It’s been a busy month or so since I last wrote my diary - Christmas is approaching at high speed and everybody is getting geared up for the festive season. I’ve managed to get a few things sorted out including the booking of the cake maker and the invitation maker - I’ll elaborate about these in a future diary.

Two great things happened over the past two months - my little sister/chief bridesmaid came home from Australia to the surprise of my parents who weren’t expecting her home until the end of February. My poor Mum nearly had a heart attack when she saw Eimear walk in through the back door and couldn’t believe that we could be so devious and hide it from her.

We also had a WOL get-together - it wasn’t a general shindig but a gathering of some now married & some B2B’s who have struck up a friendship via WOL. We’ve been corresponding by email for almost a year and have become very good friends so we decided to head out together for dinner and drinks in town. It took a huge amount of planning to get us all together - but eventually we agreed a date that suited all but two of us ( and we missed you Lily and Paula) and Thomas Reads was picked as the meeting point.

Us non Dublin girls booked a guesthouse in Donnybrook and stared yapping from then! The three Wicklow ladies - myself, Mairin and Alvina, all shared a room and Catriona from Cork and Anita from Manchester shared so the ice was well and truly broken by the time we set off in the taxis into town. After the first drink in the pub, we were all yapping away as if there was no tomorrow. Ceara could only join us for drinks as she had guests staying with her so we were down to 11. We headed over to Luigi Malone’s where we had a table booked for dinner (well we needed to be slightly ladylike) and got stuck into the wine and cocktail list…. I can highly recommend the strawberry daiquirist. Dinner was lovely, plates were cleared and glasses emptied very rapidly and then we decided that it was time for a bit of divilment. Catriona is the next of us to get married so we told the waiters that it was her hen night and asked if they could “do something memorable for us”. Apparently, the manager wouldn’t let then strip (bah humbug) but they did make her a dessert of bananas of ice-cream… need I say more ? Poor Catriona didn’t know where to look but provided us with some very funny photos! We were the last to leave the restaurant but we hadn’t finished talking so off we went to the Mercantile for last drinks. All the moving around was a great idea because it meant that we all changed seats and got a chance to talk to everybody - everybody being myself, Mairin, Alvina, Chris, Natasha, Wendy, Ceara, Janet, Susan, Catriona & Anita.

It was such a good night, we’re planning the second get-together for the end of January!

That’s really all I have for the moment - I just want to wish you all a very happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year (especially Catriona & Paul who are getting married in Limerick on 2nd January)

See you next year!
Aoife