On the ferry to France I was eating a plate of smoked salmon and drinking a glass of wine on my own while peering out at the sunset through a pane of hazy glass. I wasn’t in the mood to go out on deck. The children and their father were snoring in bed in the cabin but my sinuses were at me and I’d gone wandering in ferryland.
First I caught a cabaret show which featured a woman from Liverpool serenading a group of babies, children and their parents with pop songs. “Come on, let’s show them how it’s done, hands in the air you lot,” she said. The children followed her every move as though she were Rihanna and this a floating O2. Everyone was in holiday mood, a mood I wasn’t yet in.
When I met Christina I was eating the salmon and drinking the wine as a hopeful kind of makey-up sinus cure. Beside me, she was doing the same thing. Trying to catch the sun as it dipped into the horizon that is, not eating salmon and drinking wine. Her sinuses were in good order. We sat there watching the sky show until one of us remarked on what we were doing.
“Isn’t it marvellous?” she said and I agreed. The pinkish disc was descending rapidly and though we both knew we’d have a better view outside, it was good enough for us. Christina was from Kerry, a Ballyhaig woman originally, and she told me she watches the sunset there all the time which is not quite as impressive as in the middle of the sea but impressive all the same.
We watched the sun fall and we talked about France. We were both off to a family camping type of place. She was with her son and daughter-in-law and their children. It was a grand kind of holiday. She’d been last year and had a fine time.
Last year she’d been to the same place we were headed to Château des Ormes in Brittany, so she could tell me all about the pony rides and the lake where you can feed the ducks and the 40-metre zipwire which neither of us were inclined to get involved with.
You stick a pin in a map really when you pick these places and you takes your chances, but here was a woman who could tell me we’d done well with our choice. The only reason her gang weren’t going back was because it was northern Brittany and the weather had been just like Irish weather, the drizzle and the clouds; they were looking for an improvement further south.
I told her I didn’t mind about the weather. And she agreed that with children it was easier if it was overcast what with having to slather on the suncream and think about sunhats all the time. Exactly, I said. And we sat there in easy silence.
Her daughter-in-law came along on the way to bringing a child to bed and she had recommendations for restaurants near the place we were staying and by the time she left Christina and I realised we’d missed the sun going down. “After all that,” smiled Christina. But when we looked again we realised it had only dipped into cloud and there it was, glinting like a ruby for a few seconds before it disappeared.
We chatted for a while and I learned a few things about Christina. She was born on Christmas day and has a big birthday coming up this December. She was widowed a few years ago and it’s a terrible shock when your husband of nearly 40 years who you still get along with very well dies suddenly and you don’t get a chance to say goodbye. She gets up every morning at 7.30am to listen to Radio Kerry. She begins the day with the death announcements because the day doesn’t start right without them. She didn’t mind me slagging her about this. “You need to know about the deaths,” she insisted with a smile.
I also learned that she carries Olbas Oil with her on holidays because when I mentioned my sinuses she made me drown a load of paper napkins in it to ease the congestion in my head. “Take more, no more than that, no more,” she kept saying so I did.
The oil did the trick. I went off to bed smelling strange but feeling a little more in the holiday mood. As I left, she said we should think of each other when the sun sets while we're on our holidays. And that's what I've been doing on all these non-drizzly gloriously sunny days. Smiling at the setting sun and thinking of Christina who is kind to complete strangers and likes to know who has died.
roisin@irishtimes.com