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It's weird. I've seen little or nothing of my actual friends over the past six months. We're talking Christian, JP, Oisinn and Fionn. I mean – yeah, no – we have our Wednesday and Saturday night Zoom chats, where we enjoy a few scoops and discuss various rugby topics, including my favourite moments from my own career, the players I would have loved to have played with, and the things I'd say to Warren Gatland if he ever flagged down my cor after his Land Rover Discovery broke down in the middle of literally nowhere.
Then there’s our Monday night table quizzes, which were Fionn’s idea – although I usually mute those, switch off my microphone and watch swan dive fails on You Tube.
The point I'm making is that a definite distance has opened up between me and the goys since this whole, I suppose, pandemic storted? But, at the same time, I've made a lot of new friendships. I'm talking about Steve and Robbie, who've been delivering our online supermorket orders since the middle of Morch and who have grown to genuinely, genuinely love my anecdotes. I'm talking about the engineer (can't remember name) from our broadband provider, who's in the gaff at least twice a week and who I can talk to about literally anything, except why our wifi is so shit.
And then there’s Janet from the courier company that delivers Sorcha’s regular clothes purchases from Net-a-Porter, then collects them again when they don’t fit, don’t suit, or Sorcha realises that she’s not going to need good clothes for the foreseeable future and only bought them for the short-term dopamine hit that comes from shopping online.
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I think I’m on the record as saying that men and women can never truly be friends. And yet sometimes I feel that Janet was put on this Earth – or at least assigned to the Killiney-Dalkey-and-ports-of-Glenageary delivery route – to prove me wrong.
There's no attraction. I want to make that clear from the pretty much outset. She's, like, a few years older than me, and she gets that I'm out of her league, although I hope I don't come across as a dick for saying it.
Me and Janet are just two people who hit it off on a whole, like, other level? I think the word I'm looking for is plutonic.
It storted out with just the regular shooting-of-the-shit that goes with a doorstep package handover. “Big box today!” she’d go and I’d be like, “Yeah, no, it’s her winter coat.”
And then, the next day, when she was collecting it again, it’d be, “Didn’t suit her?” and I’d be all, “Yeah, no, full-length coats tend to shorten her legs, especially if she’s wearing flats.”
It’s hord to believe that an actual friendship could, like, blossom from daily exchanges like this. But that’s what happened.
Our chats at the front door storted to grow longer, then branched into other areas. For instance, she told me that she and her husband, Marius, were sharing the job of home-schooling their youngest daughter and that she was worried about the effect that cocooning was having on the mental health of her parents. And I shared one or two of my own stories, about how I thought the triplets were becoming thicker by the day since they stopped mixing with other kids, and how I wouldn’t lift a finger to help Warren Gatland if he was in trouble (“Jump leads? I’ll give you focking jump leads, you focking–”).
Anyway, there reached a point, in late May, when Sorcha – understandably suspicious, given my previous – storted to comment on this, like, friendship that was developing between me and Janet.
She was like, “I think it’s cute.”
And I was there, “What are you talking about?”
“Just that you’re craving human contact so much that you’ll spend 15 minutes at the door talking to a total stranger.”
“I’ve never been much of a conversationalist, but I’m on fire with this woman. She’ll say something – it’ll be like, ‘Blah, blah, blah,’ – and then I’ll say something back, along the lines of, ‘Blah, blah, blah-blah-blah.’ Sometimes, I hear my voice and I think, ‘Is that me actually talking?’ It’s all a bit surreal.”
“Some days, you spend more time talking to her than you do to me.”
“Whoa! You’re not jealous, are you?”
"Er, I'd hordly say it was cute if I was jealous, Ross."
I suggested she write a letter to Conor Pope – I'd hordly call that flirting
But as the summer months wore on, I noticed a definite passive-aggressive edge creep into Sorcha’s voice after Janet had driven away each morning.
She’d go, “Half an hour today? Does that woman have no other work to do?”
And I'd be like, "She was telling me that her and Marius had to cancel their city break to Kraków, but they're having a pretty hord time trying to get the price of their flights refunded."
"I'm just making the point, Ross, that some of us are trying to work from home, which is hord enough without having to listen to our husband's flirting with other women."
"I suggested she write a letter to Conor Pope – I'd hordly call that flirting."
Then, about halfway through the summer, Sorcha deliberately stopped buying clothes online, just to limit my contact with Janet. A week or two would go by without us seeing each other. I'd stort looking at the sites myself and emailing Sorcha pictures of, say, a Bottega Veneta grey wool turtleneck midi dress that I thought she'd like, or a pair of Kismet Basque wool-blend pants by Blazé Milano.
And suddenly Janet was at the front door again, going, “Shoes, is it?” and I’d be like, “Yeah, no, it’s the Mansur Gavriel glove pumps. She didn’t like them in Degas Blue, so she’s going to try them in Biscotto,” and we’d be off again.
This all came to a head on, like, Thursday morning, when I closed the door after another one of our marathon chats and discovered that Sorcha was standing right behind me.
“I was just telling Janet,” I went, “that I hope our daughter doesn’t turn out to be a focking dipso like her grandmother.”
And Sorcha was like, “She stands very close to you, doesn’t she, Ross?”
“Sorry?”
“When she’s talking you. There’s definitely not two metres between you. There’s, like, barely 12 inches. And no mask either?”
I was there, “Sorcha, please don’t say what I think you’re about to say.”
But she was like, “I’m going to report her to her boss.”