Category Archives: Irish woman abroad

17. Angela

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About this time six years ago, I started to drop in to visit my friend Angela regularly. She was 82 years old at the time. What started as a one-off visit for a gin and tonic one Sunday evening, turned into a weekly affair. I’d pop around at 6 o’clock each Sunday evening (or later during the summer), the gin and tonic on the worktop ready for me to pour. I’d make us a glass each and then we’d sit and chat for the next couple of hours, with Miranda the cat sleeping by the gas fire, Mora the dachshund trying to sneak onto my lap, and Archie the African grey parrot adding his own opinions to the conversation. Our conversations were far-ranging. We talked a lot about the books we were reading, the movies we had watched, with each of us often taking up the others’ recommendations. She frequently quoted poetry to me – long-remembered lines that popped into her conversation, appropriate to whatever we were discussing. We talked politics – from our little village all the way up to the international level. She talked about her childhood during the war, her years in London as a trainee nurse, and then her married life raising her three children in Wales. Being a retired nurse, no topic of conversation was too delicate or too squeamish for our Sunday evenings. With deteriorating eyesight and hearing, she preferred these one-on-one get togethers with friends in the quiet of her own home.

When COVID came the following spring, our Sunday night visits continued via WhatsApp video. We’d each pour a glass of red wine or a gin and tonic in our respective homes, only a few hundred metres away from each other and carry on our conversations are normal. How happy we were when we finally got to meet in person again.

As her eyesight deteriorated, she found ingenious ways to continue reading and watching movies. She turned to Audible and listened to books now and she devised an iPad and magnifying glass set-up to allow her to continue watching movies. For a woman of her years, she was remarkably tech savvy and had a weakness for buying clothes and gadgets and all sorts of wonderful things online.

One Sunday evening in the early summer of 2021, she announced, “I think I’ve gone and something totally mad.” I expected it to be some new online purchase. “What have you done?” I asked. She told me that, at the age of 84, she was tired of living in a house that didn’t have a garden. In whatever remaining years she had, she wanted to grow vegetables again and keep hens. This wasn’t too shocking. After all, at the age of 77, she had decided to sell her home in Wales and moved to Sanlucar de Guadiana. “What are you going to do with this house?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t thought about it.” “Would you sell it to me?” I asked. The girls and I were living in a big old rented house at the time and I was despairing of ever having a house of my own. “Yes,” she said, without pausing to think about it. I’d no idea how I was going to afford this house, but was determined to find a way.

And so began the next phase of my relationship with Angela. She was happy to sell me the house, but under certain conditions, the main one being that the girls and I live in it for a year to see if we really liked it. During that year, I would pay her a tiny amount of rent, which would allow me to save up for a deposit for a mortgage. If, at the end of that year, I decided the house wasn’t for us, we could walk away, and she’d put it on the market. A couple of months later, she moved out into her new house – just 50 metres along the same street – and I moved into her old house and she became my landlady. Our weekly get togethers continued, now at her new house and we continued to put the world to rights for those two hours every Sunday evening.

When I quit drinking and she mostly quit drinking, our Sunday evening chats came to an end and I started to drop in to her on Monday or Tuesday mornings instead. I never tired of our conversation and felt something was missing on those occasional weeks when, for one reason or another, I couldn’t make it over to spend time with her.

Almost two years ago she fell in the house, slipping on a piece of plastic on her living room floor. She broke her hip and spent some time in hospital. But soon she was out, valiantly doing her physio exercises and getting her fitness back on a stationary bike that she bought and installed in the spare room. Although she was frustrated with her slow recovery, the rest of us were amazed by her speedy recovery and soon she was out walking the dog again, first using a walker, then crutches, then a walking stick. About six months later, she fell again, this time breaking her wrist, when she got tangled up in the dog’s lead while out walking up a steep hill one morning.

Her eyesight continued to deteriorate and her next ingenious online purchase was a gaming chair and TV. The sight of a tiny 87-year-old woman sitting in a teenager’s gaming chair was something else! I’d drop in and she’d tell me about some 1940s black and white movie she’d watched, recalling Hollywood stars in movies that were old even when I was a kid. She introduced me to The Rest is History podcast and we got great mileage discussing the various episodes we’d listened to.

She remained positive and engaged and witty, despite her body increasingly letting her down. I can’t list all the things she carried on doing – gardening and baking and taking trips back to the UK and just being engaged with the world – that people half her age have already given up on. I thought often of Seamus Heaney’s Field of Vision when I was with her. He might have written the following lines about her:

She was steadfast as the big window itself.

Her brow as clear as the chrome bits of the chair.

She never lamented once and she never

Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

She was a loyal friend too, not just to me, but to so many of us in Sanlucar. Every single day, without fail, she had a phone conversation with Val (Honeybunch) her friend back in the UK from her nursing days in London in the late 1950s. That’s friendship for you.

For all her amazing attributes, she was my hero. I don’t aspire to be like her in my 80s; I aspire to be like her now. Her attitude to life was like that of no-one I’ve ever met.

Only four weeks ago, she was diagnosed with incurable cancer. I had the privilege to spend a lot of time with her in the first three of those weeks and, despite her increasingly frail body, we continued to laugh and take an interest in life. On the last day I was with her, when her body seemed to not be able to go on any more, she continued to tell me fascinating stories about her life. When I left to come to England last week, I knew how much I would miss her as we said goodbye for the last time and I knew that she would be sorely missed by all of us who have had the privilege of having her in our lives.

Angela died yesterday afternoon.

Angela handing me the keys three years ago, the day she sold her house to me.

16. Country mouse

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There’s nothing quite like spending a few days in London’s leafy suburbs. My head is spinning from the range of international cuisine to choose from, the delivery to the door of fresh food, the charity shops selling the hand-me-downs of the well-to-do. The easy and regular public transport.

We went to a Japanese fast food place for lunch today. Proper, real, honest to god Japanese food. I haven’t eaten inari in years – it tasted as good as I remembered when I used to buy it in my local supermarket in Sue-machi. The katsu curry brought me back to winter evenings at my friend Takako’s house in Sasaguri-machi. The edamame were a delight. It was all southwest London outside the window – red buses and black cabs going past – but inside it was all Japan. And how happy I was.

Then a spot of shopping. Not much, because we’re travelling light and don’t have much room in our bags when we make the return journey to the midlands in a few days. An independent bookshop was a delight – our second in less than a week. While the range on offer and the hours you can spend in Waterstones – the big book chain store – is amazing, there’s nothing quite like a small independent book shop. They’re always quirky, with friendly staff eager (but not too eager) to help. This one was narrow and tightly packed. We had to squeeze between shelves and step aside to let other customers pass. We all got excited when we saw books that we’ve read or showed each other books we want to read. We oohed and aahed over beautiful cover art and I apologized to the shop assistant for buying nothing more than a greeting card and not supporting her business more.

We browsed a few charity shops. I’ve been looking for a linen shirt, and I found one that, by the looks of it, is brand new and only cost me £3. We were drawn to the books in the charity shops too and to the cute little figurines and ornaments. I offered to buy Lily a measuring tape housed in a crocheted ladybird, but she declined my offer. How strange. Coincidentally, I bought a Ladybird book for myself for nostalgia’s sake and I bought Katie a badge. It takes so little to make us happy.

And then it was a fancy coffee place for salted caramel iced frappes. You don’t get those in Sanlucar, let me tell you! And then it was back to the train and in five minutes we were walking down the tree-lined road back to Sarah’s house.

While I never want to swap rural life for suburban or city life, I still enjoy savouring what this other life has to offer. The katsu curry and salted caramel frappe taste all the better for only being available to this country mouse once in a very very blue moon.

Photo by Emrah Kara on Unsplash

13. Liliane’s replacement

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We’re on the train and I’m very excited. In only a few hours, we will be in southwest London at the home of one of my dearest friends.

Sarah and I met in Japan in August 1997. I had already completed two years as an assistant language teacher with the JET programme in a little town in Fukuoka in the southwest of the country. Sarah was brand new and had come to replace my friend Liliane, who had the same job as me in the next town over. Surely, no one could replace Liliane.

I arrived at Liliane’s apartment one hot August evening to meet this new person. Sarah opened the door. I remember her holding the Arthur Hailey novel Hotel in her hand when she opened the door. Back then, I was all up myself, into the Beat poets and raving about Jack Kerouac, so I wasn’t too impressed by her choice of reading material. ‘She’ll never replace Liliane,’ I told myself.

She invited me in and we sat at her kitchen table (Liliane’s kitchen table) and started to get to know each other. Twenty-eight years later and I’m on a train to London to see Sarah. I’ve no idea where Liliane is.

Sarah’s first year in Japan was to be my last. We quickly became firm friends and giggled our way through that year, having all sorts of fun. A year after I left Japan, I returned to visit her for a few weeks the next year and when she returned home to live in London, our friendship only deepened. She came to Ireland and met my family and I went to England and met hers.

We met our future husbands at around the same time. I still have the letter she wrote to me about the cute Spanish guy she met while she was in Boston and how he stuck a Post-it note to her work computer, asking her out on a date. She sent me that letter around the same time I sent her a letter about the cute English guy I met while I was studying in Aberdeen. Her wedding a couple of years later to Luis remains the best wedding I’ve ever been to.

We became pregnant with our first babies within months of each other and Lily and Isabel have known each other since they were tiny. Then I had Katie and Sarah had Daniel and our four kids – now all teenagers – get on like a house on fire.

Rarely a year has gone by when our two families don’t spend time together – her English-Spanish family coming to spend a few days with us; my Irish-English Spanish-speaking family spending a few days with them. These annual visits are a highlight of our year. The fact that our children all get on so well makes it all the easier for Sarah and me. Over the coming days, we’ll hang out, go places together, she’ll tell my kids stories about me and I’ll tell her kids stories about her – all from the days when we weren’t a whole lot older than they are now. And we’ll part ways after those few days, our friendship renewed and, despite a few more wrinkles than last year, the two of us feeling, just a little, like we’re in our 20s once again.

Now, I wonder what ever happened to Liliane?

12. Jumbo hot dogs

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Warwick market, Saturday morning

Being in the UK and, in particular, in this town, brings memories of Julian flooding back. I pass through places by car that I only ever drove through with him. I go to places that I visited for the first time, or only ever visited with him. Indeed, I would never have known this town in the middle of England, had I never met him.

There have been times in the past few years, when being here has been overwhelming. Not only being in this place, but being with Julian’s family and the memories and emotions that being in their company brings to the surface. In the past, being here has caused me to have panic attacks. In fact, last year, after only four days, I ended up in A&E (ER) with a panic attack that I thought was a heart attack. That was a scary day.

This time, however, I am so much more at ease. Time has played a part in healing me, so too have eight sessions with a therapist that I gave as a birthday present to myself last year, so too the memoir I’ve been writing this past year. I’m busy with work (intentionally, perhaps?) and I’m absorbing the sensations of being in parks and along canals and surrounded by nature in this exceptionally nature-filled town. (Yesterday, a falcon had an aerial fight with two crows only metres from me in Priory Park!)

Each morning since we got here, I work for a few hours at Warwick Library. Yesterday, I went in as usual. But it wasn’t usual. It was Saturday, so the market was on in the square in front of the library. Even better, at the far end of the square I saw a van bearing the words ‘Jumbo Hot Dogs’. Memories came flooding back. I phoned Katie and suggested that she and Lily get Granddad to drive them to the library in a few hours, so we could wander the market and have jumbo hot dogs for lunch.

The girls duly arrived and I packed up my laptop and we wandered around the market, chatting to the vendors and browsing the arts, crafts and foodstuffs they had on offer. At the food stalls, there were savoury pies and all sorts of lovely things that tempted me. But I was going for the jumbo hot dogs, for nostalgia’s sake more than anything else.

You see, Julian loved jumbo hot dogs. No matter what his state of hunger, if he spotted a jumbo hot dog stand, he had to have one. He was also someone who stuffed receipts into his pockets. When we both worked, we shared the task of doing the laundry. Every time it was my turn to put a load in the machine, I’d first have to empty Julian’s trouser pockets of receipts. When we lived in Cambridge, I’d often find five or six receipts for the jumbo hot dog stand! How long had he been wearing those trousers? Or how many hot dogs was he consuming a day? He’d laugh sheepishly and tell me he’d occasionally get a craving in the middle of work, leave his desk, hop on his bike and cycle the two miles into the middle of Cambridge for a jumbo hot dog and then return to work. Crazy man.

So, there was nothing for it yesterday but to introduce jumbo hot dogs to our daughters, who’d only ever before had those cheap rubbery vacuum packed frankfurters you get at kid’s birthday parties, and not these juicy British sausages, with real fried onions, ketchup, in a soft, freshly baked hotdog roll. Katie wasn’t sure if she wanted one, so I bought two. One bite of mine and I had to go back to get a third from the friendly chatty couple running the van.

Good God, they tasted good, that combination of good food mixed with good memories. As we ate, I told the girls about their father’s jumbo hot dog obsession, another piece of him revealed to them, another good memory of him restored to me.

11. The artist formerly known as…

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When she was in her early 50s, my mother decided to take up painting. She joined an art class, bought art supplies and painted some lovely landscapes and rustic urban scenes that still grace the walls of her house.

The Christmas after she took up painting, I arrived home from somewhere, I can’t now remember where. The presents were all under the tree – all except Mammy’s present to me. One of my and my sister’s favourite pastimes in the days leading up to Christmas Eve was to sit by the tree, examining all the carefully wrapped presents with our names on and guess the contents, comparing the size and weight of our respective presents. Mammy explained that she hadn’t put my present under the tree yet, because I would immediately know what it was and the surprise would be ruined. She planned to only put it under the tree in the moments before we unwrapped our presents after tea on Christmas Eve. I had no idea what it might be.

The next day, I went in to Gilroy to see Nana. She made me a mug of coffee and put a plate of biscuits on the coffee table beside the bowl of Quality Street chocolates that was already there. We chatted about this and that. After a while, and seemingly apropos to nothing, she said, “What do you think of it?” “Hmmm?” I said, too busy deciding whether to have another Quality Street or another biscuit. “I don’t think it looks anything like you, do you?” she asked. “Erm, no,” I replied, with genuinely not a clue what she was talking about, but also still too distracted by the chocolate to find out more. And the conversation moved on to other things.

Christmas Eve evening arrived. We ate our tea and then went to light the Christmas candle on the hall table. Daddy lit the candle and the four of us bowed our heads and said a prayer. The moment to open our presents had come. In the middle of tea, Mammy had slipped out to put her present to me under the tree. As soon as I walked into the sitting room and saw it under the tree, I knew that it was a painting of some sort.

We opened our presents one by one, each of us waiting to see what everyone else had received and watching their reactions. The moment came to unwrap my painting from Mammy. I carefully removed the wrapping to reveal…a portrait of ME! Well, sort of a portrait of me. I tried hard not to burst out laughing and one look at Daddy’s and my sister’s faces let me know that they were struggling not to laugh too. But, she’d put so much effort into it and none of us wanted to hurt her feelings. But, God, it was hard.

“I couldn’t get the lips right,” she said. I thought to myself ‘And that’s not all!’. I could see that the lips and been drawn, erased and redrawn many times in pencil, as she tried and failed to get the shape right. My nose was very long and narrow, my eyes strangely slanted and wide-set and my hair sat on top of my head like a helmet. My shoulders were heavy and, although the portrait stopped above my chest, it gave the impression that I had the huge heavy breasts of a seventy year old. “It’s lovely,” I said.

I don’t remember what happened next, but by the next day, Mammy’s portrait of me had turned into a highlight of our Christmas. The first to see it was my uncle Tom, when he arrived out for Christmas Day dinner, and then my uncles and cousins who came out for tea later that evening. Mammy was very quickly in on the joke, realising that this was perhaps not her best work and that the portrait had value of a different kind – it made us all silly with laughter. We discovered the best thing about the portrait was showing it to people with straight faces, pretending that we thought it was brilliant and watching as the cogs moved in their heads as they tried to find something polite to say about it.

The portrait came with me to the UK and, when I met Julian, it came with us to the many houses we lived in over the years. I’d sometimes arrive home late at night to find Julian in bed with the portrait on my pillow, delighted with his little joke. He carried on the tradition started by my own family of showing it to his family and our friends with a straight face and waiting for their reactions.

When we moved onto the boat, there was no room for the portrait, so we put it up in my father-in-law’s loft in Coventry. I imagined it doing a Dorian Grey on me but, I’ve grown older and it continues to not look at all like me! A little over a year ago, my father-in-law downsized to a smaller house and I travelled to the UK to deal with what was left of our stuff up in his loft. There I found the portrait, which I hadn’t seen in years. There was only one place for it – on the wall of the spare room (Lily and Katie’s room) at my father-in-law’s new house.

Lily and I are sleeping in that room at the moment, with Katie relegated to the sofa in the living room. Every time we look up at that portrait we giggle. Who could have guessed that that heartfelt and earnestly created piece of art would have such an unexpected life out in the world.

10. From there to here

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The trees are so big and so green and so varied and so alive. Oaks, horse chestnuts, sycamores, beech. Their trunks are immense and they reach high up into the blue sky. So unlike the scrubby arid trees of the dehesa (savannah) of southwest Spain. Tiredness is causing me to have an out of body experience as I walk through Priory Park. Is this what it’s like to experience the world when high on drugs, I wonder? The giant beautiful trees seem to pulsate around me, my brain and eyes playing tricks on me. Maybe the trees are playing tricks on me too. The tiredness is adding to my disbelief that I’m here, when only a few hours ago, I was there.

We woke up at 3.10am. I slept little anyway, checking my phone through the night to make sure I hadn’t slept through the alarm. Katie had set her alarm too, so it wouldn’t have mattered, but tell that to my subconscious/unconscious brain. It didn’t help that the narrow single bed in the cheap airport hotel was springy and uncomfortable and the room was too hot at first, then too cold with the fan, then too hot when I turned the fan off. Through those few brief hours, I heard other hotel guests arriving and departing, the thunk-thunk of heavy suitcases being hauled up or down the old stone stairs of this hotel without a lift, the wheels squeaking down the corridor outside our bedroom door, a movement-sensing light flooding our room with light through the glass panel over the door.

I am grateful that the airport was straightforward, the flight uneventful, our train to Leamington Spa on time. By the time we get to my father-in-law’s house mid-morning, the effects of the tiny €30 airport breakfast has long worn off and we are starving. While he asks the girls about the flight, I make a bee-line for the kitchen, knowing exactly what I’ll make (the girls and I have been discussing it, fantasizing about it). We anticipate what Granddad will have in stock, and we’re not disappointed. Rashers and eggs and fried tomatoes, with buttered fresh white bread and strong tea.

Afterwards, I rest for an hour, unpack a little and then I’m off again. The girls are sleepy, though they claim they aren’t. But they’re pale and have bags under their eyes, so they can’t fool me. I leave them sitting in the livingroom with Granddad, looking out over his garden at a fat pigeon pecking at the seeds he’s scattered about. I leave the house to the sounds of him telling the girls about a radio he built when he was a teenager, from his dad’s old cigar box. I hear him ask them what components they’d need to make a radio. My Gen Z teenagers have never used a radio in their lives, but I’m out the door before I hear their answer.

While my work life will be decidedly less frenetic in the coming weeks than it has been of late, I have a deadline to meet this coming weekend and I need to crack on. I spend a few hours at the library, meet my self-imposted work target for the day, and head back to my father-in-law’s house again. By now, I am well and truly zombified with tiredness, and the trees pulsate as I walk through them. Perhaps they are really Ents. Perhaps I need a good night’s sleep.

8. Leaving home and going home

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Later today, I will close my front door behind me as the girls and I leave home for 10 weeks. We’ve never been away from Sanlucar for so long before. At first, we will spend a few weeks in the UK and then we will go home to Ireland. We have a wonderful summer ahead of us, packed with family and close friends and trips to all sorts of wonderful places and events.

But I have mixed emotions about leaving. I am saying goodbye to a close friend who, owing to illness, will likely no longer be with us when I return. At the same, I am excited to spend time with my family and dear friends, the people who have known me longer and who know me better than anyone.

I’m taking the girls away from a summer by the pool and at the beach, and being with their friends. I’m also taking them away from Lady. But then I remind myself of how hot it’s going to be and how we’ll be stuck inside the house most of each day in +40C heat. So, I’m looking forward to taking the girls to cooler beaches and to places familiar to them that they want to visit again and places new that they have never been to. And I’m excited about the time they will get to spend with friends in the UK, starting on Sunday, when we travel to London to visit their oldest friends.

While I have adapted to many aspects of Spanish culture, after ten years I have yet to adapt to staying out so late at night. I can do it once or twice in the entire summer. But, in general, when Sanlucar comes alive at night in the summertime, when many of our friends and neighbours are out strolling the streets, or at one of the bars, or sociably sitting outside their houses, the girls and I have already gone to bed. I have tried to adapt, but I can neither stay awake that late at night nor get by on so little sleep the next day when I need to be up at 6am to get my work done before it gets too hot. Lots of people have managed to adapt to it. Sadly, I’m not one of them. So, I’m looking forward to cooler weather in the UK and Ireland (despite a heatwave in the former at the moment) and sticking to my normal bedtime.

For all of that, for all the wonderful things I have planned, I know that when I am at home* in Ireland I will miss my home in Spain. I will be looking forward to coming home in September, batteries charged, feeling refreshed and renewed, and feeling love and longing for both the home I will be leaving behind and the home I will be returning to. I am grateful for both.

*I don’t actually own a home in Ireland. We’ll be couch and spare-bed surfing for the entire summer. It’s more that home owns me.

An aerial photo of my home in Ireland, taken sometime in the 1960s.

5. Sedna

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Sedna/Nuliajuq by Brian Arualak, Arviat, 20003

A few days ago, when it was too hot for Lady’s little paws to be on the road, I took her down to the river for a swim. When I got there, I spotted a yacht on the pontoon called Sedna. I got very excited. Sedna (or Nuliajuq in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut) is the supreme goddess of Inuit mythology. Goddess of the sea, she hides and protects the marine animals in her long flowing seaweedy hair, only revealing them to hunters who prove themselves deserving. How does she decide who’s deserving? It’s those hunters and, more importantly, their wives, who generously share the meat and fur and other parts taken in the hunt. In the old days (and in some quarters still today), Inuit believed that animals, once released from Sedna’s hair, gave themselves to generous hunters.

So, I got very excited when I saw this boat. The way I got excited in the past to see a boat called Aarluk (orca) or one called Nanuq (polar bear). One doesn’t expect to see Inuktitut words in southern Europe! I couldn’t resist popping down to the pontoon to say hi and inquire as to why the owner had named his boat after the Inuit goddess of the sea. I mean, a goddess of the sea I get; but the Inuit one specifically?

I saw that the boat was flying a Spanish flag and had a Spanish registration mark printed on the hull. There was a man in his seventies in the cockpit. ‘Buenas tardes,’ I said, assuming that he, like his boat, was Spanish. When he replied in English with a British accent, I said hi, and told him, perhaps a little over-enthusiastically, that I’d noticed his boat was called Sedna.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, distinctly less enthusiastic than I was. ‘Why did you call it that?’ I asked. ‘That’s what the previous owner called it and I didn’t bother to change it.’ He seemed not curious, not interested, not bemused, not annoyed that I’d bothered him. Indeed, he seemed not really anything at all that this overly-exuberant Irish dog-walker on the Spanish border was trying to make conversation about the name of his boat.

‘Do you know what it means?’ I asked.

‘Nope,’ he replied.

‘She’s the Inuit goddess of the sea,’ I started, but he cut me short and asked, ‘Do you live here?’ He was completely disinterested and my little bubble of excitement at having found someone who might share my interest in Inuit mythology and Inuit culture was immediately burst.

I laughed at my silliness after. At how I had imagined our conversation would go and at how the conversation actually went. I chatted with him for a few minutes more, answering his questions about life in the village, and whether I still owned a boat, and whether the schools around here are any good. Then I said goodbye, wished him luck on his sailing trip and Lady and I carried on on our merry way.

4. Blinded by the tears

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It’s hard to put into words what Bruce Springsteen means to me. His music and his persona are so entangled with my teenage years and my 20s, with my relationships with my father, my sister, my cousin Sean. Bruce Springsteen is me listening to the Born in the USA album on the stereo in our living room when I was 13 or 14 years’ old, wishing I could go see him in Slane. It’s finally going to see him when I was 17 in the RDS with Daddy and my sister. It’s going to see him again when I was 20, this time on my own, the night before my final anthropology exam at the end of my degree. None of my friends would come with me, because of…well…final exams, but I’d been to Bon Jovi the night before and now Bruce (I did great in those exams, by the way). I remember standing on my own at the very front of the crowd, crushed up against the stage and Bruce doing an acoustic version of Thunder Road. It’s me on my 50th birthday, standing in a muddy stadium in Barcelona with my sister and my best friend, tears streaming down my face as Bruce sang Thunder Road again. I’m not a Bruce completist. I don’t have (or even know) all of his music, but I’m an all in, unapologetic fan.

My favorite album, not just by Bruce, but my favourite album by anyone ever, is Nebraska. I’ve listened to it a thousand times. I could sing the whole album to you without skipping a beat (not that anyone would want me to). I love that album. From that opening harmonica of the title track, it just grabs me, with its pathos and anger and the death of the American Dream, and Bruce’s gravelly voice weaving stories of the struggles of ordinary people. It simply moves me in ways that no other album ever has.

Two mornings ago I did what I do first thing every morning. I put on the kettle and, while I waited for it to boil, I got my phone and looked at the news. I scrolled down my preferred news site, reading about all the terrible things happening in the world at the moment. Down at the culture section, I see that a trailer for some new Bruce Springsteen film has just been released. Not only is it a film about Bruce, it’s a film about the making of the Nebraska album. Jeremy Allen White is playing Bruce. I really loved The Bear, not really because of Jeremy Allen White but because of the entire ensemble cast. I find him an odd-looking sullen little man and I wondered what he would be like in the role of Bruce. I was thinking about it on my one-hour walk so, when I got home, I found the trailer on YouTube for Deliver me from Nowhere, as I discovered the film is called. I watched the two and a half minute trailer and without warning, found tears streamed down my face. I don’t think a trailer has ever made me cry before. It had such a deep impact on me. I don’t really even know why I was crying, but I think a mixture of nostalgia, joy, excitement about seeing the film, and remembering listening to that album throughout my teens and 20s and 30s and how it has meant something different to me at different stages of my life. Later on, instead of listening to a podcast, as I usually do when I’m making lunch, I did the only thing I could possibly do and played the Nebraska album from first song to last.

3. W.W.A.D.

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My next-door neighbor Alfredas has quite an impressive social media following given that, until recently, his content was exclusively presented in Lithuanian. He posts daily videos about sobriety, quitting smoking, sleep health, mental health, and so on, tracking his own journey and sharing what he has learned with others. His videos are well informed and based on peer reviewed science. I know this because I get the omnibus edition when my family has lunch with his family every Sunday. He’s less the man who wants to live forever and more the man who wants to live his remaining years on the planet in the best way possible.

Last year, he returned home to Lithuania for a few months to organize Sober Summer. He recruited thousands of people, mostly young and middle-aged, to quit alcohol for the summer. To party, have fun, be active, be engaged, and do it all without alcohol. His Sober Summer events were featured widely on Lithuanian social and traditional media.

This summer, he’s returned to Lithuania with a new plan: 90 X 90. He’s encouraging everyone to be active for one hour every day for the ninety days of summer. 90 X 90 officially started on 1 June and, well, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to join in.

Doing one hour of activity is not a problem for me. I regularly walk the dog for an hour or more, do housework for an hour or play pádel with Katie for an hour. However, I lack the consistency of engaging in a continuous hour of activity every single day. So that’s my challenge.

I started on day one and, twenty days in, I haven’t missed a day yet. I’ve been walking the dog and playing sports as usual. I’ve even started jogging a little, which is something I haven’t done since I was pregnant with Lily. It’s extremely hot these days (40C yesterday), so I leave the house with the girls in the morning when they go to catch the school bus and get my active hour in then. It feels great to do this consistently.

Alfredas is a man of action and, for some time, my family and his family have had a running joke: ‘Ask yourself, what would Alfredas do?’ So, Lily, crafty kid that she is, made W.W.A.D. bracelets for all of us! And that’s my motto on days when I think ‘maybe I don’t have an hour to spare today’. What would Alfredas do? He’d put on his running shoes and go.