I WAS sitting in one corner of the room in a chair usually occupied by father.
It is a highly coveted position, given that it maintains perfect proximity to the TV, the fire and a coffee table.
It is also large enough so you can curl up.
It has everything you need in a chair: somewhere to rest your coffee, somewhere to rest your feet, optimum warmth and an excellent viewing angle.
Luckily for me, father was at a match that evening, so I landed myself “the seat”. I won’t lie – I was excited.
It was just another crazy Saturday night in the Wilmot household – Brendan O’Connor was in the background holding up a curtain for some inexplicable reason.
It looked like some terrible mishap had occurred in the RTÉ studio, which was a cause of great hilarity for the audience. I really wanted to know what was going on but I was distracted.
Mother was sitting in her seat across the room. Some argue she has the best seat in the house, given her proximity to the fire and her viewing angle, but I disagree.
She had been silent for quite some time and a scent of fragrant oils wafted through the room.
I noted she was frantically rubbing the oils into her hands and then tugging on her right hand before stopping, sighing loudly and starting the whole process over again.
I decided to enquire what she was doing – if only to get her to stop so I could find out what the hell was happening with the curtain on the Saturday Night Show.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She looked at me, sighed loudly again and suddenly hopped up out of her seat. “I have a problem,” she announced, with great gravitas.
“I had an appointment and they told me to take off my wedding ring. I put the ring in a sock, I put the sock in my shoe and I hid the shoe under my clothes. I said to myself: ‘No-one will look for a ring in a sock in a shoe under a pile of clothes.’
And I was right – they didn’t! So then I put the ring on. Now I struggled, mind you, I struggled. And I said to myself: ‘My God, I surely could not have bloated so much in the half hour the ring was off ‘ – but anyway, I managed to get the ring back on my finger but it was bothering me. It really was bothering me that it took so long to get it on, but I did it. And then, when I was doing the washing yesterday, I realised the ring was on the bloody wrong finger, and now I can’t get the fecking thing off .”
Her voice reached a high-pitch squeal at this stage.
“I have not taken this wedding ring off in years. Sure there were times when I took it to the end of my finger and I said ‘I’m going to throw this over the ditch’ – but I never did. I never took it off and now look at it!”
She was standing in the middle of the sitting room, stomping her little size four feet on the ground as she re-enacted the entire scene from putting the ring into her sock to throwing it over the imaginary ditch. Her eyes were ablaze with an emotion I couldn’t quite read.
“Has Dad noticed?” I asked tentatively. “Of course he hasn’t noticed!”
As someone who can’t tell their left from their right, I felt it wasn’t my place to question how she managed to achieve this. Also, she appeared distressed. “Ok mother, we will fix this. If it went on, it will come off ,” I said.
What would Bear Grylls do right now, I wondered? Then the answer came to me: butter.
It was like a tug-o-war. We lathered her finger up with butter. She pulled one way, I pulled the other way. It wouldn’t budge but I was determined it would work, so we stuck at it. Ten minutes passed.
Ten minutes of mother roaring at me and ten minutes of me possessing steely determination. Occasionally, I shouted: “man-up, mother! Pain is only temporary … more butter!”
Eventually, it popped off her fi nger. “Tada!” I shouted, rather thrilled with saving the day.
“Give that to me,” she said, shooting a filthy look at the wedding ring before placing it back in its rightful place.
“Don’t tell anyone about this”.