Anne Enright

I bumped into my brother in the street and we talked about Fintan O’Toole’s book on the beef tribunal. I told him to read it immediately. I myself had stopped both reading about the beef tribunal and eating beef in 1991, after a two-line thing in the Irish Times about cirrhotic calves’ livers being packed by someone, somewhere in Ireland. My brother is a civil servant. He did not reel, gag, or clutch his throat. He said: ‘Come on. You can’t get cirrhosis by eating it in beef.’

In Ireland we don’t need aliens; we already have a race of higher beings with strange powers who gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will. We call them priests. A loopy Protestant, on the other hand, has to make it up as she goes along. And no one makes it up better than your American Protestant, driven mad by all that sky. I am talking about the alien-breeding programme affecting ‘up to two million’ carefully selected Americans. You have to be white to qualify.

Sitting in France writing about death and wallpaper, it is no surprise to find my walls orange: ‘that most morbid and irritating of colours’, as Huysmans described it, ‘with its acid glow and unnatural splendour’. The word ‘orange’ was a late addition to the language, before it we just had gold or ochre, and, like the colour, it throws up questions about the precious and the fake, the difference between what is natural and what is recent. Like the fruit, the walls are good in the morning and odd at night. Unlike the fruit the colour is strangely flat, very inedible: the blind colour of optimism, of airport furniture, of faith in the modern and the failure of that faith. Repeated, it is the colour of writer’s block. I look out the window and at the keyboard and try to avoid a Barton Fink. What is the difference between a pattern and a story, I wonder, as paragraphs repeat and strain for change, like the unsuccessful mutation zigzagging the walls; flowers held monstrous in stasis, trying to stop being flowers and start just being shapes – or is it the other way around? When it comes to writing, it is probably the other way around.’

The night they bombed Baghdad – the first time – I was out at the TV station where I was working. I saw it in hospitality, on the big screen. The room was full of people drinking; people from the show, and also, because they were bombing Baghdad, other people from around the building. They just drifted in. There were no rules to hospitality, but on a normal night these people would not have come in for a beer at the end of the day. People from other programmes, the crew, the guys on cameras, the vision mixer, the guys who did sound on the studio floor. So we were all together. And on the screen for the first time was that green colour which was the colour of the news when they bombed Baghdad.

I don’t know where I heard of her first: a woman whose cells are bred in culture dishes in labs all over the world; a woman whose cells were so prolific that there is more of her now, in terms of bio-mass, then there ever was when she was alive.