction to bridge" I began on, my fellow students were from every conceivable kind of background. The ones I got to know, and still try to play with once a week, are young women who work in frighteningly advanced bits of the financial services. They advise on stocks and bonds and so on. They look like film stars. They're learning bridge because they like difficult games and because they're extremely competitive. There are other reasons, in other words, for learning the game, besides trying to make up for being too dull to upset a vicarage tea party.
But basically, the attempt to acquire new skills in middle age is a preemptive strike against old age. Given a choice, I'd learn map reading and compasses so I could walk in the hills, but that would be by myself. The thing about bridge or golf, which unfortunately I haven't the smallest chance of learning to play is that other people are involved. And it may come to any of us that we need semi artificial ways to solicit the company of other people.
It may even happen to Michael McDowell. Some day he may be one of that over crowded class Ireland's ex-Attorneys General. He will have his memories, of course. Haven't they all? But he, like me, may have to wake one day to find himself publicly pilloried as a dreary old well, old man. If that happens, I hope he'll have a pack of cards to turn to.