From Ukraine to the state of your wobbly bits – nothing beats a chat with an old pal

On Saturday mornings, I often rendezvous with an old friend at the Milk Market in Limerick. We meet early, soon after the traders have set up their stalls. The smell of fresh coffee wafts around the place, mingling with the pong of strong cheese from West Cork and grilled T-bone steaks from Tipperary, while rashers from Shanagolden sizzle on a hot plate in the company of tomatoes and chorizo from Andalucia.

Trestle tables are mounded high with fresh fruit, vegetables, and sprays of flowers emblazon the place with colour. On the pavements outside, you can buy anything from a bag of Ballysteen spuds to a rusty pitchfork or a hames to hang somewhere.

In the heart of Limerick City, the enclosed space and the surrounding streets are always thronged and buzzing with Saturday morning fever.

Gently shouldering your way through the contented crowd feels like being in town on Christmas Eve, except it happens every week.

The market on Saturday and on Sunday mornings anchors the week for a lot of people. It is a therapeutic ritual where, for a few hours, they treat themselves to the best of fresh food and the joy of meeting the people who produced it.

The stallholders and traders have become their friends, who know what they want, what they like and will be told what they don’t like.

And there is plenty of time for the human bits. They talk about who is laid up, who is laid down, who is getting hitched and who is alone as tender conversations are wrapped and held in that most empathetic of Limerick expressions, ‘God help us, love’.

My friend will be waiting in Marie’s cafe at edge of the market. If he is alone, I will find him looking into his coffee and as I approach, he will take out his phone and turn its face to me, showing me the time. “I thought it was today we were meeting — it’s nearly tomorrow.”

If he has fallen in with a gathering of regulars, I will be ignored until each of them has greeted me, then he will grace me with an acknowledgement, a glance over the top of his spectacles.

Once the crowd scatters, we will find ourselves a corner to ourselves or wander further afield to one of the many coffee shops and cafes around Little Catherine St and Thomas St where on-street and off-street food emporiums give the place something of a continental vibe.

Our conversation can stretch from the battlefields of Ukraine to the melting icecaps, to what Carl Jung

‘He is the thoughtful academic, keeping footnotes and acknowledging his sources, while I’m the wannabe novelist trying to get 300 pages from a hunch’

might make of Dancing With The Stars or what Freud’s take might be on the things ageing men think about in the dark of night when sleep escapes them.

A few years separate us, but we have a lot in common: we both hail from West Limerick farming stock; we spent some of our youth in the arms of Mother Church; we have reinvented ourselves a few times and now find ourselves at the empty-nest phase of parenthood.

But we are also quite different from one another. He is the thoughtful academic, keeping careful footnotes and acknowledging his sources, while I’m the racy novelist who hopes to get 300 pages out of a hunch. He is the grounded one to my kite flyer.

We talk our way through a cooked breakfast and at least two cups of coffee and leave the cafe still talking. Very often, out on the street, we have that Columbo moment — we are just about to part company when one of us will ask a key question or make an observation that opens up a corner of the conversation we hadn’t spotted while hunched over our food. We will either dive back in or, if we are under spousal time-pressure, make a note of it for our next meeting.

We have known one another for 40 years and, over that time, have created for ourselves a space where anything can be said, where there is no judgement, no sugar-coating, no preening or positioning, where truth rules and reality doesn’t have to be harsh.

Our Saturday morning rendezvous represents an important oasis for us, a place many men of our generation don’t have, a gracious place where you can talk about everything from the vagaries of your mental well-being to the state of your wobbly bits. It is a balm for existential angst.