Kate thinks there are far too many bank holidays in the calendar. And on each one of them her husband suggests that they have his old rip of a mother to lunch. "It's a lonely day for people of that age, I'd hate to think of her festering on her own," he says with the air of a man who has done a good deed.
Then Kate, who goes out to work and would like a nice rest on the Monday, has to tidy the house, arrange for a taxi to collect her mother-in-law and cook a meal which will not include herbs, spices or food that was not in vogue 50 years ago.
And bribe the children not to have bare midriffs or dreadlocks and to pretend that they've been to Mass in recent memory.
What Kate was hoping was that there might be extensive sports coverage on television. Then her husband would stay at home, and her sons, and they could pretend to be a happy extended family, and the women could doze until it was time to take the mother-in-law back.
But there isn't, there's only racing at Kempton Park on Channel 4.
You can't get her a nice video because there's a sense of plonking her in front of something hired specially to keep her quiet.
She'd sense that a mile off. It has to be something live and then of course if it was any film that she would like the others would go out immediately and anything they'd like would make the mother-in-law faint.
"There's a film about a mermaid," I said helpfully, looking up the RTE Guide for her.
"Thanks a lot," said Kate, preparing for yet another afternoon of listening to how things are not what they used to be, and people aren't really caring any more, and what wonderful young women Kate's husband could have married if he had only put his mind to it.
Orla is another beauty. She is 15 and like all of us at that age she would fight with her shadow. Not at all pleased to have a day off from school, she is fighting about the whole idea of bank holidays. She used to hate saints' days because they were sectarian and divisive, but now she thinks they were better than what we have now, at least they came from something in us rather than rampant greed.
"It's typical that when this society wants a day off they have to relate it to the banks," she says scornfully to her parents. "Your generation made us grow up thinking that the banks were great and powerful and to be respected and admired and if possible get a job in one of them for life."
To be fair, her parents had the same kind of nervous relationship with banks as we all had, lodging before 3 p.m. or the phone could be cut off, having to have two vodkas or two valium but not both before asking for an ovedraft. They didn't want her to work in a bank for life at all.
There aren't any jobs for life in a bank nowadays. But try telling that to Orla.
"It doesn't matter how many disgraceful things are discovered about banks every single day, you still think of them as the establishment, something to be looked up to. "Forget that they have to put notices in the newspaper swearing they aren't dodgy. You still think we should bow down in front of them and call things bank holidays.
"Once the bank takes a holiday, we all take a holiday. It makes me sick."
Almost everything makes Orla sick at the moment. It goes with the territory of being 15. It will pass of course but then Orla has a younger sister of 12.
There's this couple and they haven't been back in Dublin for a long time, and they decided they were going to come for a few days, arriving on the bank holiday.
They wrote ages ago to alert everyone they knew and said they didn't know where they'd be staying yet, but they didn't want a big noisy place with tour buses and they didn't want a small place which might have tomato sauce on the table at breakfast.
Fair enough. Everyone waited to hear where they'd be.
And it turned out that someone had lent them a flat which was great, but of course there was a huge crisis, the business of it being a bank holiday.
So could someone get them bread and milk and eggs, and the name of a good taxi firm? And a list of other various siege provisions. And a plaintive request for something to do on a bank holiday night when they assumed that the city would be as dead as a dodo.
And somehow it sounded a bit rude to say that everything would be open anyway -- it looked as if you didn't want to get things for them - so their friends arranged all kinds of complicated things like trying to get them into theatres and restaurants with much duplication and people having to make decisions about which they'd prefer.
And yesterday there was a message to say that there was a cheap last-minute week in Spain and that's where they were heading off to, but that maybe it was all for the best. A bank holiday in Dublin would be like a wet week when all was said and done, wouldn't it?