Two pieces of toasted white bread on a side plate. Golden stripes from the grill. No-frills filling. Melted cheese. Ham. Lift open the bread and add a few smears from the small, bright-yellow sachet of English mustard. Accept no substitutes.
Take a sip from a freshly poured pint of Guinness. A pint of Guinness in an actual glass. Outside Grogan’s pub on the corner of Castle Market and South William Street in Dublin at 10.30am on the June-bank-holiday morning. Plastic chairs and tables on green AstroTurf.
"I'll have a pint."
"A pint."
"A pint, please."
Nature is healing.
I don't drink pints at 10.30 in the morning as a rule. Except at a festival. This feels like a festival. Everybody is here.
We lost so much in the last 15 months. People. Our minds. The will to live. Friends. Mothers and fathers. Jobs. Our bearings. Freedoms. Exams. Partners. Pubs
The lads in shorts and hoodies on a rollover from the night before. Laughing their heads off.
"You've the best job: drink pints and type away," one smiles.
I peer over my reading glasses and my laptop and agree. I can hardly argue. I smile back and sip.
They're all here. The Grogan's regulars in cravats. The older couple drinking coffee. Normal People. The boys in T-shirts with chains around their necks. Like Connell's chain, I think, and raise my glass to the Bafta-winning Paul Mescal. Longer, though, this chain on this boy. And golden.
“I got it for my christening,” the teenager with the curly hair says. “It’s a St Christopher.”
St Christopher is for the travellers. But we are not allowed to travel. So I think of St Anthony of Padua. He helps us find lost things. Take a sip. Take another. Think about it. We lost so much in the last 15 months. We lost people. We lost our minds. We lost the will to live. We lost friends. We lost mothers and fathers. We lost jobs. We lost our bearings. We lost freedoms. We lost exams. We lost partners. We lost pubs. We lost it.
But St Anthony is here finding things in Grogan's, on a fragrant South William Street, last night's fun and public-order shenanigans swept and mopped and tidied away.
The barman with the blond hair comes to ask if I'm okay. I am very okay. I'm working remotely. Remotely working.
Are you okay?
"Yes," I tell him, "but, controversially given the hour of the morning, I am going to have another pint of Guinness."
"Nothing controversial about it," he says. And it's like an absolution.
My children ring about the Aldi click-and-collect. I’d forgotten all about the Aldi click-and-collect. I don’t tell them I am drinking Guinness from an actual glass outside a pub. I’ll tell them when they’re older and they can maybe understand why it felt, as the man behind me in the queue said earlier, like a historic occasion. I didn’t mean to queue. I just found myself here. I tell myself that, anyway. It was not premeditated.
I text the people in Aldi to tell them what parking bay the car is in, the car that I’m not in, so they can load the groceries in the boot. Then I come back to this moment in history, this Reeling in the Years moment-to-be.
St Christopher glints on the neck of the boy. But I think of St Anthony. And all the lost things. The things we'll find again
I think. I sip. I listen to the people. Clink. Sláinte. Clink.
"We're outside Grogan's here," a man tells his friend on the phone. "F**kin' buzzin'".
"Are you okay, my man?"
"Can I square up?"
"You can, man."
"We take cards now, still getting used to it."
"AstroTurf? Fancy."
"What day is it? Sunday?"
"Where you from? Cork. The worst county."
"Says your man from Dublin."
"Look at all the TV cameras."
"The mother'll kill me, if she sees me on the telly."
"Gavan Reilly is over there."
"The best journalist in the country."
"Take the pints off the tray yourselves, we can't touch them. Regulations."
"Lovely being in a pub, outside a pub. Something normal."
"If the first drink you get in a pub when they open is a Heineken you don't deserve to be here."
"I can't drink stout. I can't drink whiskey. I'm not a man."
"What makes a man?"
"The boys in the better land. They're always talking 'bout the boys in the better land."
"Solid mullet there, boy."
"Now lads, three and one for you."
"Back in business."
"The best spot in the promised land."
"It's like Entourage."
"Victory!"
Noon. Maybe time to go. Don't go. "We're all still here."
All except the TikTok influencer who was here earlier to document the moment. Has he posted it yet? All the phones come out. We watch his report. "He told us we were too loud. Imagine. Too loud."
They are loud, in fairness. What else would they be?
"Ah, feck, my mother's after ringing me. What do I say to her? I keep forgetting she's on Instagram."
Another pint arrives. I didn't order it. The boys in the hoodies with the Insta mammy sent it over. "For your hard work."
They say we're in "the circle of trust" now, and I feel it but I also feel like I hope Grogan's has opened its toilets. I forgot about what Guinness does in that regard. I forgot about the banter. I forgot about the random conversations and the way they happen and the way time passes in the pub, like water. Don't think about water.
St Christopher glints on the neck of the boy. But I think of St Anthony. And all the lost things. The things we'll find again.
roisin@irishtimes.com