Masterpieces teeming with life

Maeve Binchy’s brilliant columns were a wise reminder that, correctly handled, the simple, everyday business of life has a mercurial power

IN a busy cafe in a Dublin suburb yesterday, four female friends sat sipping coffee and discussing Maeve Binchy. As I eavesdropped on their conversation I heard the words “comforting” and “relaxing” and “joyful” used in connection with the bestselling books written by the woman they called “marvellous” Maeve.

Now I can’t lip-read half as well as, by all accounts, Maeve could and anyway one of the women had the kind of annoying breathless voice that is anathema to the professional ear-wigger so when their chat moved on to an intriguing anecdote about a missing engagement ring I lost the thread of the conversation.

I smiled into my own coffee at that point feeling sure that, under pressure of a looming deadline during her days as a columnist for this newspaper, Maeve could have spun an excellent read out of those elusive threads. Her great skill in her columns, as one letter writer to this newspaper observed back in the 1970s, was in creating “little masterpieces out of nothing”.

I grew up reading and loving Echoes and The Lilac Bus and Circle of Friends. I often devoured them in marathon torch-lit under-the-duvet sessions, losing myself in the expertly told stories of romance unfolding in an Ireland of modesty panels, village gossips and doomed romances. But it wasn’t until much later, when I became a columnist for this newspaper myself, that I began to view Maeve Binchy as something more than our storytelling laureate and she became a personal hero of mine.

Around the time I started the column in the Saturday magazine my mother found a book, a selection of Irish Times columns called Maeve’s Diary, on a second-hand stall and gave it to me as a gift.

More than 10 years later I still keep this book by my bed, dipping into it for inspiration or when I just need cheering up. It’s become a kind of talisman – my columnist’s bible – reminding me that, correctly handled, the simple, everyday, trivial business of life has a mercurial kind of power that should never be underestimated.

And God, they are a brilliant read. One incarnation of her columns was called Today and most of these start simply, no flowers, no flourishes, with the words “Today I . . . ”. The columns are short, original and surprising. Most of them take you on a journey you will remember for days or even years.

“Today I . . . ” and then she is off, telling you about the woman delivering junk mail who she’s invited in for tea just so she can hear about the life and times of a leaflet distributor who has thin hands and bags under her eyes and a thousand double glazing leaflets to deliver by 6pm. “Today I . . .” and she is standing at a bus stop having an increasingly uncomfortable conversation with an increasingly appalled older woman about contraception.

“Today I . . .” and she is on a rant about a pre-Diana Prince Charles and the pressure he was being put under to marry. She wondered why people in general thought it was perfectly acceptable to exert such pressure on their friends, setting them up with potential mates: “In a million years people wouldn’t try to get you to change your job or dig up your garden and make an air raid shelter, so why should they try to get you to change your status and go live forever with a person of their choosing?” she asked.

“Today I . . .” and she is on a Dublin pier wondering should she talk a young man out of the deed she thinks he might be contemplating. She tries to engage him in what she hopes is uplifting chat before he tells her he is merely trying to figure out the plot of a book he is writing and he’d be glad if she’d leave him alone to work it out. The last line is so Maeve but it’s difficult to see any columnist getting it away with such an ending now. “I saw two girls in school uniform who looked as if they would either get hypothermia or raped but I decided to let it happen”.

She wrote columns that left you with either a lump or a laugh in your throat. It was her straight talking, fearlessness, humanity and wit that I grew to love.

I was lucky enough to interview her once. It was, for me, a bit like meeting writing royalty. I sat in her home in Dalkey and basked in her great generosity, her hilarious stories and as a message plopped through her cat flap from a neighbour – it was a chess move in their latest postal game – I wished I had a friend like Maeve.

Then again, just reading her columns she feels like a friend: the most compassionate, empathetic, cleverest kind of friend you could wish for. Another letter writer to this newspaper was intrigued by her column writing methods, asking with regard to one piece about a laundry visit whether she had (a) a tape-recorder hidden under the garment she was taking to the cleaners, (b) a formidable memory, or (c) a fertile imagination.

In the end it didn’t matter. The truly marvellous thing about marvellous Maeve was that, however she crafted these thought provoking, hilarious, insightful little masterpieces, she made it all look so easy.