We've just got back from old Amsterdam, where we called on the Blings, the enchanting couple who became godfathers to my niece a couple of months ago. Mr and Mr Bling - so-called for their love of jewelled cufflinks and rings the size of children's fists - are friends of my sister's. The boyfriend and I bonded with them over beers in the small English village where my niece was christened, quickly deciding they were well worth stealing from her. So, as you do, we did, writes Róisín Ingle
They live around the corner from the Anne Frank House, a place I have wanted to visit since reading her diary umpteen times as a teenager and a few more times as an adult. We had put it and the Van Gogh Museum at the top of our not very long must-see list. The Anne Frank House was as moving as I had imagined, but, it being Amsterdam, we kind of got diverted as we cycled towards the Van Gogh Museum. One out of two isn't bad.
The Blings' apartment was, as anticipated, a work of art, and we found it easily enough. After landing at Schiphol airport, which turns seamlessly into a beautifully designed railway station, we took a double-decker train and a tram, then walked through cobbled lanes, past shops selling magic mushrooms and marijuana, to Keizersgracht, one of the pretty canals that dominate the city.
Their dog, Nicholas - named after the tsar, of course - rushed down the marble staircase to greet us. Then Mr Bling led us into their apartment. It was a couple of hours, and a few glasses of the finest champagne, later by the time we managed to scrape our jaws off the floor.
We didn't know where to look on our tour of their three-storey apartment. At the massive signed Andy Warhol prints of Queen Elizabeth on the red walls of the kitchen? At the downstairs bathroom lined with black rubber? At the stunning antique furniture - "that chair was made by Napoleon's brother," one of the Blings blithely informed us - in the formal canary-yellow dining room? At the pillars imported from an English bank? At the art-deco chandeliers? After all that we needed a lie down. The guest suite, on the top floor, was better than any five-star hotel's, with a sauna in the bathroom and a tanning machine near the bed for those pale-skin emergencies.
It was inevitable, when we eventually ventured out, that our walk took us past a coffee shop where one of the Blings purchased for us some delicious chocolates laced with the kind of herbs that don't grow in Darina Allen's garden.
The way drugs affect different people is always interesting. Drugs such as alcohol, for example, can make some people merry and others depressed, while turning usually entertaining folk into intolerable bores. Marijuana is no different. I tend to forget everything I have just said, everything I am saying and everything I wanted to say, which leads me to talk even more nonsense than I normally do. Then I eat vast and eclectic amounts of food - crisps, scrambled eggs, brioche, blood sausage on toast - and fall into a deep, snore-filled sleep.
It turns out that the boyfriend, not previously experienced in the way of the weed, becomes more alert than usual, spouting profundities and adopting an expression that suggests he has just discovered the meaning of life. He therefore grew even more fanciable under the influence. Unfortunately, he confessed to not being able to say the same about me, after I'd repeated once too often my regret at spending our Van Gogh time in a coffee shop.
I didn't know there was such a thing as a hash hangover. I do now. The morning after I got back to Dublin I took to cycling around in a muggy haze, wearing my new floaty aquamarine skirt, thinking I looked all bohemian and arty, like all those Amsterdammers who cycle around in kitten heels and other inappropriate clobber.
The reality was a little different from the art-house movie playing in my head. I was whizzing past Trinity College when the pedals stopped turning. I looked back to see the floaty skirt twisted into the back spokes. I tried to yank it out discreetly, but the skirt just got more entwined. Naturally, a small crowd gathered to watch. It took six people 20 minutes to hoist the bike up and cut my pride and joy out of the wheel. Thankfully, I was wearing an underskirt, so my modesty was protected, but my new skirt was now covered in oil and ragged and torn at the seams.
The lesson for today is: when in Amsterdam, think carefully before you do what Amsterdammers do. The high may be fun, but a messy comedown can leave you red faced and in rag order.