I look from him to John Johns’s red lips pulled back in a smile at something Petey McGovern has said and I feel the blush burn my face before I even realise that I’m embarrassed. I’m roasting from top to tail! I don’t know why just seeing him has such an effect – he’s not even close, he’s twenty seats away. After all he’s just a man, as Tammy Wynette says, and she should know as she’s on her fifth husband. Tammy doesn’t get much further than the opening bar at The Hill. Mammy doesn’t like the strains of THAT SINGING TRAMP infiltrating her clean kitchen.

John had started at the agricultural college Greenmount in Enniskillen a few days a week and Bridie was never done worrying about him travelling through checkpoints. The problem always was, and always would be, that he stuck out; it was impossible to miss him. He looked like a soldier, the kind of soldier who could lead rebels. Bridie swears he’s not involved. He’d promised her years ago that he would never risk his life for Republicanism when he was all she had left. It seems almost impossible that little round Mrs Johns had produced such a handsome creature. He stands head and shoulders above the entire congregation at Sunday Mass and is stop-the-traffic gorgeous.

Like so many stories, the story of Bridie was handed down by Granda Ban. She had married a Thomas O’Neil when her mother finally died after being bedridden with a stroke for four years. Alas, Thomas O’Neil died after three years, leaving her childless. Then at thirty-eight she married Dan Johns in the rare year that he was sober and had buried her two sons from pneumonia not long before Dan fell off the long road home one cold winter night when he’d had too much whiskey. He was found dead in the ditch by morning. Granny Moo had seen Dan wave goodbye to her from the foot of the bed before the sun was up.

The young curate Father Pat O’Connell had started calling round as part of his priestly duties to check that Bridie was alright. Tongues had wagged as soon as she was spotted in the town, dry-eyed at last but definitely in trouble as her only coat strained at the buttons. But she was forgiven by all and sundry because she’d had the good sense to suffer!

First she did her duty by her mammy, then she lost two husbands plus two children, which all adds up to a get-out-of-jail-free card in Northern Ireland. When you suffer you can be tolerated even if you’ve broken every rule in the book and ripped it up and used it to light a fire. There’s no fool like an old fool, says Mammy, who doesn’t approve of Catholic women who lose Catholic husbands for any reason. It’s slipshod.