The Stairlift Ascends: Tweets from a Covid Cocoon

By Helen O'Rahilly and Jennie O'Connell

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Release date: Dec 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781788492560

Helen O'Rahilly

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.