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grandeur of Partry House in the West of Ireland in 1983 – a mysterious time, long before Skype and texting, when international telephone calls were so unfathomably costly they were spoken about in hushed tones, and people wrote letters abroad on tissue-thin blue ‘airmail’ paper to keep the weight down because even letters were an onerous expense.
    Not knowing many people in the town, and certainly not knowing any young people, Mrs Blosse-Lynch spoke to my father and soon myself and two of my age-appropriate siblings were drafted in to keep the lonely American company. I didn’t need to be drafted: I was eager to sign up. I couldn’t wait to see up close how a magnificent Protestant like Mrs Blosse-Lynch lived, and a glossy-haired American (my very own Jaclyn Smith!) was a bonus.
    I already had a very high opinion of Protestants. Not only were most of my favourite people Protestants – or at least I assumed Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal were – but my mother had lived in Protestant England till she was twelve and, even though she was a devout Catholic, we always thought of her as having Protestant bones, which poked through occasionally when she used her ‘telephone voice’.
    Protestant stuff was just generally better. Even their farms were better. One summer we went to visit our English ‘cousins’, the Perrys (they weren’t actually our cousins but were the family of my mother’s childhood best friend) and their farm was amazing. The Mayo mountain farms I went to with my father were hard, mud-worn places, where tough, wiry men picked stones from wet fields and drove wet, suspicious animals into dark shit-splashed sheds. On the Perrys’ summer-drenched Pear Tree Farm (I know, they were really rubbing it in with that), there were giant, rolling fields, enormous gleaming harvesting machines, noisy, exhilarating go-karts, huge prickly hay stacks, and crumbly cheese and crusty bread washed down with homemade cider. I felt like Worzel Gummidge. At home, where we were Irish Catholics, we weren’t allowed to drive dangerous, petrol-filled go-karts at breakneck speed round scrubby fields, but when we were English Protestants, we could drive
and
drink booze! Being English and Protestant was brilliant. Obviously becoming one of Charlie’s Angels was still my first choice but failing that I was going to put down ‘Protestant farmer’ as my second.
    And living the exotic Protestant life at Mrs Blosse-Lynch’s was everything I’d hoped. The rheumy-eyed old Labradors wandered distractedly through the house, which, though neat, was showing its age, and the rooms, crowded with the flotsam and jetsam of a storied family life in the big house, were probably a little toomuch for Mrs Blosse-Lynch and Pat to keep on top of. Not that I cared. To me, the shabby rugs covered with dog hair, and the comfortable threadbare sofas with sun-faded cushions, were talismans of a glorious past, full of shooting parties and pheasants and petticoats and binoculars and charming people saying charming things over fancy dishes. But the glassy eyes of the dusty animal heads that hung on the walls didn’t just look down on a disappeared past, they looked down on a present where the past still shimmered through, like an image from my father’s old cine projector. Once, while taking off her wellington boots by the stairs, Mrs Blosse-Lynch saw me examining a small, carved wooden box. ‘It’s from India,’ she said casually, and I wondered would she have said, ‘It’s from Mars,’ just as casually, because to me they were pretty much the same thing.
    There was a lawn tennis court, and even though it hadn’t been tended in years it was still usable, and we would play tennis or croquet while Mrs Blosse-Lynch watched and Pat brought out cucumber sandwiches (actual cucumber sandwiches), which we thought were hilarious and disgusting till we ate them and found out they were crunchy and delicious.
    Years later the fully fledged gay version