The Personals. Brian O’Connell

stance in not wearing them and she is now making another by selling them. Why be weighed down by the past? If she does succeed in selling them, the money is already accounted for, she tells me. ‘I will buy my mother a little plaque which has a mother’s verse on it and I want to put it on her grave from her children.’

So far she’s had a few offers but won’t let the rings go for much below the asking price. I ask her finally whether she’d ever talked to her parents about the years she lived with them when they were having difficulties in their marriage. ‘I did,’ she tells me, ‘I spoke to my father. I didn’t get a chance to speak to my mother. He always said he would keep a special place in his heart for my mother and he respected her and he said it was such a pity they could not live together. He is 86 years old now and lives in a different country, but he always advised me to never go to bed on a row.’

      She keeps this in mind, even with the added difficulty of caring for her husband during his illness. The years ahead will be uncertain, so now feels the right time to break with the past, and move on. She’s hoping for the right buyer and will be slow to let the rings go to a dealer or speculator. ‘Even though my mother never wore these rings, there is a lot of happiness in them,’ she tells me. ‘They just need to find a home now.’

A Dress for the (Middle) Ages

      For sale: beautiful medieval-style wedding dress. Never worn. Evening Echo, 2014

      Jane lives in a small two-up, two-down in Cork city with her husband and two cats. She studied history at university but a series of illnesses meant that she had to give up her work as a part-time tutor. Two days a week she now works from home – a job, coincidentally, that she found through the classifieds. Jane always wanted a traditional church wedding, but her fiancé wanted something less conventional and more ‘out there’. They compromised and decided on a medieval-themed wedding in a church. Jane ordered her dress, a medieval satin designer gown, from a designer in the United States.

So far so good, but as the day of the wedding grew nearer, the pressure of getting married got to the couple. Ireland was still clawing its way out of recession and the lack of credit on offer from their bank meant they were worried about getting into more debt. Her fiancé had to travel long distances for work so they spent more and more time apart. After weeks of discussion the wedding was postponed.

      As you can imagine, the couple and both their families were devastated. ‘My dress was made of cream velvet with large bell sleeves and a criss-cross design in the front and back,’ Jane explains. ‘We had it all planned and everything and for one reason and another it didn’t take place and we put off the wedding for a while.’

Thankfully, this story does have a happy ending and the couple ended up having a medieval blessing on Cape Clear Island in summer 2013. Jane wore a more casual medieval dress for the occasion and her husband dressed as a knight. He wore four patches of colours and a long gown and both arrived at the ceremony carrying large swords. The blessing came from an old Viking text and two ‘druids’ performed the ceremony using ancient stones. ‘We even have an official medieval certificate,’ says Jane. And even though they are both medieval enthusiasts, and her original wedding dress is now up for sale, she says she hasn’t given up hope of a more traditional church wedding at some point in the future. Maybe without the swords.

A Chance Encounter of a Shocking Kind

      White gold band valued at €4,950. Will sell for €1,000. Also, 18-carat cluster diamond ring. Brand new, barely worn. Valued at €7,000. I will sell for €1,000. Evening Echo

      Was €12,000 worth of jewellery for sale for €2,000? It seemed almost too good to be true. ‘I need the money because my son needs orthodontic treatment,’ the somewhat hesitant voice at the other end of the phone tells me. ‘So I thought, time to sell the rings.’

Even though reductions in value are expected in the classifieds, this seemed an extraordinary bargain. I was curious about the price drop, but also the fact that the ad had been placed in the Evening Echo and not online. Putting an ad like this online means adding pictures, while a print ad allows greater anonymity and a discreet sale. The words ‘brand new’ and ‘barely worn’ coupled with the low price gave me a strong feeling that there was a story to be told. Initially the seller wasn’t sure if she’d feel comfortable meeting me, but a few days after I made contact we did agree to meet.

      The interview took place in the car park of a shopping centre and had taken half a dozen phone calls to arrange, including one from a friend of hers checking me out, before it was agreed. I’d given her my car description. When I got there, I scanned the faces exiting the shopping centre to see if I could pick her out from the crowd. Although I’m hopeless at this sort of thing, I find it a useful exercise to try to acknowledge any stereotypes or prejudices I may have before an encounter – even those I’m not conscious of holding.

      The seller is a very private person, and it turns out that she has been through a lot in a short space of time. Her experiences have meant that her trust in people she doesn’t know, and even in people she does know, has been eroded and is pretty much shattered.

I’m guessing that she’s in her early forties and she’s of slim build and attractive, with a natural curiosity and an obvious intellect. She sits in the passenger seat of my car, remarking that this is all very strange and she doesn’t know quite what she’s doing here. On one level it is strange to sit in a car with someone you don’t know and tell them some of the more intimate details of your life. If I can’t meet people in their homes I tend to interview them in my car – sound-wise, it works well and there’s a nice informality to it. I sometimes ask interviewees to imagine that we’ve done the school run and met at the school gate and then they’ve sat in the car to shelter from the rain for a chat. Then off we go ....

      The rings had been given to this woman by her former partner. The relationship ended a long time ago and in her own words, ‘Any emotional attachment is long gone.’ She says this in a way that’s definite, not as if she’s trying to convince herself of something, but stating it with certainty and with, to use that awful American phrase, a certain amount of ‘closure’.

      She tells me that she was in a five-year relationship which produced two children, and as she begins to go into what happened, her hands clench tightly, perhaps mirroring the twist in her stomach, as she revisits what was an incredibly painful time.

      She points to the entrance to the large shopping centre. One day, when her daughter was just one, this woman was walking through a clothing store. Another woman passed her and as she did so, she stared at her child. She could see that this passer-by was visibly taken aback. This woman said the child reminded her of her own toddler, who had died a few years previously. In fact, she said, ‘She is the spitting image of her.’ It was an odd encounter, but both parents chatted away and when the stranger asked her the child’s father’s name, things took an incredible turn.

‘I told her my partner’s name,’ she says. ‘And to my utter shock, she said that was the name of her partner and the father of her child also.’ I repeat this slowly so I can process it. ‘So out of the blue a woman walked up to you in the shopping centre opposite and said that your child reminded her of her own who had died?’ She nods, sharing my incredulity. ‘And then it turned out that the children shared a father and you knew nothing about this second family?’

      She again nods her head in agreement at the unlikely coincidence. ‘I was dumbstruck,’ she tells me. ‘In that moment, I would possibly have overlooked the fact that he had had a previous relationship that he hadn’t told me about. But the fact that he had a child that died, and he didn’t tell me about it – that’s hugely traumatic.’