And Jenny’s ability to make us laugh as a unit when we need it. And the way she often kisses me on my cheek when we are together in the kitchen, while she rinses her brushes and I am boiling pasta, or potatoes. Sometimes she touches my arm gently with her palm after we have all shared a family joke even if it isn’t particularly funny.

You’ve got to act sometimes, children need to grow up happy; this is what I tell Jenny.

And the smile she gives away, unabashed as the children sing along to songs like ‘We Are Family’ and Jenny tells me that she never had this, this proper family. The premature absence of a maternal hand for her, her father that we see occasionally but who doesn’t appear to have any real interest in us, the children, we know that. There isn’t any doubt in Jenny’s mind that her father tried his best. Tried to be a combination parent, a bit of both. It is one thing to be a good father, it is another matter altogether to be both a good father and a good mother.

I can feel Jenny’s pain. At least my mother had met Jenny, had the opportunity to know my family. Although she is gone now, at least she had that chance. Sometimes I think this makes me the better parent. Things have a way of turning out after turning inside out on you and you are trying to right yourself. You are disorientated, the sea spits you back on to the shore.

I fear sharks coming to Irish waters on account of Joey’s questions and I think about jellyfish and the belief that I cannot be stung twice. I was stung once as a young boy. I can enter the water safe in the knowledge that I’ve had my share of pain from their poisonous tentacles but I cannot have the same confidence about sharks.

And when I fear love I think not only of Jenny but of my children and although these thoughts bring me joy, they too bring worries about carbon footprints, and excess.

24. Paris Enfin

November 1996

Paris was a glorious time for us. Jenny bought clothes in a second-hand shop near the Pompidou Centre and she was amazed, being an artist, by Beaubourg with its structural pipes exposed and the whole inside-outside-ness of it. Groups of Spanish students sat in packs in the square and they clapped and sang and it reminded me of growing up when they gathered on the green outside our house, and I could catch words like bastante and entonces and mira and tenia and polvo. We took the escalator to the top floor and looked out over the city and all the while, I held Jenny’s hand.