When peace broke out in Northern Ireland on Good Friday 1998, she was far from happy. She missed the daily battles and being duty-bound to sneer at any Protestants who crossed her path. Her and the Troubles have been on the back foot now for nearly a decade. The government of us and them – depending on what side of the barbed wire you were on – had bounced back to London for a while, but now we are power sharing! And surely anything is possible when the Chuckle Brothers – the Democratic Unionist Party’s Reverend Ian Paisley (hate preacher) and Sinn Féin’s Mr Martin McGuinness (former IRA commander) – still haven’t kicked ten bags of shite out of each other?

–  There was a photo of those two fuckers in the Tyrone Constitution the other day, says Auntie Eileen, smiling at each other. Smiling! At each other! Imagine it, Mary? The fuckers!

It was nice that Auntie Eileen was more engaged with current affairs these days. When poor Mo Mowlam, God rest her resolute soul, was battling with both of those wonderfully dedicated public servants in the 1990s, Eileen only had one eye, one ear and evidently only half a brain on events unfolding on the BBC’s Inside Ulster programme.

–  That poor woman has to fairly tear her hair out to be heard.

–  Eileen, she has cancer.

–  Who?

–  Mo Mowlam!

–  Mo Mowlam has cancer? No! Mother of God, what is she doing here wastin’ her time on those dickheads? She should be at home lookin’ after herself. She’ll understand the benefit of rest one day!

Ah, Auntie Eileen and her one day, one day! If she has one fault, it’s her one day, one day! ‘One day’ has been hanging over my head like a noose for as long as I can remember and even now I can’t outrun it. She kept me so firmly focused on all the good things that would happen one day because so many bad things happened every day. But that meant I missed out on a thousand gems that were right under my nose. High on the list is him, the missing husband.

The September sun is dipping and the chill that it will leave reaches me where I sit outside the house that I long to call my own. I must check my hens, I must check the gates, I must check some rat traps that I have set in the barn. A lonely woman’s work is never done. When I stand, my cat stretches himself, ready for the plod around the perimeter. His creaky yawn tells me that he doesn’t have a care in the world except his supper – lucky little rascal.