“How was I to know you were having a stroke?”

I HAVE been idling in Dunnes Stores for a good 10 minutes, watching a double act — my mother and her old friend Sheila — play out in the pyjama section. We are all wind-blown and purple-cheeked; it is minus two outside and braving the beach has exhausted any desire to ever go out of doors again.

My mother is lamenting the dearth of “decent cotton nightwear” to Sheila who, she’s failed to notice, swung right half a minute ago and disappeared behind a stand of folded pyjamas.

“All this synthetic fleece,” my mother confides to thin air, tutting, “who’d want to boil to death like that in bed? I mean you might as well buy a roll of cling-film and wrap yourself up in it.”

Sheila reappears suddenly, wearing a pair of sunglasses. What with price-tag obscuring one lens and the purple cheeks, it’s quite a look.

My mother and Sheila regard each other. “What do you think?” they ask each other simultaneously, with Sheila affecting a 1950s-starlet pose and my mother facing her, holding up a pair of mint green and pink seersucker pyjamas. “Seersucker,” she informs Sheila, “100% cotton. And there’s a collar. Nice to have a collar to keep your neck warm.”

“I like the shape of these,” Sheila says, dipping her head and peering at my mother over the top of the sunglasses, “I think they suit my face.”

My mother looks up from her pyjamas at Sheila suddenly. “Oh for crying out loud, not another pair of cheap sunglasses,” she says.

“But the shape…” Sheila protests. The shape is undeniably fetching.”

My mother says never mind the shape.

“Remember those cheap sunglasses — the ones you bought for 40p in Rome?” she warns, “I’m still not convinced those sunglasses didn’t have something to do with what happened on the beach…”

“What happened on the beach?” I say, beginning to feel as I often do when I’m in my mother’s company — that life is transposing at surprising speed into a scene from a Mike Leigh film, in which the setting is always prosaic, but the script is peculiar and the outcome completely unforeseeable.

“Oh take them off,” my mother says, re-folding pyjamas expertly with brusque, deft movements.

“What happened?” I persist.

“Didn’t I tell you?” she says casually, “Sheila stood up on the beach and then all of a sudden she sort of… lurched to one side.”

“I couldn’t see properly,” Sheila says with some asperity.

“So I suggested we go for a paddle,” my mother says.

“So we went for a paddle even though I told your mother it was as if someone had thrown netting over my eyes and I couldn’t walk straight.”

“Well, would you know what do if someone said they had netting over their eyes,” she asks of me indignantly. “I thought it was the cheap sunglasses that she bought for 40p in Rome. So I told her to take them off.”

“So I took them off.”

“Anyway,” my mother continues, “she was blinking away there, weren’t you Sheila? She didn’t look right so I suggested an ice cream. She likes gooseberry ice-cream. I thought it might…”

“Might what?” I say, with all the feeling of a teenager who’s had the bitter experience of being struck down overnight with Bell’s Palsy — the typical hallmark of which is a rapid onset of highly distinctive bilateral facial paralysis — only to be summarily dispatched to school by her mother, even though she was dribbling, disorientated, had slurred speech and couldn’t open one eye.

“She thought gooseberry ice-cream might help with my sudden blindness and loss of balance,” Sheila informs me with the exasperation that only a retired nurse can muster.

“I’m going to buy these pyjamas,” my mother says to Sheila, “are you getting those sunglasses?”

“Yes,” Sheila says, “I like the shape.”

“You like gooseberry ice-cream,” my mother says doughtily, “how was I to know you were having a stroke?”

“Two strokes,” Sheila says, giving my mother a sharp look over her sunglasses. “By the time we’d finished our ice creams, it was two strokes.”

And it’s a wrap, I think to myself. Wind, reel and print: it’s a wrap.