Suzanne Harrington: I wouldn’t even mind sharing a sofa with someone who smells a bit funny

With St Patrick’s Day mothballed for a second year, pent-up crowd hunger is becoming voracious. All the things you might hate about crowds — jostling, slowed movement, proximity, crush — are now sensations to crave. God, I miss crowds.

People keep talking about throwing parties when all of this is over, but all I want to do is sit in a crowded coffee shop, alone, and soak up the hubbub, the clatter and chatter and movement and animation. I wouldn’t even mind sharing a sofa with someone who smells a bit funny, whose shopping bags spill over my feet. Whose inane conversation I’d be happy to return with my own. We could talk about the weather. It’d be a novelty.

I want to be stuck behind an inconsiderately tall person at a gig who refuses to budge, and be elbowed in the side of the head by their stupid girlfriend’s over-enthusiastic dancing. I want to be splashed by the sticky beer of people shoving their way to the front, pints aloft. I want my toes trodden on, and the armpits of strangers to be way too close as we surge towards the deafening music. I want to go home with sore feet and ringing ears.

I want to be at the home end of the football stadium, crushed in with tens of thousands of roaring fans all shouting unprintable advice at some hapless ref, singing and swaying in a sea of hyped-up home colours. To be part of that howl of joy after a goal, where random men hug each other in a way they wouldn’t dream of anywhere else. I want to be in the crush afterwards, a human river of exuberance trying to board buses and trains, jubilant, elated, full volume. Feeding off the group energy in a way you don’t get on the sofa with Sky Sports and simulated crowd noises.

I want to be at a sold-out festival where everyone is camped too close to each other and the chance of someone tripping over your guy ropes at 4am is high. To be stuck in a queue outside a restaurant and then given the table behind the pillar. To have to stand on a train all the way because the seats are all taken and people are rammed in like vertical sardines, staggering backwards and forwards as the train stops and starts.

But most of all I want to be on a cheap nasty airplane, with my knees uncomfortably rubbing the seat in front, and the thighs of randoms warming my own. Where the aisles are so narrow you have to walk sideways to the loo, and wedge yourself upright into a coffin-sized cubicle. This plane could either be headed towards a French beach more crowded than a hot yoga studio, with hundreds of bodies side by side in the sun, or it could be headed to Cork, where the only crowd I want to see are my own. God, it’s been long.