One of the best things about turning 40, and then 41, was realising that I didn’t have to do things I used to think were obligatory. It turns out this is a huge category, from replying promptly to text messages, to maintaining relationships with people I don’t really like, and – a new revelation – participating in events rather than watching them on TV.

Women's March on Washington barred from Lincoln Memorial Read more

This came to me a few weeks ago when friends asked if I was planning on going to the women’s march, the huge anti-Trump rally taking place in Washington DC on 21 January. My initial response was: of course I’m going, I’ll get an overnight babysitter, it’s a historic event and a symbolic gesture and something I’ll one day tell my children about.

Then I thought: what is it exactly I’ll tell them? I revived a lot of miserable memories of Glastonbury. I thought about the hell of the annual Halloween parade in downtown Manhattan and some old, grim experiences at the Notting Hill carnival. Mostly, I thought about being at Barack Obama’s inauguration; not at the ceremony itself, but the back of the crowd approximately three miles away, in frigid DC weather and surrounded by thousands of other scuffling, freezing, depressed-looking people, trying to squeeze a sense of occasion from what felt like being at the back of a demo.

Very occasionally, crowds can be electrifying – the spontaneous gathering in Times Square on the night of Obama’s election victory was one. But from experience, I suspect that unless I camp overnight to get a good spot at the front, the women’s march on Washington will be less a wonderful, uplifting celebration of womanhood, than five hours of shouting, “What did she say?” to the woman standing next to me and a lot of anxiety about where to go to the toilet.

And where once I would’ve lied and made up an excuse, it felt good to be old enough to say, “No, I hate crowds. I’m staying home to watch it on TV.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Edna O’Brien, pictured in 1964. ‘The Country Girls is brilliant and seems as fresh as any modern coming-of-age novel.’ Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

Why Edna still shocks



When I was in my teens, my mother would urge novels she’d read in her youth on me with the caveat, “They might be terribly dated by now.” Some I read, but then came the phase when anything she recommended was tainted and to be avoided like the plague. This passed. But for some reason I remained suspicious of Edna O’Brien, whose first novel, The Country Girls, was beloved by my mother and which I used to think sounded horribly boring. Then last week I found an old copy on my shelf and started to read it, and of course it’s brilliant in a way that makes its late-1940s setting seem as fresh as any modern coming-of-age novel.

There is one exception to this. The heroine, Caithleen, is expelled from her convent for writing a tame note implying sexual relations between a nun and a priest, an act she considers so lewd she hesitates to share it with the reader. At the same time, she is, at 14, being wooed by a married man decades older than her, which the author presents as a thrilling but more or less straightforward love interest.

You couldn’t do that today without calling it grooming, which I suspect the author would see as a piece of fussy editorialising with no place in fiction. It’s interesting; it simultaneously dates the novel, which was banned in Ireland on first publication, and preserves something of its original shock value.

Machine moments



When I was a baby, my mother would park me in front of the washing machine to watch the socks go round for minutes at a time. My kids watch the vacuum cleaner; I think they think it’s a pet. Some people worry about the day their children will stop believing in Father Christmas; I worry about the day mine figure out the Roomba doesn’t have agency and I lose those precious few moments to read another paragraph or glance up at the crowds on TV.