MY WEALTHY FRIEND rings me about the recession. "I can't sleep," he says. "I'm lying in bed at night worrying about what will happen to all my money. I'm wondering should I take it out of the bank, or leave the country. I don't know what to do." He carries on like this for 10 minutes while I make soothing noises and pretend I am not jealous that his "problem" is essentially having too much money. As my nordy mother-in-law-in-waiting would say, "I could handle a wee 'problem' like that, so I could."
When he's finished, I tell him what the Buddha might have said about his predicament: everything changes. There's no point getting upset when all is transitory, no two moments the same, like the river flowing or the candle flame burning.
"Anitya, Anitya," I murmur which means impermanence in Sanskrit. For some reason, this doesn't make him feel better. Or as he puts it, "no offence but your Zen mumbo-jumbo is not helping me here." So, I suggest lunch instead.
We decide not to go to our usual recession-friendly place where he always gets a full Irish and I have anything as long as it comes with chips. I always have to make sure my tomato sauce doesn't come within sniffing distance of him, though. He has an aversion to ketchup or any dishes involving sweetcorn, which, he says, is like "old lady teeth".
Today, sticking our tongues out at the economy, we decide to eat in a hotel restaurant that has an oyster bar and high-backed golden booths. There are curtains you can pull across the booths for privacy. The waiter tells me that celebrities like to do that when they come, so they can't be seen by civilians.
Everyone looks sleek here. They all sport shiny Gráinne Seoige hair. I wish I had Seoige hair, even her little sister's barnet would do. I think about pulling the curtains across and retouching my make-up while I wait for my friend. Then I worry someone might peek behind the curtain thinking it's somebody really important like Bill Cullen, and just see me sitting there with lipstick on my teeth. (Even though I have serious issues with Bill's outrageous sacking of poor Avril on last week's Apprentice, I forgive him for coming up with his latest recession- appropriate catchphrase: Have you got the liathroidi? Well have you, punk?)
I retouch in full view and a man wanders past doing a double take. He thinks I am an old friend of his he hasn't seen for years, but I'm not, so we laugh. He leaves. I wonder about my doppelganger. I hope she's good-looking, at least average, anyway. Just not deeply unattractive, that's the main thing. A few moments later, the man is back telling me about this sunglasses promotion that is happening in the other room and would I like to take a look?
I wander into the room where a blonde woman tells me about Maui Jim sunglasses from Hawaii.
She tells me to pick a pair, any pair. I grab them before she changes her mind and go back to my golden booth feeling very pleased with myself. I put on my Maui Jims and wonder if my friend might pay for lunch, in which case I would have scored a free lunch and free sunglasses in one day, a coup in these straitened times.
He arrives and orders a giant platter of seafood. I have the salmon and a side order of chips. You couldn't be thinking of a recession munching on perfect hand-cut chips served in a dainty copper pot while sitting in a golden booth. It's pretty much impossible.
We eat and talk about this country's odd relationship with the €50 note. I tell my friend I keep getting into taxis, and when I go to pay with a €50 note, the driver recoils like I've just let off a stink bomb.
It's all: "Ah, I don't have change" or "The three customers before you had fifties". And they act as though it's my responsibility to find change somewhere. I used to jump through hoops to get change, but now I just sit there saying nothing until they drive themselves to a shop to sort out their problem.
My friend recalls a shop on Dame Street which had a sign on its window saying "Sorry No Fifties". We agree it's no wonder that the Celtic Tiger collapsed when we couldn't even handle €50 notes, which everyone knows have been the new twenties for years. We moan a bit more and my friend says he is cheered up by the end of our lunch when, sad to report, we go dutch.
I'm glad he's happy, but he's got me thinking about my own financial situation. We've had a stash in the bank for six months while we wait for work on our extension to start. My boyfriend rings up the bank to check (a) if it's still there and (b) how much lovely interest we have made.
Turns out we've had it in the wrong kind of account all this time and made a grand total of €17 instead of the thousands we were imagining.
I lie in bed. Worried. Can't sleep. I phone my wealthy friend. "Anitya, anitya," he murmurs. "Ketchup dribbling all over your chin, and sweetcorn in your teeth," I counter. I fall asleep and dream that taxi drivers in the form of giant €50 notes are chasing me down O'Connell Street.