“We bonded over the jump-leads, you could say”

WE got to know our 20-year-old neighbour J well before he moved up to Sligo for the surf.

Age was no obstacle to friendship, not when he lived just a stone’s throw away from us and had a car that wouldn’t start in the mornings. At least twice a week, we’d hear his car engine balk all the way down the lane, and then put itself to obstinate silence at the bottom of our drive. We bonded over the jump-leads, you could say.

Great lad. Nice to have around.

“Hope you make it,” we shouted after his car as it bucked down the lane for the last time, with surfboard in the back and six hours driving to Sligo ahead of it. “I will,” J shouted back. And as he kangarooed round the bend with not a thought in his head but the surf, we thought, “there’s nothing in the world to make you feel old like the young.”

Six months later, he’s back in Cork for a visit. We’re to come to dinner Saturday night, he texts, at his sister’s house in Blackpool.

6pm on Saturday, having cleared brambles from the front ditch all day, my husband and I are nursing our complaints in front of the fire, with a glass of wine and the newspapers.

“Oof,” my husband says, lowering himself onto the sofa with caution, “my back.”

“Oof,” I say, creaking into the armchair, “my knees.”

“If someone was to paint us now,” I say, fumbling down the back of the sofa for my reading glasses, “they’d call it “Incipient Old Age.”

“Stiff as Sticks,” more like it,” my husband says.

8pm, in a dodgy-looking part of Blackpool, we park the car outside a block of flats, which someone thought to build next to an underpass. J is waving at us with a big smile, in paint-splotched trousers.

“Oof,” my husband says, getting out of the car.

“Oof,” I say, swinging my legs out of the passenger seat.

“Nice of you to have us oldies up to dinner,” I say, giving J a hug.

“The best oldies,” he says.

“And good to see you’ve made an effort,” I say, pointing at his trousers.

My husband bangs him on the back, then looks about. “Should we lock our car?” he asks.

“Ha,” J says, “no one’s going to bother breaking into that thing, even round here.”

He leads us towards some waist-high railings. Behind it is a door leading to his sister’s ground-floor flat. “There’s another way in,” he says “but it’s round the side. Hop over.” I think of my nice red tights. And my quite-short dress. Then I think of my back. I cannot imagine a way of hopping over that doesn’t involve terrible shame.

J bends down, clasping his hands together. “I’ll give you a boost,” he says. I arrive on the other side of the railings with my dress around my waist. My husband turns down the offer of a boost. His run-up looks looks awkward in a geriatric sort of way, and the dismount, when he smacks straight into the door — beyond which J’s friends gather in sudden alarm — looks painful.

Inside there is outstanding company but not enough chairs, so in order to eat, J suggests spreading a blanket on the floor in front of the sofa. J’s friends fall lightly into cross-legged position. I think of my quite short dress, knees and personal dignity once more. “Oof,” I say, dropping like a stone to my knees and lurching sideways.

“I’m quite comfy here,” my husband says quickly, from the sofa.

On the blanket there is delicious food but not enough plates. Around the blanket there is exceptional banter, but no cushions. And after pudding, which is a big box of Celebrations, there are the railings. Then boosts — for both of us this time — and two shaming dismounts.

In the car, there is soreness.

At home, after one of one of the loveliest evenings we’ve had in a long time, we think, “there’s nothing in the world to make you feel old like the young.” And upstairs, in our bed, there is our electric blanket.