The O’Brien Press

Aunt: *calling loudly from sitting room* Helen, can you help me?

Me: *drops everything, rushes to front room, expecting her to have fallen*

Aunt: The cat’s on my lap, could you pour me a small Jameson?

Cocooning with my ninety-year-old Aunt is not the life I’d imagined when I came back to live in Dublin after 30 years of being a high-flying media executive in London.

From the Groucho Club to our North Dublin coastal cocoon, it was back to earth with a bump. Funny and frustrating, living with the Aunt in our Covid bubble has been quite the eye-opener. Bickering, bitching, masking-up for rare outings, The Stairlift Ascends is a Twitter diary of our time trying to live together, of surviving the pandemic ... and each other.

Love, lashings of apple tart, laughter and a longing for trips to Arnotts have seen us through, so far ...

A hugely popular, funny and compassionate view on 2020 from @HelenORahilly

Helen O’Rahilly is a television executive, producer and journalist. A Dubliner, she worked at RTÉ before heading for the BBC in London where she’d spend the next 30 years, with a year’s trip home to be the first woman Director of RTÉ Television. As the executive of BBC One, she helped bring back Doctor Who to TV screens while as an investigative journalist she faced an armed Mafia member in Las Vegas, had a Rottweiler set on her and faced down a chain-wielding gangster. “None of this” she says, “prepared me for being locked up with a feisty 90 year old”.

Helen left London in 2019 and now lives in Dublin with her cats and a mobile phone that never stops ringing.

Jennie O’Connell was born in Galway, and has lived in Wexford, London and New York, before coming back to Galway again and enjoying its particular brand of driving rain, brilliant people, and excellent pubs.

She works as an English teacher, and is a freelance illustrator. She particularly enjoys drawing nostalgic, evocative scenes, and a lot of her work has humour and is recognisably Irish.

Jennie lives in Galway with her two daughters, two cats, and three guinea pigs, who rule the house with a rod of iron.

Fabulously funny, humane and heartwarming. I LOVED it.

Marian Keyes

Perfect Christmas stocking present

BBC Radio Ulster’s Steven Rainey Show

Very funny … a lovely book

Cork 96FM’s The Opinion Line with PJ Coogan

Thank you for our wonderful chat today @HelenORahilly @C103Cork

#Corktoday really enjoyed it and love, love, love your book! #stairliftascends

Cork’s C103’s Cork Today with Patricia Messenger

A great stocking filler

RTE Radio 1’s ‘Sunday with Miriam’

A hoot

Irish Daily Mail

Funny, insightful … really important

Irish Examiner

It’s a delight...a gorgeous, gorgeous little book

Patricia Messenger, C103’s Cork Today