Basic B*tch

Ciara O’Connor on the year of Connell’s chain

When our grandchildren ask us

about 2020, we’ll take a deep breath and smile indulgently and say:

“Ah yes, Normal People, the year everything changed”.

Do you remember where you were the first time you saw Connell’s chain? Everyone does. Perhaps it was in your living room, on your couch. Perhaps it was in your bedroom, in your bed. Who knows what rich stories we have to tell! Connell’s chain is our generation’s Kennedy; Good Friday Agreement; ‘Who shot JR?’

Did you first notice it glinting at the match, or were you looking at the GAA shorts? Was it what centred you during the excruciating condom sound effects?

Normal People has been a huge story, but all discourse has now finally been distilled to this: Connell’s chain.

We thought we had sex in Ireland since television: but it’s clear that there was no sex in Ireland before Normal People.

The only thing naughtier than Paul Mescal’s Connell naked, is him naked but for his little chain. In the novel, it’s a class signifier, underlining the social distinctions between the lovers; it’s a motif for Rooney’s anti-capitalist narrative underpinning. Connell’s chain was Marxist — now it thrives in glorious isolation, it is only middle-class sex.

In this context, the chain tapped into a little-researched universal experience of being young, and fancying men in jewellery. With an almost passiveaggressive soundtrack, the TV show played millennials like a nostalgia-violin.

Between the ages of 16 and 22, I fell in love temporarily with several necklace-types: an English degree is essentially a menu of them. As I shot zingers about gap-yahs and bourgeois hippies, I stoles secret glances at the chains nestling in preternaturally smooth chests, or surprisingly hairy ones, hating myself for the overwhelming urge to reach over and ask, with big eyes: “What’s this one?”

Perhaps they are the ultimate signifier of youth — it’s a fact that 90pc of middle-aged men in necklaces are either Johnny Depp or equally tragic. Perhaps a necklace-wearing man-child is the ultimate antithesis of your Irish father; exactly what 19-year-old girls are primed to crave.

It’s been a long time since I’ve fancied a man in a necklace. I thought those days were behind me. But then, in 2020: Connell’s chain.