A new friend was making dinner in between Scrabble games. It turns out Cormac, who is infuriatingly good at Scrabble, can also cook. He was wearing a pink-and-white striped apron and standing at his stove lost in quiet concentration. I watched him open a tub of sour cream, spoon a small amount of it into the mismatched china cups he’d filled with soup and carefully bring them over to the table. Nettle soup, he told us. I raised the delicate cup to my nose. It smelled like a meditation retreat I’d been on once.
He’d picked the nettles from his garden and with some help from Darina Allen made a delicious green concoction that tasted mildly medicinal, in a good way. Cormac says everyone should let nettles grow in their gardens, if you’re lucky enough to have one, or in window boxes or pots. He says butterflies lay their eggs on them and that nettles put nitrogen into the soil. He knows a lot about nettles. He also makes apple jelly and fermented pears. And he is far too good for my liking at Scrabble.
I don’t know much more about him yet. New friends are exciting like that. Another new friend, MK, is someone I meet in London every so often or in Dublin when she is over here. She’s decades younger than me, which I find invigorating. She’s older than me in some ways too. Wise from life experiences I’ve not had. She knows about Mulberry bags and where to find the best charity shops. There’s something ancient and deep about her. Olde worlde. She knows about Georgian architecture and renovation. New friends are teachers. The best kind.
[ Donal Skehan's recipe for nettle soupOpens in new window ]
We’re in that romantic friendship stage when everything is fascinating and there is always more to discover. We laugh a lot and she tells me about restaurants in London I absolutely have to try. That’s how we ended up in Straker’s in Notting Hill eating mussel flatbreads, which my teenagers – who mostly choose chicken wings when we go out to eat – declared was the best thing they’d ever put in their mouths. She told us about Julie’s restaurant, where The Beatles used to hang out back in the day and where King Charles had his stag night. I dragged her to the leafy West London road where I’d discovered my great-grandfather once lived. She seemed as invested as I was which made me happy and she took photos of me at the door my great-grandfather had been carried through as a baby.
I’m enjoying my new friendship. We’re at the stage when everything is fascinating
Róisín Ingle: I have a list in my head of unwritten letters. Now I will write them
Róisín Ingle: We will have two 16-year-olds in this house soon which is blowing my mind a bit
Róisín Ingle: Here’s what happened when I lost my phone ... again
I’m enjoying the mystery of new friendship. Making friends in your 50s is an adventure. MK with her red lipstick and infectious laughter. Cormac with his apple jelly and nettle soup. You can’t ask them too many questions at first – you don’t want to scare them off. The information comes incrementally. His lyrical children’s names. How he met his wife. She doesn’t remember their first meeting. He can’t forget it; the moment is burned on his brain. He was walking up a set of stairs and she was coming down the same set of stairs wearing an extremely short skirt. You don’t forget these encounters. Not if you are the one going up the stairs
The Scrabble tournament is monthly now, on a Wednesday. It moves from house to house, dinner is included in the evening’s activity and there’s a hefty cash prize for the first person who reaches 2,000 points. Old friend Trevor brought a bottle of red and old friend Gerry brought his fancy rotating Scrabble board and the latest edition of the Scrabble dictionary. Our “bible”. No more searching up “is ‘farad’ a valid Scrabble word?” on the internet. (It is. Cormac put the word down and of course we challenged it. But he knew what it meant, a unit of electrical capacitance named after Faraday. See? Infuriating. One of these months, I will beat him. I will.)
In Nettles, a poem by Vernon Scannell, the poet recalls a memory of his son falling into a nettle bed in the garden. “Bed seemed a curious name for those green spears.” There was no place to rest in this bed, that “regiment of spite behind the shed”. Scannell’s son was distraught.
Reading the poem I was reminded of how nettle stings can be traumatic for a child. I saw my own small legs as a girl, having fallen into a nettle patch, white marks appearing on livid skin. I remembered the flowering of a special kind of pain that comes from accidental encounters with those singular leaves. In the poem, Scannell recalls how the pain eventually subsided to the point where his son could give him a “watery grin”. The relief. That feeling when a child realises that stings fade.
Meanwhile, protective father Scannell was furious and took a freshly sharpened blade to the nettles behind the shed until there was no trace of them left. Two weeks later, thanks to “the busy sun and rain” the nettles were back with a vengeance. The final line of the poem is a life lesson, a reminder: “My son would often feel sharp wounds again.”
Nettles, like new friends, are teachers. Cormac says to pick the nettles now, grasp them while they are still tender and the season of Bealtaine is upon us. He says wear gloves to avoid stings and wash the nettles thoroughly. And then? Make tea. Make soup. Make friends.
