A year of ferocious self-examination and apportioning of blame has us semi-exhausted and demoralised, writes ORNA MULCAHY
BUYING STOCKING fillers in Penneys, I left my phone on the counter and wandered off to fondle their famous fleecy pyjamas. People were grabbing armfuls of them while, at the other end of the store, the sequined miniskirts had been slashed to €3 – and still no one was buying. Staying in is the new going out and all that. Who needs sequins any more?
Anyway, the phone. It was a couple of hours before I noticed it missing and dialled the number, hoping to hear it ring at the bottom of the handbag. Instead a woman answered. Aaaaggghhhh! Now a stranger has my phone and is going to hold me to ransom.
“I took your phone home in case it got lost,” the woman said. Okay. Thank you so much and where is home so I can come and get it? “Harmonstown.”
Now the evening was stretching out in front of me, hopelessly lost in Harmonstown, and the Christmas tree still to be bought.
“Don’t come all this way,” she went on. “I’ll get my daughter to bring it to you.”
Could this be for real? It was lashing rain and pitch dark, but yes, it seemed Linda, her daughter, was willing to hop in her car and meet me in Fairview by the fire station. She had taken the phone because she didn’t trust the security in big shops.
I head for Fairview, thinking this is an elaborate sting, and Linda won't be there but some big lad will be, and money will have to be handed over. Prime Time Investigates, eat your heart out.
But, bang on time, Linda arrives and gives me the phone with a smile. Could I take her mother’s address to write her a thank-you? Not at all, she said, there’s no need. Sure anyone would do the same thing!
I was speechless. How kind people are and what a pity that a lot of the kind things they do are so small and everyday that they don’t get noticed very much.
Not in these pages at any rate; particularly not in 2009. A year of ferocious self-examination and apportioning of blame has the country semi-exhausted and demoralised. Lying and cheating, thieving, cowardice and hypocrisy have been written about at length. Kindness, decency and good humour a lot less so.
It took just half an hour to regain my vocals, when presented, in the same lashing rain, with the abysmal range of Christmas trees in our local car park.
Is there a tree drain going on? Have all the nice fresh bushy firs from the Wicklow hills been exported, leaving the natives with a lot of knobbly, twisty, mutant ones with strange cactus like tops?
After hauling out one disaster after another we settled on the least ugly one and then managed to screw in the stand in such a way that the whole thing tilts to one side. It doesn’t even smell nice, said the eldest later, when it had been wedged into a corner with one branch sticking out about six feet into the room, ready to take the dog’s eye out.
No matter, the days of demanding perfection are over. There is, my friend says, a perfect tree for sale in Milltown, but it is €210 and not a bob goes to charity. There are decent trees for sale in the car park of Jurys (what next for the Jurys site – car boot sales? A horse fair? Fossetts Circus?) but they are €100. A Limerick contact tells me that the trees are equally atrocious down her way and that the county’s top families are rumoured to have their trees flown in from Canada.
According to the New York Times, the hot new trend is for rentable Christmas trees. In Los Angeles (and maybe next year in Dublin) you can choose your “temporary tannenbaum” online. It gets delivered in a pot and is taken away to be replanted in a nursery three weeks later.
Drained from the tree debacle, I had to gear up for a big corporate event the next day. The host, who in previous years would have invited his staff, clients and the media to an expensive restaurant and plied them with champagne and fine wines until it was time to stagger to Doheny Nesbitts, instead opted to have a quieter affair – at home.
Comfort food was on the menu – baked ham, cauliflower in white sauce, served up by colleagues. Carols were sung by beautiful teenagers from his daughter’s class. Terrible year but we’re still here was the theme of the day. To my left, a former cabinet minister pulled crackers and read out the jokes. Some people were eyeing the biros that came out of the crackers. It was all unexpectedly nice.
I’d stopped off at a wine shop to buy chocolates for the host and could barely get through the door – there were so many wine boxes stacked up ready to be delivered as corporate gifts. Lo and behold, many of them were addressed to people in Anglo Irish Bank.
“I’m so glad they’re still being looked after,” I said, aiming for high sarcasm.
“Oh but there’ve been big cutbacks,” said the man behind the counter. “You want to have seen what they were all getting last year!”