I made another new friend recently. It was set up by my daughters, a kind of friendship blind date with the mother of one of their best friends. \u201cYou\u2019ll get on with her,\u201d they said. \u201cShe\u2019s like you,\u201d they added. I think they meant it as a compliment.<\/p>\n
It turned out they were right. We did get on. Jennifer is a straight-talking and extremely stylish Australian woman who has lived here for years. We\u2019ve been on two outings so far, both times to the Glass Mask Theatre on Dawson Street<\/a> in Dublin<\/a>. <\/p>\n If you haven\u2019t been and you enjoy theatre, I can highly recommend that place as a great night out. It\u2019s a tiny theatre at the back of the Bestseller Cafe, opposite the Mansion House, a cabaret-style venue, where the audience sits at small tables while watching the show. <\/p>\n You can order charcuterie and wine and coffee, nibbling on refreshments while watching the actors perform. They produce new writing there, sometimes dark, often funny, always original box-fresh plays. <\/p>\n This one night, as the sequinned Christmas party hordes milled around the city centre, we went to see Playground, a preview of some plays the Glass Mask Theatre will be putting on next year. It was our second friendship date. The last time had gone well and so we decided to do it again. We ordered hummus and sourdough and settled in. <\/p>\n During the interval, we got talking about mortality. It was probably me that started the death chat. I\u2019m on a bit of a mission to normalise these conversations so shooting the breeze on a drizzly Friday evening before Christmas about the inevitability of every single one of us croaking it at some point suited me fine. <\/p>\n Jennifer turned out to be a good person to talk to about death. She has thought about it a lot. She tells her children that when she goes, whenever that may be, that they must celebrate her. \u201cI\u2019ve lived a great life,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve lived it exactly how I wanted\u201d. I could tell she meant it, too.<\/p>\n We talked about the importance of going through our days with the awareness of our inevitable demise. About how we never know the day or the hour. \u201cI mean,\u201d Jennifer said, scooping up a bit of hummus with a piece of sourdough. \u201cI could walk out of here tonight and get knocked over by a car.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cExactly,\u201d I said, and regaled her with my recent near-death experience with a Luas<\/a> out near the Red Cow Inn. \u201cI could have been squished by a Luas but I wasn\u2019t,\u201d I said. \u201cNo you weren\u2019t,\u201d she agreed. <\/p>\n