I have always read Mary Kenny’s columns with pleasure. Now she has distilled her unique mixture of reminiscence, observation and humorous anecdotage into a book: A Day at a Time (New Island Books). Subtitled “Thoughts and Reflections through the Seasons”, they show the author’s lively interest in the manners and morals of society, her love for Ireland and poetry, her warmth and her wisdom, pondered over a lifetime that has had its fair share of failure as well as success.
In the book Mary relates that someone once challenged her: “Why did you change from being a wild child and a bad girl in the 1960s and 1970s into a right-wing Catholic subsequently?” She responded briskly: “You grow up; you grow old.” As I also reject the label “right-wing Catholic” which is sometimes made against me, I ask Mary how she would define herself.
