The Real Men sort of blur into a hairy manly haze for me, but I’m going to try to untangle them in my head for you and describe them

Okay, they’re all ‘Alpha’ ‘Males’, but Luke Costello is the ‘Alpha’ ‘Alpha’ and I’ll save him for last.

I’ll tell you about Joey first. Joey has long, blondy hair and he looks a bit like Jon Bon Jovi. But his hair isn’t really blond; it’s because he uses Sun-In and he goes mad if you suggest that he does. Joey is as cranky as bedamned. Always going round with a face like thunder, and he does these ‘statement actions’ like striking a match off the brick wall in Rachel’s apartment or swinging a chair round so that he’s sitting on it backwards, you know what I mean? I spend my life in dread that Joey is going to start shouting at me for something or other.

Despite his ‘narkiness’, Joey sees a lot of ‘lurve action’ (another dreadful phrase) with the ladies. Loads of them have slept with Joey. Helen did as part of her ‘Tag and Release’ Programme. Rachel’s friend Brigit did. Anna’s friend Jacqui … Joey snared Jacqui by stealing one of her Scrabble tiles and shoving it down the front of his jeans and making her rummage around and fish it out again – with him not wearing any jocks. Which she did, cool as a cucumber. Took her time about it too, if what I hear is to be believed. Then it all went to hell, but that’s another story.

Next there’s Gaz – and how do I put this without getting the head bitten off me …? Gaz has a small bit of a lack. Gaz, if you ask me, is not all there. A nice lad, no harm in him, a bit on the tubby side, but that’s no crime. What’s worrying me is that he’s training to be an acupuncturist and he goes round with a leather pouch full of needles, and if you stand still for more than two seconds, he’s sticking them into you and trying to cure you of ailments you didn’t even know you had, and my fear is that in his ‘cluelessness’ he might accidentally sever someone’s spinal cord with one of his needles …

Gaz doesn’t enjoy the same success with the ladies as Joey does, but funnily enough, in one of those six degrees of separation things, Gaz once ‘slept’ with Claire, a long time ago, before any of them were in New York. Hilaire, as Helen would say. Small world, as I would say.

Now I’ll tell you about Shake. Shake distinguishes himself by his skill at playing the air guitar. He did very well in a championship, got to the semi-finals of something or other – forgive me for not having the details to hand, but it’s not the sort of thing I’m interested in.

Shake has a ‘mahooosive’ head of hair, easily the biggest of them all and at Rachel’s wedding, he did a sort of floor show. The DJ put on ‘Smoke on the Water’ and Shake was swirling his hair round and about in a big circle and he was playing his air guitar, twiddling away at his ‘region’, you know … his ‘down below’ … and for all the world he looked to me like he was ‘at’ himself, if you know what I mean. I mean … you know … ‘at’ himself, like playing with himself. I was mortified, but I couldn’t stop looking …

Johnno now, I couldn’t tell you much about. Quiet sort of chap. Doesn’t do much. Just there to make up numbers.

But Luke … Luke is the one I want to talk to you about. Luke Costello is the stand-out Real Man, the ‘break out’ ‘star’. Anna says she can only talk to Luke’s crotch, that she tries, she tries really hard to address his face, but for whatever reason her eyes are always drawn back to his ‘region’.

Even on his wedding day his trousers were distractingly tight and we were all wondering how he does it; does he have the trousers specially tailored or is it just down to … him?

Jacqui says Luke makes her break into such a sweat, she has to take rehydration salts after ten minutes in his company.

As for myself, I dread being alone with Luke. He’s so … I don’t know the word, but he makes me feel … I don’t know the word. Like a wild animal. Often I’m afraid I’m going to lunge across the room and take a bite out of him. I have a suspicion he doesn’t always wear underpants and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go to … What! Sorry, where were we?

S is for Sausage. As in ‘Throwing a sausage up O’Connell Street.’ A disgustingly vulgar phrase Claire employs to describe having sexual intercourse after having given birth.

S is also for Sisters. I myself have five sisters and I suppose you could say I have five best friends. We are great pals, all of us; we all get on great and there is no rivalry between any of us, none at all. We are all thrilled when a child of one of the others does well and we are not one bit happy when a child of one of the others gets caught embezzling from their workplace, or becomes a Jolly Girl or a deserted wife. We are all terrific pals. The best of friends.

S is also for Shovel List. The Shovel List is a simply marvellous invention of Helen’s. It’s a list of all the things and people she hates so much she wants to hit them in the face with a shovel. It can be an actual list, written on a piece of paper, or on your ‘smartphone’, or you could have the things written on little cue cards and you could shuffle them around, as the mood took you, or you could simply keep the list in your head. I will give you some examples of the things on my shovel list: the Aon Insurance ad; the sound of Francesca drinking a Slurpee; the smell of the elephant house at the zoo; hard pears, especially when the label said they were ‘perfectly ripe’; old people who stop for no reason in the supermarket so your trolley goes bashing into their heels and then they act like you were the one at fault; Michael, the man who used to ‘do’ our garden but did sweet damn all, and when Mr Walsh finally ‘fronted’ him ‘up’, he left and spread a rumour that he’d seen me use a dirty tea towel to dry Mr Walsh’s lettuce.

Do you see? Isn’t it lovely? And you can keep adding new things all the time!

T is for ‘Taking agin’. Honesty compels me to admit that this phrase originated with Margaret’s friend Emily, but it has been adopted by the entire Walsh clan. Even Imelda, my most competitive sister, says it, like she made it up. To ‘take agin’ something means you have a ‘set’ against something, that something has displeased you or disappointed you in some way. It is a tremendous phrase, extremely versatile, and I urge you to give it a go yourself, right now. For example, let’s say you’ve gone to the hairdresser and you’ve had a body wave and decided to take your colour down a shade. You’re looking the best you’ve looked for years and you know it. You arrive home and not only is your husband there, but so are two of your daughters and not one person mentions your beautiful new hair. Under old circumstances you would become vexed with them, perhaps even enraged, but not any more. Now, you ‘take agin’ them. ‘Taking agin’ someone can be expressed in many ways – banging is always considered suitable. You could say, ‘Cup of tea, everyone? I’ll make it, will I? Like I always fecking well do, will I?’ Then you can bang the kettle into the sink, fill it with water, bang it back onto its stand, bang some mugs onto the worktop, bang open the door of the biscuit cupboard, bang the biscuits onto the table, and so on. Like ‘holding a grudge’, ‘taking agin’ things is one of life’s great pleasures.