St Patrick's Day in the rare ould times

When I was a young fella growing up in the dreary smoked smothered streets of Ireland, St Patrick’s Day was an island in the stormy shark filled seas of Lent. Whatever penance you had imposed on yourself, giving up sweets or sugar in your tea or back chat to your parents, could be relaxed for that single day. This was an allowance given by my Mother so that she could also indulge in a few glasses of wine, having set herself an abstinence target until Easter.

Apart from the chocolate and sugary tea, my only other memories of March 17^th in my youth were dreary parades in the rain, dressed only in a polyester scout uniform. There was nothing particularly Irish about these processions. The army dominated events, so it had the air of a May day parade in a small and impoverished Communist state.

We wore fresh shamrock and school reinforced that it was a religious rather than a Nationalist holiday. Mind you, at that time, flag waving was dominated by Irish Republicans who were blowing people up and generally being a menace.

That seemed to change by the time I left Ireland in 1988. Ireland qualified for Euro 88 and it became normal to feel proud of your country. The World Cup in 1990 accelerated this and the very act of me leaving the country seemed to release it from years of backwardness.

I do remember my first St Patrick’s Day outside Ireland. I was in London and desperate to get into a pub in Covent Garden to celebrate the great man’s day. Luckily the bouncer was from Kerry and let us skip past the English people in the queue. He wasn’t just being patriotic. Experience had thought him that Irish people go out to have a good time and if they get drunk it’s a bonus. For English people, it’s the other way around.

Once I’d moved away, celebrating my Irishness became important to me. I remember festivals in Finsbury Park, all night sessions in the Black Stuff in Luxembourg and cramming into a field in Melbourne with hundreds of back packers.

But I’m older now and less able to keep up with the young ones. This year I went with a more sedate approach. Auckland prides itself in having the first St Patrick’s Day parade in the world, as the rest of the world is still in bed by the time festivities kick off here. They ask for 32 volunteers to carry their counties banner and for the second time, I had the honour of walking down the city’s main thoroughfare with Louth’s name and crest held proudly aloft.

The street was thronged by girls in GAA tops, boys in Irish Rugby tops and people from Asia, Africa and everywhere else, who came along for the colour and craic. It made me think of our little island of 7 million souls. No other country gets to shut down the main street of capital cities across the globe. No other country has a guaranteed annual audience with the American president and no other country is honoured by famous buildings and rivers being decked in their national colour.

Ireland certainly punches above its weight around the world and makes you wonder why it took the Irish government so long to harness this soft power. While many foreign companies set up in Ireland for tax reasons, there is a lot of old time sentimentality involved as well.

St Patrick’s Day fell on a Sunday this year and the bars in Auckland were full of people wearing green hats or jumpers who would happily admit that they have no Irish heritage but love to join in when a party is going on. We are known as a fun bunch of people and most of the best pubs here (and in most of the world) are Irish pubs.

It seems a long way from the 1970s when we saw the world through our narrow internal prism, with the only portal to the wider world being provided through British TV. This regularly portrayed Ireland as stupid or backward. Irish jokes were popular, and every Irish character on British TV was either an idiot or a terrorist. Once I moved to England, I found a warmer reception. I noticed that many English people have Irish relatives and while there was gentle ribbing about my inability to pronounce my ‘th’s’ I was generally treated well and the English envied our easy ability to have fun.

It would be hard to find a country that engenders as much good will as Ireland. I guess the fact that we have never invaded another country or gone to war with one, if you excuse our on-going struggle with perfidious Albion, helps in this regard. So, we’ve never really annoyed anyone and we’ve sent out 70 million ambassadors to the world to spread the good word.

I work for a company where 50% of the staff are kiwi born and the rest of us come from about thirty different companies. Lots of them passed my desk in March and wished me a Happy St Patrick’s Day. I don’t remember that happening for any other country. Not even New Zealand, which treats its national day with a large amount of embarrassment and shame. Celebrating a treaty that essentially stole the land from the people who were here first is not a smart move.

Most New Zealanders just take the day off and try not to think about it too much. Which is pretty much how I felt about St Patrick’s Day when I lived in Ireland. There is a paradox that you become more patriotic the further you live from your homeland. I live as far away as is geographically possible. So, I’ll raise a toast to old St Pat again this year and feel a flutter of pride when do we well at sport or culture. It’s a great wee country except when you have to live in it.

 

Do we actually exist?

I used to go drinking with a friend, who after consuming seven or eight pints, would bring up the same question. Do we actually exist? This was usually his get out of jail card when he was failing in other arguments. He had studied philosophy and could polish his opinions with quotes from Aristotle to Wittgenstein.

I floundered for years, instinctively believing in our existence, but unable to prove it. Then Google came along and I was able to do some interesting research. When we next met for a drink and the subject came up, I puffed out my chest and announced, “I think, therefore I am”. The very fact that we were even having the debate proved that we existed. At least, I think that’s what it meant. I tried to argue from a scientific perspective, which became more difficult with each pint I sank.

I’m not a scientist, it should be said. I’m an Accountant, due to an accident at birth. The accident being that I wasn’t born into a family that could afford to send me to university. I envy those people who dreamed of being a doctor, an actor or a scientist. There is a bullshit idea that can be found in many self help books and motivational videos. “If you follow your dream, one day you’ll find it’.

That might work for people with parents who can fund you during your dream chasing phase, but it doesn’t work for people who have to buy food and pay rent. I went down the path of getting any job and then using the money I earned from that to pursue the interests I have. Most of those interests turned out to be beer and curry related.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve wondered what career I would have ended up in, if my parents could have afforded it. If you look at my bookshelf you’ll see that it is dominated with History tomes. Most of these relate to Ireland. It’s troubled relationship with England and the origins of the Irish race in particular. I’m now in my late fifties, so Second World War books are becoming more prevalent. I’m not sure why men of my age become interested in that topic. Perhaps it’s a throw-back to the comics we read as Children and the games we played in back gardens with imitation machine guns fashioned from tree branches and where everybody inexplicably wanted to be a German.

I’ve gotten to the age now where I want to visit a WW2 re-enactment festival, drink real ale and count the rivets on a replica Sherman tank to assess its authenticity.

But I notice that another subject is slowly worming its way onto my shelves. I chose biology over physics at school on the advice of my older brother. Like most of his advice (how to chat up girls, source underage alcohol etc.), I now wish I’d ignored it. The world, the universe and all that is in it is something I’d like to understand.

If I look at the science books that I have, they lean towards physics rather than biology. One in particular has fascinated me recently and I’d like to explore it further.

Scientists would have you believe that the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is on a par with the  unearthing of penicillin or the first moon landing, although the God Particle, as it is known, is unlikely to ease the pain of venereal disease or create conspiracy theories about its dark side.

In fact, it’s not a discovery at all, more a confirmation of what scientists already theorised, or perhaps it is just a simple justification for all the money they spent on the large hadron collider at a time when they should have been investing this money in the more honourable adventure of bailing out banks.

Science is the art of studying the behaviour of 15,000 people to discover what you already know or suspected. For example, you will never see a report on research by the University of Arkansas into childhood obesity, which says that to their great surprise, sugar and a lack of exercise is actually good for kids.

The major achievement of Higgs Boson appears to be the proof that mass can be created out of nothing.  Energy shares space in Einstein’s famous little formula with mass, dangling out there on the left, like a hallucinating drug trying to get into a rave party. Energy can also be created out of nothing. Imagine you are tired after a hard week at work. You want to hit the sofa with a takeaway and a brain numbing night in front of Love Island. You feel like you don’t have the energy to make it to the toilet and contemplate fashioning a colostomy bag from the various crisp packets that litter your sitting room.

Then a text message arrives from a friend inviting you the pub. For the formula to work it has to be a particular friend who makes you laugh and encourages you to have one for the road at 3am. You will find that an instant infusion of energy results and before you know where you are, you are skipping down the road like a Duracell battery on acid.

So if mass and energy can be created out of nothing, then the speed of light must also be nothing. This means that the sun doesn’t exist and this is all a dream. If somebody will give me 10 billion Euros and a large round hole in Switzerland, I’m confident I can prove this.

And perhaps it also proves that my old drinking buddie was right. That science can also prove that we don’t exist. But that would also mean that history doesn’t exist and I’ve been wasting my time reading all those books. But if we don’t exist, then this is all a simulation and I’ve been programmed to be a history reading, blog writing Accountant. I pity the guy who wrote that code.

 

My Podcast Life

On the morning of my 40th birthday, I stopped outside an Apple store in London and looked scornfully at the products within.

I've never been fond of their products, and I made this clear to my friends who were with me at the time. One of them held a senior position within Apple and he chuckled conspiratorially. Later that evening I found out why. I opened the tightly wrapped present they had purchased me and inside was a gleaming new iPod, adorned with an inscribed message from my friends.

That device was the one I listened to my first podcast on. After I had copied all my CDs onto iTunes and transitioned from music to the spoken word. When I left Australia all those CDs went to an op shop and I presume somebody in Melbourne is now enjoying that collection of mournful American female country singers and soft rock. The iPod has also gone to God, so all I'm left with is an electronic copy of 25 years of obsessive music purchases. It's on an old laptop and I'm not even sure I can access it.

I can't remember the first podcast I listened to. But one thing I'm pretty sure of is that I'm not listening to that series now. Over the years my tastes have changed and every time I get a new device, I use it as a chance to cull my library and start again.

My current list is an eclectic mix of politics, sport, comedy and history as well as the occasional one-off series such as Serial. I enjoyed these as interlopers in the normal dreary routine of my weekly episodes. “13 minutes to the Moon” remains my favourite.

One thing that troubles me though, is the business model of podcasts. Increasingly they are becoming the main income source for artists. Many of the ones I listen to are free, subsidised by licence payers in Ireland and the UK.

The others are commercial to one extent or another. Some depend on advertising alone. This suits me as a resident of New Zealand who tends to listen to northern hemisphere podcasts. Advertising is local and few Kiwi companies bother advertising on the obscure Irish podcasts I listen to.

As a result, I'm not tempted by these offers of an ad free experience in return for a small monthly stipend.

Neither am I tempted by the offer of additional episodes in return for cash. I already struggled to get through the list I have, not helped by an OCS compulsion to listen to everything I've downloaded.

So, I'm left with the ones who make a shameless plea each week for nothing more than a guilt free listen. Podcasting must be the only product that is initially offered for free before they try to guilt you into paying for it.

I have a problem with paying for something I don't have to. If offered a view over the fence rather than paying at the turnstile, I'll choose the fence every time. I don't think it's because I'm tight, I just don't like the idea that I'm paying for something that others are getting for free. I also wonder about equity. I have about five podcasts that depend on voluntary contribution and if I paid for all of them, it would be more than I used to pay for Sky Sports at the height of my hedonistic TV watching.

Most of the ones who plea for money are comedians. Historians and economists are usually more circumspect. They know that the product they produce would previously have been on radio. They might have been paid for this but it's unlikely it was more than the advertising they manage to attract for their products now.

Comedians never admit it, but they are the ones who benefit most from the development of podcasting. Most of the stuff I listen to is too sweary to have ever made it onto mainstream media. They can find an audience now that was never previously available. In the old days, they earned an income by touring the country and playing in as many venues as possible. This would involve travel costs, hotel costs, venue rental, promotion and all the non-financial hassle of being away from your family for a month.

Now you can sit in your bedroom with a cheap microphone and reach a bigger audience than you could with six months of touring. A couple of thousand subscribers would earn the comedian the same income as they had in the past for a lot less hassle and for a lower cost. And when they do want to tour, they end up with bigger venues as they now have a larger dedicated audience to promote too.

Given my experience with podcasts and particularly the fact that I tend to get bored with them after about six months, I'm reluctant to sign up for a payment schedule. Like gym memberships, I’ll forget to cancel and find myself paying for something in years to come that I no longer listen to.

I think that there needs to be a new economic model. Perhaps, a pay per listen process set at a small notional fee. I would be happy to pay for this. And surely technology is sufficient these days to support this.

Of course, on the music side, I now listen exclusively on Spotify. I'm happy to pay a monthly subscription for this that is roughly equal to the amount that I used to spend on CDs. I do think however, that if CDs still existed, there would reach a point where I would stop buying them and be content with the haul I already had.

As things stand, I'll be paying for Spotify until I stop listening to music, which hopefully will be the day I finally stop listening to anything.

Perhaps 2024 is the time to change and finally pay for something. And I might see if I can access those old CD’s too.

My Parenting Life

 “Will we go and see the horses?” my Dad asked. My uncle threw him a conspiratorial smile and said “Aye, we should, indeed”. They grabbed their coats and headed for the door, giggling like school children as they got into my uncle’s car.

I raced behind them “Can I go too?” I asked. “I love horses”. My Dad and uncle looked at each other and I could tell their enthusiasm to get going overruled their desire to argue. I was told to jump into the back seat and we set off.

I was twelve and we were on a family holiday to the part of Ireland that my Dad grew up in. I spent that afternoon in the company of these two men and let’s just say we didn’t see any horses. We transversed the windy roads of South Wexford, stopping off at thatched roofed country pubs that could have fallen out of a 1950’s Hollywood movie that presented a romanticised version of what Ireland should look like.

I consumed more Coca Cola than is good for a growing boy and ate about ten packets of Tayto crisps. It wasn’t great for my stomach but years later I still remember that afternoon because of the easy blanket of love that embraced me. My Dad was having one of those afternoons that I now treasure. The chance to share a few beers with somebody who makes you laugh. But he was comfortable enough to let me sit in and listen to their grown-up conversations.

They talked about Hurling and Wexford’s chances in that year’s Championship. My Dad grew up in the countryside and moved to town when he met my Mother. He loved nothing better than to return to his earlier life of fertiliser and turnips and the affect of rain on that year’s harvest. For two weeks every year he could slip back into his earlier life and leave behind the pressures of work and helping to raise five unruly children.

I only have one child and she’s now the age I was when I went on that odyssey in South Wexford. Like all Dads, I look back on my own childhood and the experience I had with my own father. I sometimes get frustrated with my daughter and ache for some free time. A chance to get away from the demands of parenting. I wonder if my Dad felt like that too. He worked long hours when I was growing up. He said this was to earn as much overtime as possible as providing for seven people wasn’t an easy task. My Mother claimed it was to get away from parenting and leave it all to her. With the benefit of hindsight and my own experience, I think it was probably a combination of both.

But when my Dad was at home, he was fully invested in his kids. Memory is of course selective. We can choose to only remember the good times if it suits our narrative and it’s also not linear and continuous. I remember events from my childhood but don’t know when they happened or how often.

I can remember my Dad covering our school books with wall paper at the start of the new school year, putting up Christmas decorations on the 8^th December in the exact same way every year, attaching an old piece of carpet to my bicycle seat when the original wore out, taking me around the sports shops of our hometown looking for an Arsenal sticker after my Mother had mistakenly brought back a bag with Liverpool FC on the front.  

I often fret about whether I’m being as good a Dad as my father was. There are certainly things I do that he never had to. I take my daughter to cricket every Saturday. I had to make my own way to football when I was twelve and we would have been mortified to have a parent watching. I spend a lot of time each week driving around town to sewing classes or girl guides. Much of this is due to living in a big city as opposed to the medium sized town I grew up. When I was young, I could reach everywhere on foot or on bike. My daughter would struggle with this as her activities are spread across a wide area. But it’s also due to this generation being much more cautious than the one I grew up in. Despite the modern world being statistically safer, nobody would dream of letting a 12 year walk home alone.

But I can’t help feeling that we’re softer too. My parents would regularly make the point that we had it easy as kids compared to their generation. My Dad was old enough to remember World War Two and the rationing that it imposed. He talked about going to school barefoot and being sent out to work full time at fourteen.

I find myself feeling the same about my daughter. That things are so much easier for her. We didn’t have the internet, Nexflix or mobile phones. We weren’t wealthy enough to go on exotic holidays. My daughter had travelled across the world four times before she was six.

But the truth is that life is just as hard for her as it was for me, because we can only deal with what is in front of us. She has a far better material life than I had but I didn’t have to deal with climate change, internet weirdos and the pressures that young girls face in the modern world.

I hope that in a few years time, when she stumbles across this blog that she’ll know that I did my best. I’ll try but never quite manage to do as good a job as my Dad. But I hope one day my daughter will look back to when she was twelve and think of a day when she was smothered in love. Although I doubt if that day will involve horses either.

 

 

I'll keep the red flag flying here

 “He has no heart who is not a socialist at twenty. He has no head who is still one at thirty”. That’s a phrase that may have been coined by Churchill, Shaw, Disraeli, or Bismarck. I heard it first from my English teacher in secondary school. Mr. White insisted that we attribute any quotes in our essays to their original source. As he made no mention of a source, I assumed he was the originator of these profound words, and he shot up in my estimation.

It was back in the sunlit uplands of 1982. The Human League were number one in the charts, the hunger strikes had just fizzled out, kicking off thirteen more years of misery just up the road from where I was living.

Down south, we were in the middle of three general elections in eighteen months. I was developing an interest in politics and was seduced by the rhetoric of the emerging left-wing parties whose growth suggested that Ireland might finally be growing up. For years before that I had looked at British and European elections and marveled at the balance between left and right in their politics. Back in Ireland, we were haunted by the ghosts of the 1923 Civil War. Two center right parties came out of this conflict and have ruled Ireland ever since, conning the people that they are fundamentally different to each other.

I was hopeful that this cycle would be broken in 1982 and took the opportunity to pen an article in the school magazine to this affect. Mr. White, who was a card-carrying member of one of those right-wing parties, was editor of the magazine. He graciously let my article through without amendment, apart from the above quote scribbled in the margin. I’m now fifty eight, well past the age of thirty when I was supposed to swivel into a right wing zealot. And I think of that scribbled quote every time I search for the most left-wing candidate on a ballot paper.

When I could first vote in 1983, my choice was the Worker’s Party. They were an unapologetic Marxist group with completely sensible policies, but who would have shit themselves if they had ever been put in a position to implement them. Luckily, this was never a possibility and I could bask in the smugness of voting for the correct party and then complaining about the parties that actually had to govern.

I moved to London when I twenty two and immersed myself in the fight against Thatcher. In 1992, I became part of an incongruously named group called “Accountants for a Labour victory”. I worked in the head office of an Insurance Company. Our premises were in a small town to the South of London. As a result, we didn’t attract the posh end of the Accountancy profession, who all seemed to work in City institutions run by their uncles. The twenty or so Accountants in our office had all come up through the public education system and the English ones at least had all gone to “brown brick” universities that had sprung up in the sixties. Over chats in the canteen and pub we learned that most of them planned to vote Labour and a couple of us even went so far as to hand out leaflets.

We met up on the evening of the election for a victory party, but by 11pm it was clear that our efforts where in vain. Britain was condemned to another five years of Tory rule, by which stage I was back in Ireland looking at Tony Blairs ascendancy with admiration.

By this stage, I had become more pragmatic, as had most of my old comrades in the Worker’s Party. They had shut up shop and joined the middle of the road Labour party. I followed them, as it seemed the most logical root to election success.  Unfortunately, when I did, Labour joined the government as a junior coalition partner and surrendered all their principles for a few tawdry bobbles of office.

I spent seven years in Australia and couldn’t vote as I wasn’t a citizen. Ironically, I got this title just as I was a leaving and under the mandatory voting rules in that country, I’ve had to vote in every Australian election since. I was in Australia in 2007 when Kevin Rudd won and at the ripe old age of forty two, I found myself living under a Labour government for the first time, although sadly not a left wing one.

New Zealand allows me to vote, although in fairness they have never bothered to check if I’m entitled to. Most of my time here has been spent under the benign leadership of Jacinda Ardern. She’s not exactly a radical left winger either but was a decent skin at least.

But I have to admit, I never voted for her. The Green party in New Zealand are much more left wing than Labour. They want wealth redistribution, a policy that used to be a given in Labour parties around the world, but is somehow never spoken about today. The Greens are also concerned about that other small matter. Saving the planet from its imminent climate catastrophe.

We had an election here recently and sadly my vote was in vain. The country is lurching to the right and we face at least three years of tax cuts for the rich and climate change denial.

But I’m proud to still carry the red flag. If anything, I would say I’m even more radical now that when I was in my twenties, despite being financially comfortable and knowing that the right would benefit me more financially. I’m not sure what happened to Mr. White. I guess he’s retired now and living off a pension funded by the tax paid by the working men he despised. I will keep dreaming of a Socialist paradise while doing nothing to achieve it apart from a tick on a ballot paper every three years.

 

My Life on the Stage

As with most important events in my life, my involvement in theatre started in a pub. The Black Stuff is a venerable hostelry tucked just inside the city limits of Luxembourg. The large car park at its rear hinting at the loose drink driving laws in place in the Grand Duchy in the early 1990s.

I was several pints in and Brenda was being very persistent. “You’ll be perfect for the part”, she explained, ignoring the fact that I had never been on stage before. She went on to tickle my ego to the point where I could see Oscar nominations and a Hollywood career in the future. She sold it to me as the leading role in a 19^th Century Irish classic, a dashing young hero who sweeps the wife of a farmer off her feet and disappears, Heathcliff like, into the fading Wicklow mists.

In fact, I ended up playing a village idiot, a role I have reprised many times since. The plot involved an old farmer who had apparently passed away and was tucked under a sheet in the back corner of the stage. I was busy seducing his recently widowed wife, when at a key moment in the dialogue he would sit up and explain that he had only been sleeping.

It all went well until the last night, when he turned up excited as a spring lamb in the changing room before the show. He explained that his family had flown in from London for the show. I later learned that his marriage had fallen apart due to his alcoholism and the strong smell of Whiskey on his breath should have let me know that a wagon had just lost one of its passengers.

We got to the part in the play just before the big reveal, when I heard loud snoring coming from beneath the sheets. I was the only other person on stage at the time and realised that I would have to rescue the situation. I made my way over to the bed and kicked it gently. The snoring increased. I kicked harder but with no success. In the end I shook him violently, making up dialogue that would have shamed the original author.

He eventually woke up, spotted dialogue from a completely different play and fell back on pillow in a deep slumber. I blurted out the last line of the play and signaled to the stage manager to draw the curtains. We cut twenty minutes off the play length and probably left the audience short changed and confused. But in fairness, audiences in Luxembourg had pretty low expectations from the drama world in those days.

In the changing room afterwards, the director was keen to change the play’s ending to one where the old man actually ended up dead, but we held him back and ensured that no violence took place. I was left with the assumption that this happened in every amateur production. That you flew by the skin of your pants and it would be alright on the night. And that’s largely turned out to be true.

I went on to do two further plays in Luxembourg and then about fifteen in Dublin. The social scene in both countries was fantastic. In fairness the Luxembourg group was made up of Irish ex pats, who party harder than their companions back in Dublin.

I left Europe for the Southern Hemisphere in 2007 and hoped that the fun and laughter I’d found in theatre would continue. I performed in four plays in Australia, until parenthood stepped in and caused me to swap grease paint for nappy cream. I don’t remember those plays with any great fondness. Australians strive for perfection in everything. Sport is the obvious example, but no country will join a song competition named after another continent and expect to win it every year.

Don’t get me wrong. I want to do the best when I’m on stage. But I took up acting for the fun of being part of a group and not to become the next Brando. There always was talk of a ‘party’ at the end of each production, but this generally involved a warm bottle of beer while you took the set down.

New Zealand has been a better experience. They call it “Community Theatre” here and you do get a sense of a more collegial experience. But I’m also getting older and feel theatre requires a big commitment. I’ve just finished a show that had a large cast ranging in age from fourteen to eighty. In the week of the show, I was getting up at 7am, going to work, getting home and grabbing a quick tea before heading to the venue. Then getting home at 11pm and doing it all again. The fourteen year olds and the eighty year olds seemed to cope best. They weren’t working and looking after an eleven year old.

So, my conclusion is that community theatre is a young or old man’s game. Those of us in the middle, and particularly those of us who left becoming a Dad until our mid-forties, struggle to summon up the required energy.

I might take a break now from the stage, or ‘rest’ as we luvvies say. I need to fall in love with it again.   But of course, ego plays a strong role. If somebody contacts me and says that they are putting on a show and need me for a crucial role, I will probably say yes. There is nothing like being told that you are brilliant.

“Life is a gift, it would be a shame to send it back opened”, is a line from the recent show I did. That’s why I cling to all the activities I did in my younger life. I want to act, to play sport, to drink beer like I did in my twenties. But I’d also like to sleep. And life, love and age are dragging me inextricably in that direction.

You'll need an App for that

I’m not sure if Joe is a real person or a bot. I hope he’s a real person, because if he is a bot, I fear for the future of humanity and the hope that technology will save us.

I started my conversation with Joe when he popped up on the bottom right-hand side of my screen and asked if he could help. I was trying to book a flight. In the old days, you’d walk into a travel agent, deport yourself in a comfortable seat and speak to a lady in a crisp white shirt and colourful neck scarf. After giving her a rough idea about where you wanted to go to, you’d engage in polite conversation about your holiday plans while waiting for a ticket to come out of their dot matrix printer.

But apparently technology has made this better. You can now book from the comfort of your sofa. This started out well. You found the airline’s website, filled out your name and credit card details and it was done.

I don’t want to appear like a grumpy old man, but the truth is that I am. Everything has gone downhill since. It started when they websites wanted personal information they don’t need. If I want to book a flight, why does it matter where I live or what my date of birth is. I guess it stops three-year-olds stealing their Dad’s credit card and plotting a trip to Disneyland. But if they were clever enough to do that, I doubt if they would have entered their actual date of birth.

Then they started upselling. Offering Insurance, car rental and hotel suggestions and making it as difficult to navigate these pages as it is to find your way around IKEA. Then someone came up with the great wheeze of splitting the fare. It used to be taken for granted that you needed a seat on a plane, would quite like to sit next to your partner and to bring a suitcase along on your travels. Somebody, probably Ryanair, realised that if you sell these separately, you could spin the myth that air travel is cheaper than ever, when actually it ends up at the same cost it always was, after you have added on all the items you used to take for granted.

Apart from everything else, this makes booking a flight more complicated than brain surgery, with a similar pain impact. After you have unclicked all the items you never wanted to purchase in the first place, entered more personal information than even your wife knows and committed your credit card details to a website that otherwise filled you with suspicion, you might finally get the “Flight Confirmed” message. Or more often than not a message that would send you back to the first page like a naughty child.

That’s how I ended up talking to Joe. The Auckland to Sydney route is dominated by the national carriers of New Zealand and Australia, who clearly call each other every morning to agree their eye-watering fares.

There is an alternative to this. An Asian interloper that is trying to sneak into this market. We travelled with them at Christmas and they were half the cost of the national airlines. However, my daughter was disgusted that there was no TV screen on the back of the seat in front of her, I was annoyed that my seat that was stuck in the reclined position and left me staring at the ceiling for the whole trip and we were all upset on the return trip when they seated the three of us in random seats throughout the plane.

Nevertheless, I turned to them again last week when I wanted to book another flight to Sydney and saw the eye watering fares that Air New Zealand were quoting. Since Christmas, their website has changed in one key aspect. You now have to set up an Account. You can no longer be a casual traveller, you have to a fully signed up member, willing to accept daily emails and share all of your personal details. They have also enforced two factor authentication. This is normally enforced by banks and government agencies or other parties that need to protect you from fraud. It’s rarely used by websites that simply want to sell you a product.

I went along with the charade. Entered my phone number and pressed the button that promised to send me a text that would finalise my account set up.

The text never arrived and that’s when I started talking to Joe.

“Please uninstall the App and re-install it”

“I’m not using your App, I’m looking at your website”.

“Thank you for your response. Please uninstall the App and re-install it”.

“I’M NOT USING YOUR BLOODY APP”.

At this stage, the conversation changed. Joe passed me onto an anonymous manager who gave me an official case number, as though I’d stumbled into a murder case. His suggestion was that I install their app and try to do a booking through this. I was indignant that technology had got us to the point where an App was needed for a simple transaction but did it anyhow.

The App didn’t work. I still didn’t get a text to finish my account set up.

I gave up and booked a flight with Qantas. It was expensive, but it came with a meal, movies and a bag included in the price, without having to navigate 12 screens.

The cheap airline wasn’t giving up though. They sent another email from a “Do-Not Reply” email address, saying that if I wanted to keep the case open, I should reply to the email.

Two weeks later, I got my final message. It said that they were closing the case and if I wanted it reopened, I should log on to my account, ignoring the fact that my problem was that I couldn’t open an account.

I hanker for the old days and ladies with crisp white shirts.