{"id":311,"date":"2026-06-01T13:07:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T13:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=311"},"modified":"2026-06-01T13:07:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T13:07:23","slug":"the-tally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=311","title":{"rendered":"The Tally"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One year in the early nineteen-seventies, when I was a child of eight or nine, my mother came back from the annual Christmas food shopping looking thoughtful. This trip to the supermarket was the most carefully planned of the year: savings were expended, there were lists within lists and much fretfulness. Parking was a worry, stock often ran low, and something was always forgotten or mysteriously consumed by the trolley, because it was not in the shopping bags when they were unpacked at home.<\/p>\n

Read more Jonathan Franzen on Talent, Theatre, and His Next Novel<\/a><\/p>\n

This year, my mother was, at first, pleased with the final bill, and then more and more confused. She checked the tally several times. She took a pen and went through the items she had bought, ticking each one off on the receipt, which was many feet long. Then she drove back to the supermarket to say that she had been undercharged for the turkey by, she estimated, ten Irish pounds. The manager was summoned. He checked her figures and rang up the balance for the turkey. He asked if he could keep her annotated receipt \u201cfor training purposes,\u201d and gave her a box of chocolates for it, really nice ones.<\/p>\n

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It was all a bit mad, we thought, but my mother was adamant. \u201cI couldn\u2019t have eaten it,\u201d she said. \u201cI just couldn\u2019t sit down on Christmas Day, of all days, and eat a turkey I had not paid for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though I liked the excitement of the free chocolates, I felt the loss of my mother\u2019s amazingly long till receipt. It seemed to me that the manager had taken something from her\u2014her story, or her goodness\u2014for the purpose of \u201ctraining\u201d people who were surely not good, because their first interest was in profit. Why was she so obedient to the system? I worried that she would be patronized by those people as well as admired.<\/p>\n

Perhaps as a result, I grew to dislike supermarket managers as a breed. These were invariably young men in suits with nametags that said \u201cMr. This\u201d and \u201cMr. That,\u201d while the women who worked the checkouts, often old enough to be their mothers, had nametags that said \u201cSheila\u201d or \u201cMary.\u201d I also realized that this anecdote about my mother\u2019s return to the chaos of a supermarket right before Christmas was not one that most people enjoyed or wanted to hear. What was I trying to say? That my mother was a fool?<\/p>\n

Ireland being what it is, when, in my twenties, I got a job as a television producer, one of my first assignments was on a travel show featuring the owner of the supermarket chain, a man called Feargal Quinn. He was an affable, smooth business type. A Catholic who would later be knighted by the Pope, he had old-school values, but seemed to enjoy new company and fresh opinions, of which I had, at that age, a ready supply. In between staged lunches and helicopter shoots over the ch\u00e2teaux of the Loire, we had arguments about employee nametags and sanctions on oranges from apartheid-era South Africa. One evening, I told him the story of my mother\u2019s Christmas till receipt and he asked me where in Dublin she did her shopping.<\/p>\n

Read more Aidan Turner Can\u2019t Stop Smoldering<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d he said when I told him, as though I\u2019d got it all wrong. \u201cThat happened on the Northside. It was a woman in\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d and he named a different shop in the chain.<\/p>\n

I wanted to say (I probably did say) that I had not invented my own mother or stolen someone else\u2019s, and that, if this story said anything, it was that the Enrights were not reared to be liars. I wanted to add that he could have the receipt and the tenner for the damn turkey but not the truth\u2014that was still, somehow, mine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Now that I think about it, he may have said that the receipt had been on the wall in the manager\u2019s office on the Northside for years. So there was either a superfluity of honest Dublin women back in the day or a manager who moved around.<\/p>\n

I am not thrilled that my mother\u2019s shopping list was an object of corporate interest. I am not delighted by my family\u2019s continuing probity, in an age of predatory capitalism. Still, integrity is also a way to hold the self together. Some days, you just can\u2019t eat the turkey. Honesty may be a one-sided contract with the world, but it is the only side that we can control.<\/p>\n

After the filming was done, Feargal Quinn sent me a hamper, by way of thanks. It was delivered, by his personal driver, to my mother\u2019s house, in a nice display of suburban glamour. She found the chauffeur\u2019s cap particularly fetching. I have no idea why Quinn sent it to her address, when I did not live there anymore.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more This Is What Trumpian Self-Dealing Looks Like<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Enright, the author of \u201cThe Wren, the Wren\u201d and \u201cThe Gathering,\u201d writes about her mother\u2019s radical honesty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-family-values"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Tally - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=311\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Tally - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Anne Enright, the author of \u201cThe Wren, the Wren\u201d and \u201cThe Gathering,\u201d writes about her mother\u2019s radical honesty.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=311\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-01T13:07:23+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=311#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=311\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"The Tally\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-01T13:07:23+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=311\"},\"wordCount\":848,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=311#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/418f14572f34bf7ad5454d2784ef6fb7.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Family Values\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=311#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=311\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=311\",\"name\":\"The Tally - 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