The lady sitting at the next table wore a glittering gold dress. The restaurant was full of Christmas lunchers. She was, like all the patrons, laughing at the top of her lungs, writes Quentin Fottrell
I imagine she moonlighted as a Christmas fairy in her youth, but was disgraced when she toppled from the top of the tree and landed in the stardust of her own hiccups after drinking too many G&Ts. (Or . . . not.)
Anyway, she began her meal roaring loudly with delight, but within 10 short minutes she was helped to her feet and led to the ladies' room sobbing, mascara smeared across her face. We've all been that lady. It was quite a scene.
This was the kind of restaurant we read about all the time in glossy magazines and visit in the hope that we might meet the attractive owner and become like those we read about.
But this woman was the proof in the plum pudding that we are no longer a nation of genteel country folk, who quietly dust off our napkins and nervously rearrange the contents of our handbags if we feel self-conscious.
She came here in the hope that she would be the in-crowd, not part of a vulgar sideshow. She was not sold a suckling pig in apple sauce, she was sold a pig-in-a-poke. Life is never as it appears to be in magazines.
Any advertiser worth his salt will tell you that we try to buy, eat and drink our way to happiness. (NB Happiness is cheaper in the January sales and the happiness index plateaus regardless of wealth.) We go to fancy restaurants hoping to be spotted by a co-worker steaming up the window with the laughter from our own witty repartee or spot Brian Cowen - it was him! - with a group of important-looking men, doing their darnedest to simultaneously spend and eat their way out of a downturn, with impressive Orwellian gusto. But who am I to judge? Trotters poised, I ate every last morsel too.
We have always lived life to excess. Paddies + Money = Celtic Vulgaris, a hardy mutation that may yet survive any boom-and-bust. (Is that the gentle purr of a credit card machine I hear before me?)
I actually heard of a wedding invitation saying: "No dresses from Debenhams and no presents under €150 if you're single, or €200 if you're a couple."
In the restroom on the ground floor of an office block in Dublin there is a notice telling us, "Please use the brush provided if you've soiled the bowl". It's no small irony that this sign urging us to take responsibility for our own actions is in the Central Bank.
This Christmas, the Small Firms Association says we will spend €4.5 billion. And that's with money-saving Kris Kindle. "Hourly spend will be in excess of €25 million!" (That's the SFA's "!" - not mine.) "If everyone spent just €100 extra on Irish products the result would be an extra spend of over €200 million on Irish-made products during Christmas," it said. It's presumably referring to the 290,000 Irish shoppers in New York and the estimated €1 billion a year spent on overseas shopping. An extra €100 is chicken feed when some people actually spend €1,000 per child, but €4.5 billion is quite enough.
We have tickets on ourselves, more so when we are well-off. I once asked a brash, young entrepreneur in a bar how his house was coming along; he replied, "Which one?"
This next one sounds like the makings of a joke. It's not. A barrister and solicitor attend a Christmas party; the solicitor requests white wine, if it's chilled, but not Chardonnay or, if there's no white left, he asks for red wine, but not Merlot; the barrister simply brings her own bottle of vintage claret, hides it on the bookshelf, stands guard all night and pours it surreptitiously. (And therein lies the difference between barristers and solicitors.)
We also mock celebrities who crave attention, but peek into the Shelbourne any night of the week and you will find people boasting about their credit card debt. After 800 years of oppression - yes, that again - we sure have one massive cultural chip on our shoulder, which makes us easy pickings for marketing men who tell us that we can be anything or anyone. Even that person in that magazine. We put on the Ritz. We go to the Ritz. And we complain about it afterwards because they barely let us past the gates, they didn't treat us right, they kept us waiting. Who knew all that money wouldn't buy us respect?
That's why I couldn't take my eyes off the woman in the gold dress. Her emotional trajectory over those 10 minutes - excitement, laughter, fatigue, tears - mirrors our own journey over the last 10 years. Like the woodcutter granted three wishes only to blow them all, we wished for low interest rates and high salaries, to keep us in the lifestyle to which we would like to become accustomed, and a nice quality of life, so house prices fell. But we have been too worried about wasting our wishes to truly enjoy them.
We are simple folk at heart. We will be happy to be miserable again, just like the way we were.
• John Watersis on leave