One of my Sunday book club friends had tickets to see Marina Hyde being interviewed by Patrick Freyne in Liberty Hall so I went along on Tuesday night. I bumped into the little brother of a friend of mine (he was in school when I first met him and I just can’t get over it even though he is now in his 40s), someone from my Monday night book club and a colleague from work (Ireland is very small but even by these standards, that was quite the crop of friends and acquaintances).
Marina Hyde was pretty good actually. Great projection – say what you like about English public schools and Oxbrige (she did), they give you great public speaking skills. Anyway the funniest thing she said was about some woman who messaged her on Twitter and said that her husband had a first from Oxford in economics and therefore could possibly claim to be the greatest economist of his generation – like Kwasi Kwarteng – but he had recently super glued his teeth together. Apparently he got super glue on his hands and tried to lick it off. Let that be a lesson to you.
She did say that she found the news cycle a bit exhausting. A couple of years ago you could go away for a week and come back and it was pretty much the same but now you’d make yourself a cup of tea and when you came back everything would have changed. She had got up at 4 in the morning to write her column (eek!) before getting her flight to Dublin and on the way over she worried that her column would be out of date while she was up in the air and offline. Related, I see that Liz Truss has just resigned.
