That wasn’t totally unreasonable because they are less effective for women who have never given birth vaginally, being more likely to be expelled. I think there was also a misguided consensus that you couldn’t dilate a woman’s cervix enough to insert the device unless she had previously given birth. Today, as I understand it, manufacturers produce a smaller size to solve this problem.

I was on the pill for about 10 years. I always had trouble with it, experiencing breakthrough bleeding (basically you get your period twice a month, no thank you) and other various side effects including, in my opinion, exacerbation of depression. I got switched around to more types than I can remember in an attempt to find one that was acceptable.

Here’s what’s great about the copper IUD: no hormones! The copper makes your womb inhospitable to a fertilized egg, for reasons that I think are still somewhat unknown. So, maybe an egg is fertilized, but it can’t attach itself and begin appropriating resources to build a placenta. I’m not sure whether this counts as baby-killing to the anti-abortion crowd; probably yes, even though the definition of getting pregnant involves a fertilized egg implanting itself in your uterus. Not just, you know, hanging around briefly. (Do these people really think when they go to heaven they will be vastly outnumbered by the souls of fertilized eggs who failed to implant and were washed away during menses? That’s going to be some boring conversation right there. Will those little dudes be casting down their teeny, tiny golden crowns around the glassy sea? I call bullshit; I don’t think anti-abortion people believe that at all.)

Insertion of the device does hurt. It only takes a few seconds, though, and then you don’t have to do anything about it for several years. The main reason women have the device removed it that it causes heavier bleeding during their period. My experience was that this was (dramatically!) true at first, but that my body then adjusted.

Obviously the IUD does nothing to protect you from STDs. But it’s not competing with condoms in this area, it’s competing with the pill. Pregnancy rates are lower when using IUDs than when being on the pill, probably because it’s very difficult to be a perfect pill user. Guys may think it sounds easy: you take one a day, end of story. But sometimes you forget if you’ve taken it or not; actions repeated so frequently have a tendency to blur together. Or you end up staying out super-late and crashing at your friend’s place. In theory you’re meant to add condoms to the mix at that point until you start taking a new set, but in real life people often don’t bother. Part of the appeal of the IUD is that you don’t have to do anything.

My only jealousy now is of the new pills where you only get your period 4 times a year. That would be great! Let’s face it: getting your period is a pain. There’s blood everywhere! Who needs it? It’s true that it can be the most welcome sight in all the world, when you have been sitting there thinking you might be pregnant, and wondering what the hell to do about it. And suddenly these is a cadmium red solution to all your problems. Otherwise: lame. So, ladies, IUDs are great and you should consider them.

UPDATES: One commenter notes that although we don’t know how the IUD works, it seems to work primarily by inhibiting fertilization, and only secondarily by preventing implantation. So we all win, including the little dudes with the tiny crowns. Another commenter who survived a pregnancy while his/her mother was using an IUD wants me to point out that this is a possibility, and that grave birth defects can result. This is true, and something my doctor mentioned to me. The failure rate is incredibly low, but if the IUD does fail the consequences can be very serious for the developing fetus (if not fatal before the fetus is viable outside the womb, which is more likely).

One thing one might wish to consider is what the actual economic/social conditions were like back in the Environment of Early Adaptation? Well, the real answer is that we have no idea, but a not totally implausible answer is that the most similar existing societies are those who live in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung, and (apparently) less ¡exciting! tribes in the Amazon. In such tribes everyone has notably more leisure time than in agricultural societies, though of course their reproduction rate is much, much lower.

Generally, the gathering (mostly done by women) provides 80% of the average adults’ calories and the hunting (mostly done by men) 20%. That’s on average, and the protein is obviously important, so… Now, being the all-that best hunter in the tribe can convince lots of laydeez to have sex with you. Is this because they want your resources? No, because every motherfucking-body shares the food, Holmes. Shares the motherfucking food. They don’t want your resources—-though they probably wouldn’t say no to you getting the oysters off that roast wild turkey for them. They want your hot body. Why are you so good at hunting? You’re in the pink. A fine physical specimen, keen of eye, etc.

Now, if you, hypothetical armchair evolutionary psychologist, are very, very good, I might allow you to construct a loooong chain of argument by analogy, in which being the best hunter=social capital, and monetary capital today=social capital. Note, however, that you will be forced to leave out all the bits about “providing” for the offspring and so forth, and be left with something more along the lines of birds that do stupid dances to garner sexual attention, and the great engines of modern capital will turn out to be the baroque construction of a thousand bower-birds working at cross-purposes. Which, granted, not totally implausible.

“No but food’s important,” I hear armchair evolutionary psychologist cry. Yes. Food. Totes important. We’re all together on this one. So maybe fucking the best hunter does get you (as female hunter-gatherer) a bit of extra food. (Note that everyone’s far from starving or they could just put in a little more time looking for food, which they do not, because they’d rather hang around poking the fire with a sharp stick or creating oral epics.) Then maybe you’d want the best hunter to think your kid was his so your kid would get extra food too. But life is short, and being the best hunter doesn’t last forever, maybe you better fuck that likely young up-and-comer with the blue feather in his hair. And then again, truth be told, strength isn’t everything, and that guy who used to be the best hunter a few years back knows a trick or two, if things were to get rough, might be useful. You know what you should really do here? Fuck every last member of the tribe who isn’t your dad or your brother, and convince each and every one of them that he is your special little schnookie-boo, and separately at various times of the day give each of them a blushing, downcast look which indicates he is the still point of your turning world.

And that explains why women are all total sluts to this very day, and why people who think that the veldt predisposes women to sleep with old men who have lots of money appear to have forgotten about the perishability of food items, and the non-utility/replaceability of almost all other items, and the fact that there was no money then. The End.

P.S. My husband came up with the “ad hominid” formulation and deserves full credit.

And oh yes, in March Lucy the Dog died after thirteen and a half years of faithfully guarding the house, playing with Nick, tending to Janet whenever she had migraines, and talking to Jamie when no one else would understand him.

But there was one good thing about 2011, and it was a world-historical event.  I refer, of course, to our family’s decision to topple Qaddafi and plunder Libya a milestone we had been anticipating for approximately twenty years:

And they pronounced his name correctly!

At least since 1994 I have promised Jamie I would cry at this event.  At least since 2003 he has responded to this promise with great exasperation and annoyance (“Michael! You will not cry”).  And in the end, he was right—I did not cry, largely because it was all I could do to operate the zoom at maximum zoom-power and keep my focus on the right kid.

The year is almost behind us.  Jamie has completed his first semester at LifeLink PSU, in which he took courses in meteorology, dinosaurs, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  He also declared himself the Assistant Director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, on the grounds that he does in fact assist me.  Everyone in the immediate household is well, and my father is improving.  As of six weeks ago we have a new dog, a rescued six-year-old Jack Russell/beagle mix.  So, dear readers, here’s hoping your 2012 is much better than your 2011, wherever and whoever you may be.

In the meantime, for god’s sake tip well and if you’re not paying the person who cleans your house or mows your lawn or delivers your newspaper or nannies your kids two weeks bonus wages at some point during the year (it doesn’t have to be during the Big Spending Season, but everyone is entitled to a vacation, and don’t give me this crap about how they’re “self-employed” and it’s “their responsibility” to budget for their own vacation), you suck.*

*Possibly not if you live in a country in which people who do this kind of work actually get the same benefits and protections as so-called “professionals.”

For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.

Thanks a lot, Kathleen Sebelius. God knows we wouldn’t want one of the groups least likely to use contraceptives properly to be able to easily get their hands on some Plan B. Up next: banning over-the-counter sales of paracetemol. Ha.

Belated Update: Reading below I do see that excerpt is misleading if you haven’t read the whole article; they didn’t take Plan B away from existing over-the-counter-sales, they just refused to extend it to full OTC status which would extend to those 17 and younger.

Not much else has changed; the vegetable section is either bulging with unlikely and out of season produce or empty like in a zombie movie or communist Russia. The price war turns out to be just lower prices than in August when they were hiked up ahead of time. And there are a couple more self-checkouts barking orders and requiring on average two staff interventions to make each transaction go through.

But the Costa. That’s changed everything.

This is a suburb of Edinburgh about a mile from the nearer villages and with a mix of public and private housing. It’s by no means isolated, but on a wet and blustery day twenty minutes walk feels too far for a pint of milk or the morning paper. I can’t imagine I’d do it more than once a week if I had a buggy to push or arthritis, no matter how lonely or fed up I was. And when you work from home, a burst of fresh air and a face to face conversation with a real, live human is a godsend.

Now, one of my daily highlights is my overpriced, under-caffeinated and much loved light latte sipped at a plastic table under piped music drowned out by the endless cheeping of supermarket scanners. A mix of the same people is there most days.

One is an elderly woman bent over a stick who waits discreetly at her table while the counter staff bring over her tea and biscuits. Another is any one of the buggy-pushing set enjoying a guilt-free sit down before getting on with the shop. My favourite is the older woman I always have to repeat my order to but who always seems uncommonly pleased to be there.

I suppose the point is that however annoying the perpetual encroachment of large corporates and their vertical integrations and tie-in deals, the day to day of mega-commerce can still boil down to people in a community using the place to find, talk to or just quietly appreciate each other.

‘Concerned the female unemployment rate is higher and getting worse’;

‘Troubled that axing child benefit nudges middle class women out of work for good’;

‘Alarmed that women know health and education cuts doom their children to shorter, poorer lives’;

‘Horrified that targeted cutbacks to legal aid mean demonstrably more women will be murdered by the men they love’.

Not at all.

Silly women, the government thinks! Just because of our blue-sky thinking to cut parental leave in the never-ending War on Red Tape, why would women think we have it in for them?

But the UK equivalent of the American soccer mom is deserting the coalition government in droves, and she must be won back. How? The coalition can’t miss this once-in-a-generation chance to destroy the welfare state in order to pay for banks and the imaginary economy they’ve destroyed. The cuts must go on.

Then what shall they do to win women back? How about some cheep ‘n cheerful eye-catching measures that show our hearts are in the right place? Let’s;

• Ban forced marriages, because that’s too simple an issue to cock up
• Pretend we can stop porn on the Internet, because women are too stupid to know it doesn’t work like that, and we can still get ours anyway
• Talk very loudly about how hideous it is to sexualize children, especially working class ones who don’t know any better
• Spend bazillions on our buddies’ flagship ‘free schools’ in west London to show we really care about the kids
• Remind everyone constantly that the Prime Minister’s heart is in the right place; he has NHS frequent flyer miles and he feels our pain

And you know what? Cameron is right to be a little perplexed that women are losing faith in him. Because the government’s faux-regretful gouges at the post-war social contract don’t just hurt women. They hurt everyone who’s not been sensible enough to be born or become wealthy. It’s just that women voters seem to be among the first to cop on to it.

But you can’t play the ‘trust me because I’m a reasonable, personable man with a clever wife I adore’ card more than once. Women aren’t stupid, and neither is the electorate.

For those who don’t know, Tyler’s novels, nearly all set in Baltimore, are mostly quiet dramas of family life and relationships. The wider world of politics and economics doesn’t intrude much, so we’re a long way from the grand themes of Jonathan Franzen and the like. Many of the books are somewhat similar, in that a person has their habits and their conception of who they are turned upside down by an encounter with someone utterly unlike themselves. Sometimes they are changed; sometimes they revert. Her male characters are often stiff, calculating and habit bound; women more open and spontaneous, but she manages to achieve a sympathetic engagement with all of them. And all of her families conform to the Tolstoyan cliché. Her writing is also extraordinary. Highly economic and unfussy and yet she has an ear to capture a scene or a moment in a phrase that sticks in the memory – “By now he was looking seriously undermedicated” from A Patchwork Planet, for example.

The novels are about you, and me and our relationships and difficulties with spouses, parents, children, in-laws and colleagues. Since I became enthusiastic about Tyler, I’ve given some of her books as presents and then been asked if I was “making a point” about the recipient’s relationship. Well no I wasn’t, but I take this as good evidence that Tyler sees and captures the universal in all of our peculiar cases. I mentioned Tyler to a bookblogger friend, Kate, recently, and she asked me which are the best. I’m hard pushed to say. The Tin Can Tree was a bit of a struggle and some of the others disclosed themselves slowly but turned out to be among the best. Perhaps Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant would be a good place to start.

Murphy argues that the fact that there are no documented cases of barter economies doesn’t matter, because all that is really required is for there to have been some period of history, however brief, where barter was widespread for money to have emerged. This is about the weakest argument one can possibly make. Remember, economists originally predicted all (100%) non-monetary economies would operate through barter. The actual figure of observable cases is 0%. Economists claim to be scientists. Normally, when a scientist’s premises produce such spectacularly non-predictive results, the scientist begins working on a new set of premises. Saying “but can you prove it didn’t happen sometime long long ago where there are no records?” is a classic example of special pleading. In fact, I can’t prove it didn’t. I also can’t prove that money wasn’t introduced by little green men from Mars in a similar unknown period of history.

A month or two later, I phoned to say I’d be arriving that evening from L.A. for a couple of weeks in the DC office. Henry pressed the letter into my hands as I arrived on the doorstep. He was rushing to the airport and thought I might have more time to take an interest.

The letter came via a circuitous route from a tenuous connection; Meg, Edward’s godfather’s wife who was also my mother’s friend Mary’s book club companion. It was prompted by a misunderstanding between a son who was monosyllabic about his social life and a mother who thus assumed he had none. It came from the peculiarly Anglo-Irish practice of proper letter-writing, and directly from that rare person who said ‘I must write them a letter’, and actually did.

For all that, it arrived into an insanely busy household of people who didn’t have time to meet their own friends, let alone pluck new ones from the ether. It languished there for several weeks. And when it finally got to someone with a moment to do something about it, I very nearly didn’t.

The letter said the man in question had been born in Ireland, educated in England, and was now working for some sort of military attaché in the British embassy in Washington. “Spook!” my friends cried.

Apparently, he was finding it a challenge to make friends in DC because everyone in the embassy went home to their families every night. Johnny-no-mates, I thought. Though at least it also said he didn’t know the letter was being written.

And it said twice that he was “a decent, entertaining fellow”, which, added to the very proper, English military thing, made him sound as dull as mud. You see, the thing about receiving a Victorian letter of introduction is that, however romantic it seems in retrospect, it makes the man in question sound about as exciting as the dutiful Dobbin in Vanity Fair.

I said to my sister-in-law, Nicole, if I don’t ring him this evening, I’m not going to. I thought he’s probably a braying Hoorray Henry with jug ears, the height of whose year is the Glorious Twelfth. He’s tall and gangly, with sticky out years, probably red-haired, and hasn’t finished a book since Eton. Nicole said this was quite an assumption. And anyway, I loved red hair.

I phoned him up. It was a Thursday night about half past nine. He was utterly bemused but couldn’t hear a word. He was at the 9.30 Club to see a band. Hmmm. Not a social write-off, then. We texted and agreed to meet the following night.

But on Friday night we were on different sides of the city with different groups of friends. We phoned back and forth with arrangements. I confided my fears about him and he insisted he was a jug-eared ginger who went by Lord Haw Haw. The calls got flirtier, but the logistics got harder. We didn’t meet.

On Saturday, I had lunch with my boss Paul’s boss, Paul. Over a beer and steak near where the buses leave for New York, I told him the story and showed him the letter. Spook! He said. (He would.) And then ordered me out onto the pavement to call the guy, saying if I didn’t I may as well not turn up to work on Monday. Thanks, Paul.

On Sunday, I bought a new, short skirt and rang on the bell of a stranger’s house in Dupont. Ed opened the door and my initial thought was … hmm. Bit skinny, bandy legs. Nice accent; kind of posh but Irish, too. Likes my jokes. Considerate. Lovely brown eyes and golden skin.

There then followed, in short order, a date in a pub to watch Munster play rugby, to which we each brought reinforcements. I later found out he has no interest in the sport. He flirted with another girl and I, in revenge, went after the helicopter pilot he’d invited as wingman. Him falling drunkenly asleep in an exhibit in the Spy Museum. Definitely not a spook, then. The evening ending in separate taxis and disarray. Mutual apologies the following morning and the scheduling of a proper date. Me encouraging my toddler nephew to call him from my mobile, accidentally on purpose. Him just dropping by on a seven mile run in one hundred degrees. Me inviting myself on his Californian holiday. Him accepting.

And in longer order; a cross country move for work, the sudden loss of my job, home and visa, family bereavements on both sides, unemployment in Dublin, me getting a new job in DC just weeks before he left for his next posting, and months and months of uncertainty at long distance. Then I did something uncharacteristic. I stood my ground and waited.

Because about half way through an adult life where I’d followed one opportunity to the next, moved house every nine months, lived in no country longer than three years, and always thought the point of it all would be revealed in the next job, the next city; I had stumbled into something stronger than my own will, something whose logic and grammar I intuitively accepted with questioning but not doubt. And waiting for the person chosen for me to feel that too, for the next job and the next home and the next ones after that to be willed by someone else, and for all other possibilities to be forever foreclosed, I was calm and perfectly still.

This day last year, in a sunny cottage garden in the Luberon, he crouched down beside my chair and gave me a handful of wild lavendar and thyme he’d picked as he walked and struggled to decide. He began a speech so pained and passionate that I could not tell if it meant the beginning or the end for us. I retained none of it as I concentrated on keeping my face neutral and my breathing steady, ready to bear the worst with dignity, until the very end when the tumble of words paused and he said “… and that’s why I want to marry you.”

We went walking down a country lane to gather ourselves, pulling flowers from hedges as the sun set and pausing to listen to children divebombing into a swimming pool, marveling that the exchange of a few words had changed everything for us.

We married four months later in freezing Dublin. Meg, the author of our happiness, and Mary, the book club queen, were guests of honour and read out an epic poem of our romance. It’s now hanging in the downstairs loo.

Ten days later, Ed left on exercise in east Africa and was out of contact for much of three months. The day we re-united and got the keys of our married quarter in Scotland, he charged out the door for Libya (only to spend a week cooling his heels in Brize Norton before returning home horribly behind on his email). Every time the headlines say ‘the army may be called in’, his phone starts buzzing. It’s like being married to an anti-Superman; when trouble calls, he’s ready. Oh, and that’s it. Phew.

Now, in the present, I see hideous army curtains and a professional life shoe-horned into a new home every year or two, with an unlikely infantry officer who reads me poetry in the bath and whose steady gaze brought me to tears when I ardently vowed to cherish him. And in the future; deployment and more absence, love letters on thin blue sheets, perhaps a welcome redundancy and many more fresh starts, this time together.

‘Reader, I married him’ is just the beginning of the story.

Are our enlightened, engaged, sensitive parenting practices driving a certain segment of the population insane? Is the nice, liberal father who has just this Saturday carted his kids to soccer practice, play dates, piano lessons, made sunflower-butter sandwiches, and read Goodnight Moon three times seething with quiet desperation? The surprise ascendance of Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés’ Go the F**k to Sleep on all sorts of best-seller lists eloquently answers that question….One wonders if this hostility [evident in the book] toward the child, who is naturally and rightfully manipulative, is just a tiny bit misplaced….The book, in all its cleverness and artfulness and ingenuity, raises certain other questions: Are they having sex, these slouchy rageful parents? Not enough, perhaps. When the father turns back to the waking child’s bedroom, we look out at the comfy, sexless, vaguely depressive scene of his wife sprawled asleep on the couch under an ugly old blanket. No wonder the slouchy dad is full of rage.

If the child refusing to sleep brings to mind the young Marcel in Remembrance of Things Past yearning for a kiss from his fragrant, bejeweled mother amid the clinking wine glasses of a glamorous adult dinner party, that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about two slouchy, exhausted people trying to watch a television screen somewhere in each other’s proximity. You can see why the father is so angry and unhinged; the precious adult time he is desperately fighting to preserve is so paltry, so modest, so barely there.

Awww, would’ems like a widdle blowjob? Anyway, this irritates me. It’s true enough that Marcel wants to get the benison of his mother’s kiss and preserve its sanctity all the way to the comfort of his bed, and that she is having a glamorous dinner party including M. Swann, who has recently been mentioned in the Figaro. Though frankly, Flora and Céline sound like pains in the ass. But what happens next? What if a person had made it all the way to page, oh, I don’t know, 27 before making this particular comparison? This person might have noted that Marcel sneaks out of his motherfucking room, waits on the stairs in defiance of all household laws, and is caught there first by his mother, and then, to his terror, by his father. The result?

He looked at me for a moment with an air of annoyance and surprise, and when Mamma had told him, not without some embarrassment, what had happened, said to her: “Go along with him, then; you said just now that you didn’t feel like sleep, so stay in his room for a little. I don’t need anything.”
“But dear,” my mother answered timidly, “whether or not I feel like sleep is not the point; we must not make the child accustomed…”
“There’s no question of making him accustomed,” said my father, with a shrug of the shoulders; “you can see quite well that the child is unhappy…[he tells her to go spend the whole fucking night in Marcel’s bedroom]
It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere, which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up his head…

Hot look, right? I bet Marcel’s mom was all, rrowr, gimme some of what’s in that big ol’ nightshirt! Marcel’s mother and grandmother have long been aware of his nighttime unhappiness and its source, but they think that giving in to his desire to have his mother with him all the time will have bad effects on him in the future [spoiler alert: it turns out he’s a robot queer.] Now, I’ll freely admit that this is considered unusual behavior on young Marcel’s part, and that it is not always met with the same happy result, and that he is in general forced to be more obedient than the kid getting chastised by Samuel L. Jackson in the audiobook. Nonetheless it seems an exceptionally poorly chosen analogy.

People think of Garret as a dizzy academic, and not the resolutely calculating man he could be when it came to tallying odds and gaming a scenario. This was the man who coolly reckoned at the beginning of his career that while he was constitutionally more suited to the Labour Party, he would achieve less at the head of it, and so joined Fine Gael. His first job was writing the timetable for Aer Lingus, long before there was software for that kind of organisational nitty gritty. He had an extraordinary memory for this sort of thing; on a walk near Cahersiveen a decade ago, he explained to me the old train route there, the stations it called at, the time of each train and effect on the local economy. He giggled when I said we should call him Rainman instead.

One of the best things Garret did, politically, was to go out over the whole country at the beginning of the 1980s to recruit young people and women into Fine Gael, bringing into public life a new generation, and re-inspiring the women who’d first tuned in to politics with Declan Costello’s tract , ‘The Just Society’. He phone up my mother, Louise, soon after we’d moved to Tipperary and hardly knew anyone, and got her to run. She very nearly won. But having gone out on a limb as a complete blow-in to the community and lost, Mum expected a little consolation. Garret’s rapidfire response; ‘Well of course you weren’t going to win, but you helped to get out the vote for the number 1.”

The general elections of the 1982 period all roll into one, in my memory. It seems like a long period of running door to door with my sister, brothers and other party children, decked out in an endless roll of colourful stickers, always in earshot of a tractor pulling a trailer and speakers blasting out the cheesy vinyl single; “Fine Gael, Fine Gael, oh-oh the future we hail!”. As children on the imaginative cusp of adolescence, we felt in the middle of a great adventure, on a quest to change the whole country, led by Garret the Good. Admittedly, I was ten years old and the finer policy points were a little beyond me.

Our families’ political fortunes and multi-generational friendships had been intertwined since the Easter 1916 journey of Garret’s father, Desmond FitzGerald, and my great-grandfather, Eoin MacNeill, in a truck to a prison camp in Wales. Some of my tenderest memories of Garret are from the time of my aunt Bairbre’s death, now almost twenty years ago. Bairbre was an accomplished historian, schoolteacher and a profoundly ethical woman, who Garret had always cherished. When Bairbre was dying, Garret and my uncle Michael reconciled, following Michael’s earlier departure from Fine Gael to help found the Progressive Democrats. My old friend Colin Murphy reminisced with me today about the morning Garret, my Dad, brother Remy and sisters Annaick and Eleanor followed Bairbre’s coffin in convoy from Dublin to Kerry. Garret gamely let us keep his spirits up on the long journey, but we all fell into the most profoundly speechless silence as hundreds of Bairbre’s and my uncle Joe’s uniformed students lined the bridge over the Laune and up into Killorglin. The morning of the funeral, Garret’s merriment and joy were briefly back as over a dozen of us pounded the breakfast table while Garret cooked the sausages. Emily and Bridget Hourican whipped us all into several choruses of ‘Sausage-maker, Sausage-maker, fast as you can!’, and Garret conducted us with the spatula.

When he came to Washington DC almost two years ago, Garret stayed with Henry and his family and visibly thrived on having the two small boys buzz around him, in between trips into town for dinners with John Bruton and other Irish and American politicians. This was a timely moment for me, because Garret was the first non-DC based family member to meet my then brand new boyfriend, Ed, and sent back a glowing report to Mum. On learning that Ed was in the British Army and had spent time in Northern Ireland, Garret asked for Ed’s regiment, mentally pegged it straight away and said “Oh good. They never gave us any trouble.”

(That also prompted him to tell us about a still painful incident when Irish police had unwittingly arrested British security forces for coming south of the border looking like Provos. He never could get Margaret Thatcher to believe the episode was an innocent one, and not dreamed up as a provocation, and put it down to her inability to imagine herself acting in such a straightforward way. On the whole, though, his stories about her were fond, though not especially warm, and respectful.)

I think Garret lived such a mentally sharp and active life for so long – still writing his regular economics column in the Irish Times to the end – because he was just so curious and endlessly interested in and enjoying the people around him. Every summer, he and his daughter Mary organized a weeks-long summer house rental in the south of France, where a rota of family, friends and especially his beloved grand-children and their friends would come through, with 20-30 people at a time sitting down for dinner. (Everyone took turns cooking dinner and Garret calculated contributions based on a characteristically complex but fair formula.) Just last week, my sister Annaick was telling me about once being exiled to the children’s table. She’s twenty eight. Main course done, Garret went right over to the younger crowd and demanded to know what they were talking about. Books and films, came the answer. “Ah good, much more interesting,” he said, and sat straight down to listen, learn and interject.

Garret was famously devoted to his wife, Joan, and many wondered at how he ultimately regained his energy and many enthusiasms after she died. But he was far more robust than his unworldly public image seemed to suggest. When, fairly late in life, he lost all his savings in the misguided GPA investment, Garret rolled up his sleeves and set to work writing, writing, writing to provide for them both. After Joan died, Garret carried on industriously writing, thinking and talking to his wide and varied circle of family, friends and peers.

More than anything, Garret loved the company of clever women. When my parents turned up on the annual summer holiday, he would decry their failure to bring at least two of their four daughters. Truth be told, he loved to be sat at dinner beside a clever, pretty girl. And while he had the normal allowance of conversational set pieces and an endless array of mind-bogglingly detailed information on obscure topics, Garret always asked lots of questions and listened curiously and carefully to the answers. He was the rare Great Man who relished a real conversation.

One summer, he gave me some drafts for a lecture tour of American universities he was to give in the autumn, talking about US/EU relations. I pointed out he had hardly mentioned Russia, and that relations with then-resurgent Russia were the linchpin of his arguments about Europe and America’s differences of philosophy and material interest. His loud and delighted exhalation – “Ah!” – began a memorable couple of days of discussion, reading, and re-writing. Garret’s intellectual openness and generosity were a joy to encounter.

The last time I saw Garret was at my wedding just before Christmas. He caught my eye as I started up the aisle, and his rheumy smile steadied me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. Garret was a decade younger than my grand-parents, but because both grand-fathers died early, I’ve always thought of him as being just a little of that mold. It has been lovely to be one focus of his curious and pleased interest over the years, to be a cherished knot in the silvery net of friendship between families and generations.

Garret adored his extended family and was always excitedly tender towards his own grand-children in particular. Garret’s children, and especially his daughter Mary, shaped their way of living to place Garret at the hurly burly centre of decades of family life. They generously shared him with many other people, and will miss him the most. But I will leave the final word to my mother, Louise, who told me this morning that “to have known him and been loved by him was enough”.