I pick up the phone to an old friend who, until a few weeks ago, had a working life a bit like mine; one might grandly call it a portfolio career, but in truth it’s a matter of turning your hand to all sorts of things to make a buck. In his case, a Starbuck; he’s a coffee devotee and, as we chatted, a sad story came to light, which saw him being relieved of his takeaway latte by an officious concierge as he arrived at a swanky office building for a meeting. Honestly, he said, I could have cried, to which you might retort, well, go ahead and cry me a river.
Except that the latte was a little manifestation of creature comfort and normality, a treat to power him through a whistlestop trip to London, where he normally lives, but from which he has been largely absent recently. Nowadays, you can most often find him in Jaroslaw in Poland, where he has gone to volunteer for a newly founded charity called Poland Welcomes, its mission to provide shelter and amenities to Ukrainian women and children who have been forced to leave their homes. At the last count, they had 500 guests across a series of hastily adapted sites; they’re trying to scale up to 2,000.
For a while, he seemed to be head of laundry – as he points out, you need a lot of washers and dryers when people arrive with only the clothes on their back – and now he’s added banging on the doors of organisations for funds.
Every time he calls, I am newly in awe. He is my ordinary pal, who does ordinary things (plus ice-skating, which is not ordinary but at which he is irritatingly good). I never know quite what to ask him beyond how it’s going and what I can send. So I ask about the coffee. He sends a picture of a collapsible, portable filter that accompanies him everywhere but adds rather dolefully that he can’t fit a frother in his luggage.
Census consensus
I send him a pic of my new blanket in a clumsy attempt at solidarity. It is all beautiful blue-and-yellow stripes and comes from a woollen mill here in Kilkenny. This latest production is the result of a collaboration with a young artist called Ellie Dunne, with all proceeds going to the Irish Red Cross. When I dropped into the mill to pick it up, they told me it had been all hands on deck to get the blankets woven in double-quick time, but that they didn’t hesitate for a second.
It’s a little detail I might have added to the “time capsule” part of the Irish national census, which we’ve all just completed. Distribution and collection of the forms is done by hand and we had a jolly chat with the woman who came to get ours, ranging from ethnomusicology to the wisdom of Desiderata. It was sunny, and we were on the doorstep, looking at the cows. Eventually, my husband remarked that at this rate, and in an area so sparsely populated, she’d only manage to get about three forms safely gathered in during the course of a day, so off she went.
Noble by name…
In other local news, the Lord Bagenal Inn in the small town of Leighlinbridge is where my mother-in-law might go for a posh lunch with chums. Last week, though, she might also have seen Noble Yeats, the Grand National winner who’d done Sam Waley-Cohen so proud on his final ride before retiring; the horse had been brought home to do a lap of honour.
Had I been there, I’d have given him only the finest carrots: piqued by his literary name and his provenance, I backed him at 66-1, the first and almost undoubtedly the last time I’ve ever been right at Aintree.
• Alex Clark is an Observer columnist
