That is the most honest thing anybody in that family has ever said to me.
Where things are now, fifteen months on.
There have been six gatherings at Tullamane since. Not nine — six, because I said in September that we’d do four a year and everybody accepted it without a murmur, which tells you it was never actually about the barbecues.
There is a rota. It is a shared document. It is not a joke and nobody treats it as one.
Roisin does drinks and ice. Nessa does salads and bread and is genuinely quite good at it. Solange does dessert, and she brings a rhubarb thing that is the best thing anybody puts on that table.
Nobody has missed a turn. Not once in fifteen months.
Solange has hosted twice at Fentiman Row. Both times she did all of it herself and both times she over-catered by roughly forty percent and both times somebody had to tell her to sit down.
