In Memory

The sun was already sinking into damp western fields when the red and cream CIE bus pulled out of the Long Walk car park. It was the 4.20pm service from Dundalk to Galway, via every village in between. This was the mid-eighties, long before the motorways that came to represent the Celtic Tiger had been built. The trip was scheduled to take four hours but that was merely a fantasy in a statisticians head. A double-parked car in Moate could add twenty minutes to the trip and there were at least thirty similar villages to pass through.

I was with my mate Dave. We’d hatched the travel plan in the pub on Thursday night. We had a friend at college in Galway who had regaled us with tales of wild drinking sessions and sing songs by open fires with the Atlantic roaring outside. Galway had a reputation as the coolest place in Ireland. We were huddled on the opposite coast in a town that had many reputations, none of which could be described as tepid, never mind cool.

After a few pints of Harp, we resolved to head West the following afternoon and stay with our mate for the weekend. There was one small problem. We didn’t know his address and it being the mid-eighties, we had no phones either. We communicated back then by letter. A charmingly Dickensian process that didn’t really work in last-minute spontaneous decisions.

But Dave was an adventurous sort. He had history in the Scouting movement and I trusted him to deal with the practical side of things. I imagined he could furnish up a sleeping arrangement out of moss and twigs if we got really stuck. I was in a low paid job at the time, while he was surviving on a small college grant. We did a quick budget in the pub on Thursday and figured out how much we’d need for two days of drinking, four takeaway meals and the possible price of entry to a disco. We never even thought about allowing for accommodation costs. A B&B back then would have cost as much as ten pints of beer and that wasn’t a trade-off we were willing to entertain.

Plan A was that our mate would be in a particular pub in Salthill. That was the whole point of our trip. On a previous visit to Dundalk, he had regaled us with tales of this mythical drinking establishment. By all accounts, it had the best Guinness on the Western seaboard. The best traditional musicians. The best view out into the Atlantic. And the best looking girls from the Arts Faculty at UCG. We were convinced that we would find him there.

We travelled light, as we always did back then. A couple of pairs of socks and jocks and a spare shirt wrapped up in a paper tin sleeping bag. Anything else could be carried in the numerous pockets of our Parka Jackets. But that hardly stretched beyond a toothbrush and a dog eared paperback novel.

We stored our sleeping bags on the overhead racks and settled in for the long ride. We were just outside Mullingar when Dave brought up the possibility that Plan A may not work. What if our friend wasn’t there? We quickly put our minds to thinking of other possibilities. There were a couple of other pubs that he had mentioned. Plan B and C covered this. We did think about just getting back on the bus and spending four hours driving east. That was plan D.

Throwing ourselves at the mercy of Church-run homeless services was considered as was breaking into a church itself and kipping on a pew. As we passed through the brooding town of Ballinasloe the bronzed dome of St Bridget’s Mental Hospital peaked its pernicious nose through the evening fog. Plan X was to affect a twitch and to talk in tongues in an attempt to get a night’s stay in that scary institution.

We had made it to Galway by the time we had dreamt up plan Z. I’m guessing we walked from the city centre to Salthill. Our budget certainly didn’t stretch to Taxis. We found the pub and to our immense relief, our mate was parked at the bar, Guinness in hand and holding forth to an attentive audience. We went on to have a wild weekend and budgeted perfectly so that we had just enough for the bus ticket back to Dundalk on the Sunday afternoon.

On the 1^st November last, Dave packed his bags for the last time and headed off on a celestial journey. The cancer he had battled for six years finally got the better of him. He had faced that challenge with the same resilience and dark humour that accompanied all our teenage adventures.

When I was 17 I spent every Tuesday night at his house listening to Simon & Garfunkel records. He brought a letter from my first girlfriend telling me that she was taking our relationship on a journey and I wasn’t invited. We stared out of the school window and he gently put his arm around my shoulder.

I spent my first holidays away from my family with him when we camped all over Ireland and then Europe. He was my first flatmate when we moved to England. I stayed at his house in London when I needed a stopover when my life took a left turn and I required an escape.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks thinking about those teenage years. All the great events of my life between 15 and 25 had Dave at its core. He was the best of friends and the best of people and it breaks my heart that I wasn’t there to say goodbye.

It was the garden of the golden apples,
The half-way house where we had stopped a day
Before we took the west road to Drumcatton
Where the sun was always setting on the play.

  

Get a Jab!

5,000 people protested outside New Zealand’s parliament last week. If you took a photo of them and blurred the image of Wellington’s iconic Beehive building in the background, you could imagine you were in Washington DC on January 6^th, or Paris when the maillot jaunes were in town. Or pretty much any place in the Western World where Covid restrictions are in place.

There are nutcases all over the planet. Protesting about lockdowns, vaccination mandates and simultaneously arguing that Covid is a hoax but also a conspiracy to wipe out white people as part of the great replacement project.

I’d usually find this stuff amusing. I laughed at the antics of Trump supporters and the brexiteers getting themselves in knots when trying to find a positive argument for the destruction they brought upon their country.

I even found it funny when I’d pass two guys draped in Union Jacks on my way to work on Monday mornings. They were protesting Tommy Robinson’s continued imprisonment in the UK. Most Kiwis wouldn’t know Tommy Robinson from a bar of soap, but it didn’t deter these two brave souls from bringing a little bit of Barnsley to Auckland’s main street.  

I stopped one day and pointed out the irony of supporting an anti-immigration racist while being an immigrant themselves. Needless to say, I didn’t convince them. Although funnily enough, I haven’t seen them since the Christchurch shootings. So, maybe they finally examined their conscience and found to their great surprise that they had one.

I’m not laughing today. We’ve been in lockdown for 14 weeks and let’s just say, it’s starting to get a bit boring. We’ve been promised that things will change when the country hits 90% vaccination rates. The only problem is that it has to be 90% in every health board district. Auckland is a cosmopolitan city and we’ve already hit those heady highs. But let’s just say that there are parts of the country where the Guardian Online is rarely accessed but banjo playing is at a high standard.

There is a theory that the Europeans who came here and settled in the back of beyond, did it for a good reason and not just because the land had been stolen from the locals and could be sold cheaply to white immigrants. They did it because they had a strong sense of independence and a dislike of the controlling government they were escaping. The South Island of New Zealand in particular was settled by Scottish Presbyterians, descended from people who weren’t going to be told what to do by the Pope or an English Anglican Archbishop. There is a strong culture of questioning authority among them.

This has been bolstered by recent immigrants from America and Northern Europe, who see New Zealand as the last great outpost of libertinism. It makes for an interesting mix, with the local Maori and Pacifica and the decedents of English and Irish, who came here in Victorian times and still harbour some of those conservative Victorian values.

Needless to say, I keep a close eye on Irish and New Zealand media when it comes to Covid. The countries have similar populations, are ex-British colonies and perhaps most importantly, have decades of under-investment in their health services.

There is one obvious difference though. New Zealand went hard and early in fighting Covid, whereas Ireland fell into the same ‘will we or won’t we’ trap that beset Europe. As a result, approximately 5,000 people in Ireland have died from Covid, versus 33 in New Zealand.

Both countries, however, are trying to vaccinate their population as quickly as possible. Ireland is ahead in this area, mainly because those 5,000 deaths have somewhat focussed the mind. New Zealand is catching up but it will be another few weeks before I’m allowed back into the pub.

While almost 90% of the population here have taken the jab, you tend to only hear about the ones that haven’t. They are noisy and well-funded and have tapped into other concerns that some kiwis have. This includes the 5G rollout and the demand from the Government that farmers stop pumping shit into the nation’s rivers.

The evangelical churches play a large role in these protests. This of course brings up a lot of my inbuilt bias when it comes to the behavior of Catholics and Protestants. Catholics are communal and tend to do what they are told. Vaccination depends on a whole community acting in unison and Catholicism fits easily into this process. I haven’t checked but I’m sure Catholic communities have a higher take-up of the vaccine than the other Christian faiths.

But of course, it’s not that simple.  There is something darker at the heart of New Zealand’s anti-vaxxers. Like in the US, evangelical churches here are split by race. Maori and Pacifica belong to one set, while middle-class white people attend other, more grandiose churches. The well-fed and well-paid pastors in these places fill their congregations with tales of bygone days and how it has all been stolen from them.

These people have spent their life in ascendency. They have rarely faced unemployment or homelessness. That happens to other, less virtuous people who deserve what they get as a punishment for their immoral lives.

And then a pandemic comes along and they are asked to restrict their lives in the same way as all the poor brown people. This doesn’t compute in their tiny entitled brains. They have never had to suffer in the same way as others. For the first time in their lives, they have been told that they are just the same as everyone else.

This is the same thing that happened under Trumpism. They looked at a country that had elected Barack Obama and realised that black people were now considered to be equal to everyone. That is a scarier prospect than Covid itself. A world of angry white evangelicals. And most of them have guns.

 

 

Lockdown Blues

 I wrote a letter to the Irish Times “Emigration Generation” section in January that I’m glad they never published. I also put it up as a blog here, which I’ll leave up because it reflected how I felt at the time. I come here now with a confession. But one I’m not going to beat myself up over it. In the great words of Keynes, “when the facts change, I change my mind.”

Back in January, I had just returned from a two week break in the South Island of New Zealand. Pubs and restaurants were open and because there were no overseas tourists, it was easy to get accommodation. My emotional memo to the Irish Times was based on my strongly held belief that New Zealand was the best country in the world to be in, during these dark days of Covid 19. I wanted Ireland to follow New Zealand’s example and close its border to the outside world.

New Zealand enjoyed sixteen months or so of relative freedom while the rest of the world fought with the virus. We had less than thirty deaths and the hospitals ran smoothly without the need to cater for coughing, virus sufferers. There was the occasional blip when a case would sneak out of managed isolation, but we smugly patted ourselves on the back in these times, because a snappy, short-term lockdown tended to smother these outbreaks at birth.

Then Delta came along, and the whole ball game changed. There was an inevitability about this. All the other countries in the teacher’s pet section of the Covid classroom, such as Taiwan, Singapore and Australia, had succumbed to the latest variant and proved that the strategy of getting Covid numbers down to zero through a tough lockdown was futile. Delta is a different beast from what came before and spreads faster than a conspiracy on an anti-vaccination Facebook page.

On the 17^th of August, a single case crept out of a managed isolation facility and drifted across the Auckland night sky until it found a willing host. In line with the government’s strict and hard-line policy the country was plunged into full lockdown immediately and we all sat back in our protective bubbles and expected it to be over in a couple of days.

That was two months ago. I’ve been working from home in that time while trying to home school my daughter. I’ve had a lot of time to think as I sit at the kitchen table each day. It is clear now that New Zealand took a massive gamble that came very close to paying off but looks like it might fail at the final hurdle.

Due to geography and a strong left-wing government that prioritised public health, New Zealand kept Covid at bay while thousands died overseas and lockdowns became the norm. We lived a normal life here and became the poster child of left-leaning editorials all over the world. It was hard to open the Guardian or New York Times online and not find a glowing article about Jacinda or smug kiwis at sports games or music gigs.

Everybody knew that this was akin to keeping your finger in a dyke. Sooner, or later you’re going to have to fix the leak or the person providing the finger will collapse with hunger and exhaustion and the flood will come in. The gamble that New Zealand took was to kick off a vaccination program and hope that this would be high enough when the day eventually arrived that delta took hold within the community.

You can trace the day this bet went sour. Back in the middle of June, a limo driver in Sydney picked up an International flight crew. He was unvaccinated and wasn’t wearing a mask. More than 400 people have died in Sydney from Covid since that fateful taxi ride.

New Zealand has a close connection to Australia. Thousands of kiwis live over there and one of them brought the virus with them when they came home. The government shut the country down straight away but the genie was already out of the bottle. The numbers didn’t get out of control but almost from the first day, it was obvious that the public wasn’t quite as compliant as in the initial shutdown of 2020.

Back then, everything was novel. The whole world was shut down and the internet was full of Joe Wicks fitness videos and funny home movies. There was a sense that we were all in this together and New Zealand embraced this.

This time, there is a sense that the rest of the world has moved on. Pressure from business and right-wing parties to open up is rising every day. This is highlighting a fissure that runs through every aspect of New Zealand society. There is inequity here that most people overseas don’t notice. When they watch the All Blacks, they see a happy combination of white and brown people. When people come here on holiday, they don’t tend to spend time in poverty-ridden suburbs of Auckland and Wellington. And when you meet Kiwis overseas they will talk in glowing terms about how they treated their native population so much better than the Australians did.

But the truth is that Maori are disadvantaged in education, health, and pretty much every other aspect of society. Many of them live in cold and damp homes, so are most vulnerable to respiratory illness and to have underlying health conditions. They tend to work in the sort of businesses (such as Supermarkets) that have stayed open during lockdown.

When you add to this that many young Maori feel disconnected from society, then it’s not surprising that Maori vaccination rates are low and they are overrepresented in current cases.

If we open up early, many of these Maori will die from Covid. That’s the position New Zealand is in today. And while many people love Jacinda, I don’t envy her for having to make that choice.

The Gilded Cage

 This is the second anniversary of my last overseas visit. That was a short hop to Sydney for a two day work trip. I thought nothing of it at the time, as I was a regular visitor to Australia. My sister lives in Sydney and my favourite sports team is in Melbourne. So, jumping across the Tasman was a frequent feature of my first three years in New Zealand.

I also managed two trips to Ireland in that time and planned to go back once every two years in the future.

Travel has always been passion. I qualified as an Accountant when I was 22 and started earning a decent salary. I had simple tastes, a few beers at the weekend. The occasional takeaway curry. I didn’t spend money on fancy cars or designer clothes. I didn’t gamble, smoke or dabble in Columbian marching powder as so many of my colleagues did.

I spent my money on overseas trips. It started with an Interrail excursion when I was 20 and by the time I was 30, I’d visited almost every country in Western Europe. I came out of a doomed relationship at that age and that drove me further, to look for solace and comfort in the Southern Hemisphere. 

I bought a ‘round the world’ ticket that year and spent five months working my way around the planet. My trip took me to Hong Kong, then to New Zealand with a few days in the Cook Islands and Hawaii on the way home. That cemented my love of flying and the thrill of seeing new places.  I used to really enjoy aviation, the thrill of the acceleration down the runway, the scream of the engines as the plane clawed its way into the clouds. I even enjoyed the smells. Aircraft fuel, the hot soupy air that met you when you landed in a foreign city and that faint aroma of coffee and stale beer that you find in every airport terminal.

But it was the destination that always drew me to those flights. I’ve seen the world and kept on running and sometimes I ran back to places I’ve been before.

I’m blessed that when the music stopped, I found myself in New Zealand. If you’re going to live through a pandemic, then this is the best place to do it. We’ve enjoyed a normal lifestyle for much of the last eighteen months, albeit with the occasional lockdown thrown in. I’ve even managed to squeeze in a plane journey in that time. We headed down to the South Island just after Christmas. That was fun, but it barely satisfied my thirst for adventure.

Four weeks ago, Auckland went into its fourth lockdown. The dreaded Delta variant had finally sneaked into New Zealand and had wormed its way through the city before anyone noticed. I’ve coped pretty well with the previous three but I’m finding this one tough. Staying at home doesn’t bother me too much. It’s a little boring and I’ve demonstrated beyond doubt that I was never cut out to be a teacher. It’s the Groundhog day feeling that gets me and the sense that this will go on for a long time. New Zealand is determined to keep working on an elimination policy which means that borders won’t be open any time soon. It means that all Kiwis need to be vaccinated and everyone coming in and out of the country would need to be vaccinated too.

This is a big ask and will take many months to accomplish. My worry is that is an unachievable goal. Like every other country, New Zealand has its fair share of tin foil hatted nut cases that are running an anti-vaccination campaign. It would be nice if we lived in a world where only anti-vaxxers could catch the virus, but it’s not as simple as that. About 10% of the vaccinated population would catch it and we have to pay for the anti-vaxxer buggers when they get hospitalised.

In the meantime, we are following what’s known as an “Elimination Strategy”. That means tough lockdowns like the one we’re currently going through until we fully wipe out any infestations. Then we open everything up except the border.

Strangely enough, this felt fine until the Delta variant arrived at the beginning of August. We could go to the pub, sports events and so on, while the rest of the world suffered in their lockdown. Now the roles have been reversed. I’m stuck in the garage most days trying to work and do homeschooling, while I listen to Northern Hemisphere podcasts and reading the Irish Times. The rest of the world seems to be opening up while New Zealand clings to its high principles.

It feels, as my favourite NZ economist said, that we live in a gilded cage. It’s a cage that has kept the country healthy, avoided the deaths that other countries have experienced and meant that we’ve lived relatively normal lives for most of the last eighteen months. But the Delta variance has made people wonder what the exit strategy is. It sort of feels like the American invasion of Afghanistan (and feels almost as long). It’s easy to start off a policy, but more difficult to end.

New Zealand doesn’t have the ICU beds to deal with a major outbreak. That’s why they go with the elimination strategy. One unchecked Airbus A380 from Asia would likely overwhelm the hospital system within days. Alternatively, you could vaccinate the entire population but even if we met that unlikely target, the numbers of edge cases would probably still destroy the health system.

Which means we have to wait for the rest of the world to sort the problem out. They might discover a magic vaccine that is 100% effective or let the virus rip through the countries until it wears itself out. Neither of those things are likely to happen soon. In the meantime, I’ll have to find some other corners of this gilded cage to visit.

 

The Four of Us

The text would usually arrive around 2pm on Saturday afternoon. There were four us and we’d do our best to avoid being the one to send it. Nobody wanted to appear needy. But by 2pm one of us would crack.

“Anyone fancy a few scoops tonight? Bettys at 9 bells?”

We had our own code for beer drinking. We asked for Charlie Birds rather than Carlsberg, a pint of Arthur rather than Guinness and a wedgy was a drink bought outside of the tightly controlled and monitored round system. It was all part of the comfortable vocabulary of drinkers, ‘the wink and elbow language of delight.’

Our numbers would vary depending on high days and holidays, but we had a core group of four. There were three of my school friends who had settled down in our hometown. And myself, the one who stubbornly refused to live in that hometown since the day I left in 1988, but still felt a gravitational pull most Saturday afternoons.

We would settle into Betty’s pub at 9pm. If we were lucky, we’d get our favourite corner seat which gave easy access to the bar and more importantly as the evening progressed, provided a clear run to the toilets.

I had my leaving drinks there, before I took the long road South in 2007. Celebrated birthdays, Christenings and Weddings. Put an arm round friends after funerals and enjoyed the many ordinary nights in winter when a joke would be cracked that would make that night magical.   

Betty has long since gone to the great pub in the sky and the pub shut well before Covid had the chance to put the final nail in its coffin.

I was the first of that group of four to succumb to Cancer. In hindsight I was the luckiest. Testicular Cancer is the most survivable and I’m now eleven years free of the Big C, despite the best attempts of a specialist last year to convince me otherwise.

I was in Ireland in 2015 when the second guy was diagnosed. We met up in Bettys that Christmas and I noticed he wasn’t drinking. That was a red flag given our previous history. He explained that he wasn’t feeling well and was getting tests. It spiraled pretty quickly after that and he’s still fighting Cancer to this day.  When I speak to him and hear what he’s going through I feel embarrassed for ever making a fuss about my brush with the disease. I had an operation and was discharged the same day. Spent a week with my feet up, enjoying the pain killers I left the hospital with.

Chemo was even easy in hindsight. It came with a side serving of anxiety, but I had no discernible side effects. I’ve had scans and so many blood tests that my arm feels like a second-hand dartboard. But these were all precautionary and if nothing else, got me time off work.

My mate has had more Cancer than any single person should have to endure, but bears all this with a stoicism that shames those of us who have moaned about the petty troubles of our lucky lives.

Not long after my mate was visited by the tumour ghost, it came looking for another victim.  It was Leukaemia this time. That ghoul that tricks its way into your bloodstream. This struck down the third member of my drinking group. But thankfully, he got back on his feet and so far at least, he has fought it off.

The last time I was home was in July 2019. I met my mates in a new pub and the subject of Cancer came up. We joked with the fourth guy in the group. His time would come.

That time came last Thursday. I woke up to a message on our Whatsapp group. He announced that he had bowel Cancer and was going in that day to have the tumour removed. He’s now recovering from having the tumour removed and is trying not to think about the long journey he’s about to embark on. You eat an elephant one bite at a time and the same applies to living with Cancer. There is no need to worry about the long term when there is enough activity going on this week.

Now that all four of us have has danced with Cancer, you might ask if Betty was putting something dodgy in the beer. It could be a statistical blip. 40% of people will get Cancer at some stage. It might have been 100% of our group but that could be put down to bad luck.

There are stories of radioactive winds blowing across the Irish Sea from Sellafield. But if this was the cause, we would have all developed the same type of Cancer, when in fact each of us had a unique form.

We’ll probably never know and I’m not sure I’d want to anyway. Ignorance will at least allow all of us to believe that our ailments were caused by factors beyond our control.

It’s now July 2021 and ordinarily, I’d be planning a trip back to Ireland around now. But we don’t live in ordinary times. We live in the era of Covid, when International travel seems as a likely as Ireland winning a major football tournament. I try not to think about this too much, but since I found out about my mate’s condition last week, it’s been dominating my thoughts. I would like nothing better than to spend a night in Ireland, holding up the corner of a bar and drinking with those same three friends I spent so many fun nights with.

We would trade war stories, reminisce about old times, outdo each other with shaggy dog stories and raise a glass to Betty and all those who have gone before us.

Then we would stumble out into the streets in the wee small hour and scream to the Gods above. Covid can go fuck itself and Cancer can too.  

 

 

 

Thoughts in the time of Covid

Back in January, I passed through Customs Street in Auckland, my head down and my headphones firmly lodged in my ears. I was listening to the RTE Playback podcast. The street bustled with commuters hurrying to trains and ferries, in an urgent rush to get home or to the beach for a swim. The crowds around me in shorts and t-shirts offered a contrast to the stories of Mother and Baby homes, winter snow and Covid restrictions that were filtering through my headphones.

My path was blocked by a middle-aged woman, with one hand clasping a phone to her ear while her other hand pressed against the glass door of the Grand Mercure Hotel. As I got closer, I noticed a younger woman on the other side of the glass. Her hands also cradled a phone while her palm was squeezed against the door. They laughed and cried in equal measure. Mother and daughter separated for years and now almost within touching distance.

New Zealand’s approach to Covid was summed up in their emotional exchange. With a few exceptions, only Kiwis are allowed to fly back to their home country. When they do, they are bussed straight to Hotels that are fenced off and guarded by the NZ Defence Force. They spend two weeks there, getting tested regularly and after 14 days, they can step through that glass door and enter into the free world beyond. It can’t be easy being so close to your family but not able to touch them, but 14 days in a nice hotel is a small price to pay for the benefits that lie ahead.

Being Irish in New Zealand is an odd experience at the moment. Most of us chose to live here because it is a beautiful country with easy-going people and an outdoor healthy culture. Last March, we were handed an additional gift. We found ourselves living in the country with the best approach to the virus in the world. We have a government that listens to its scientific advisors and a public that complies with the restrictions.

As a result, we have spent most of the last year living normally. Going to concerts and football matches. And more importantly, being able to drink white wine in the sun in a busy beer garden.

This elicits a little guilt. We have Zoom and Facetime and can see how tough our relatives and friends are doing it back home. But I think what upsets us most, is that we know that what worked here could also work in Ireland. We live on Islands, we have similar populations, we have a large number of hotels that will be empty if foreign tourists are kept out.

When New Zealand’s success in battling Covid is mentioned online, an army of people who have never been here will reply with explanations ranging from the remoteness of the place, the low density of the population and the fact that hobbits are immune to the virus. New Zealand might be thousands of kilometers away from anywhere else, but international air travel means that nowhere is remote. Pre-Covid, thousands of tourists arrived here each day. Auckland has a higher population density than Dublin. And as for the hobbits, they packed up and left when the tourist buses stopped coming round.

The real reason for New Zealand’s success is that it threw a quarantine blanket around its borders and  told its citizens they could no longer go to Fiji or Queensland on their holidays and that trips to support the All Blacks overseas was off the cards.

Some right-wing commentators overseas see this as an open prison. That we are trapped on an island surrounded by barbed wire. In fact, anyone that can afford an airfare is free to leave any time you want. It’s only awkward when you want to come back. And if you are willing to spend a couple of weeks in a nice hotel, then coming back is manageable too.

In return, we were offered a ‘normal’ life. The only real change is that Kiwis had to holiday in their own country this year. We saw parts of NZ we had never been to before and in doing so, helped the tourist industry, which has taken the brunt of the Government's border decisions. Statistics so far show that the tourist industry is holding up. Kiwis are getting to do things they always wanted to do, such as walk one of the countries famous national trails, which were previously booked out by overseas tourists. We noticed this ourselves in January when we holidayed in the South Island and most places were busy.

Recently, New Zealand opened up a bubble with Australia and will soon do the same with the Cook Islands. This means that quarantine is not required for travel between these places and indicates that life is slowly getting back to normal. As vaccines roll out across the world, this will also help to bring us back to the days before that bat bit somebody in Wuhan.

I see that Ireland has introduced the Hotel quarantine model in a limited form. I think it’s a no-brainer. The alternative is the constant drip-feed of lockdowns, the tragic daily death toll and crippling pressure on the health service. Throw a blanket across the borders, quarantine new arrivals and sit back and enjoy the normality. If the biggest price to pay is that you have to spend your holidays in Cliften this year, listening to a trad session while drinking a creamy pint of Guinness, then take it.

It also means that I’ll be able to get back to Ireland sooner than I had dreaded. If I don’t get to return until July 2022, it will be the longest time I’ve ever been away from my homeland.

Nothing would make us Irish Kiwis prouder than seeing our home country emulate New Zealand’s actions. And it might even ease the guilt of spending another warm evening at the pub.

 

Beer

This story starts in July 1981. The Hunger Strikes in Northern Ireland were entering their grim final denouement, Reagan was invading Central America and warming the coals under the Cold War cauldron and Thatcher was just starting on her project to destroy the social cohesion that Britain had enjoyed since the war.

But I was oblivious to this. I was 16 and setting off on my first independent adventure.   The Father of one of my friends was the local station manager and had sourced cheap tickets for three of us to travel the country at our will. We borrowed a tent and packed the backpacks that had nestled in our cupboards since our days in the Scouts.

We ended up camping in sand dunes just outside Tralee in County Kerry. We had barely two pennies to rub together, so free accommodation was a priority. On our last night before heading home, we pooled our remaining cash and decided to execute a plan that had been bubbling through every conversation for the previous two weeks.  We planned to buy beer.

We approached the off-license warily. None of us could muster the hint of bum fluff on our upper lips and we looked as guilty as a guy in a mask and stripy jumper in an Art gallery.

Conor was chosen as the oldest looking and most confident. He approached the shop nervously and we waited outside for what seemed an eternity. Then he emerged, grinning from ear to ear and clutching a six-pack of Harp Lager to his chest.

We raced back to the tent and prized open three bottles. It would be years until we realised that beer should be served cold, but at that moment we didn’t care that the bottles we held were as warm as tea. We gulped them down greedily. I seem to remember a fight then breaking out. Same as it ever was, I guess.

We awoke the next morning and packed up for the trip home. We still had three bottles left and didn’t want to carry them. So, we drank them before we left. This grew into an urban myth that we had poured beer onto our cornflakes. The truth was more prosaic. We rose late as we did every day on that trip and were packed and ready to go at 2pm. I’ve started drinking earlier than that on many occasions.

It is now almost forty years since my first taste of the amber nectar and I’ve been a regular visitor to the well ever since. It took almost 18 months from that first venture into the world of beer before I had my second. By then, I was in full-time employment and able to stand my own round. I got drunk for the first time at a work Christmas party in December 1982 and at almost every Christmas party since.

I’d be reluctant to estimate how much beer I’ve drunk in the interim, but suffice to say that my sister once described me as a not too complicated mechanism for turning alcohol into urine.

But I sat in a pub last week, fresh from turning 56 and finally took some time to contemplate my relationship with beer. I’d been invited on a pub crawl around four of Auckland’s most famous craft beer pubs. We were there for the Fresh Hops Festival, an annual event when craft beer companies are able to extort even greater revenue from their punters than they normally do. I had just tucked into my third pint of the day, a cloudy Extra Pale Ale, when I realised that I don’t actually like this craft stuff. My companions were all searching for the hoppiest, darkest beers they could find. They wanted something that was as far away from the generic beers of Heineken and Carlsberg as possible.

In that moment, I realised that despite forty years of drinking the stuff, my tastes are still the same as they were in 1981. I like Lager. I’ll tolerate a Pilsner but anything with Ale in the title can disappear up its own arse, as far as I’m concerned.

I drink beer to be social, to loosen up conversation, and to get merry. I don’t drink it for the flavour. As long as it’s cold and refreshing I couldn’t care what it tastes like. I realise now that my favourite memories of drinking do not involve what was in the glass that I was holding. My memories are of the company or the venue. A thatched roof cottage in Doolin with a fiddle band playing and the Atlantic Ocean crashing outside. The bar in Raffles Hotel on a sultry afternoon in Singapore. The Great Northern in Melbourne on ten-dollar steak night. I probably drank Guinness in Doolin, Tiger Beer in Singapore and Carlton Draught in Melbourne but none of that matters to me.

Craft beer is now the assumed beer of choice for men of a certain age. You are expected to mock the generic, mass-produced beers in the way a fine diner mocks McDonalds. I’ve seen these phases before however. You see it with coffee, where instant coffee is frowned upon and unless the beans have been passed through the intestinal system of a Malaysian monkey, they are not acceptable.

I’ve seen it with Wine. Blue Nun used to the perfect gift at a dinner party, now it would be akin to bringing a bottle of petrol.

I’ve decided I’m too old for this. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks and I’m set in my ways. From now on, I’m only going to drink what I want and not be bullied into going with the crowd. I just hope that all the favourite places I’ve drunk in will be accessible in the future. That I can visit old friends and continue the odyssey of travel and adventure that I started in 1981. That one day we can celebrate an end to this pandemic. I’ll raise a glass to that.

 

A Funeral in Lockdown

My Mother-in-Law passed away recently. She was a lovely woman but had been sick for a long time. So long in fact, that I have no memory of her being healthy. I met her first thirteen years ago and she was frail then. Parkinsons and several other diseases wrecked her body and she spent the last two weeks of her life unconscious in hospital after a stroke and my wife spent almost every night with her.

Needless to say, when the passing finally came, my wife’s family were exhausted and full of the emotional conflict that arises in these situations. Part relief, part grief and mostly tiredness.

It happened on a Friday night and my wife’s family gathered the next day to arrange the funeral. They had shared the strain of looking after their Mother in those last few weeks and it showed on their faces and in their thoughts. Somebody suggested a slide show at the funeral, another suggested that the congregation should be invited one by one to come up and give voice to the memories. It was then that my wife pointed out her Mother was a devout Catholic and at the very least she would want a Catholic funeral. Nobody saw a problem with this. Surely the local church would be amenable to them changing the entire service to suit their needs.

It became clear to me at this point that I was in a room of Atheists and Protestants (my own Mother would have said they were one and the same). I stepped forward at this point and offered myself as the representative of the Holy Church of Rome. I spent the first 22 years of my life going to Mass, so I could still remember the basic rules.

I didn’t let on that I had stopped believing in God in my twenties, around the time that I realised that there was very little evidence that God believed in me. My attendance rate at Mass had diminished ever since. But I’ve still gone along at Christmas, Easter, Weddings and Funerals and knew that the words hadn’t changed much in the interim.  

And while I no longer believe in God, I still have respect for the Church. I saw how they helped when my parents died, how the Church provided structure and support. I was married in a Catholic Church and it provided a foundation to the day and some mighty fine hymns.

So, I set about choosing the readings and prayers of the Faithful. I arranged to meet the Priest and to become the family’s point of contact for all things Churchy.

We adjourned at that point to the living room and tucked into a bottle of whiskey to toast the dearly departed. The plan was that we would all drive down to the Coromandel coast the following day, to the seaside community where my Parents in Law had retired. We came home and my wife went to bed to try and get her first decent night’s sleep in a week. I tucked into a six-pack while researching appropriate readings from the Letters of St Paul.

The first thing that struck me was his diligence. He kept writing to the Romans, Corinthians, etc with no evidence that any of them ever wrote back. He never starts his letters with “I refer to your letter of the 4^th inst”. The other thing that struck me was the number of readings that dealt with violence and misogyny. I realised from our Saturday discussion that I was dealing with a congregation that used secular funerals as their point of reference. They were used to Joni Mitchell's lyrics and not the rantings of a wandering disciple from the first century.

I was on my fifth beer when my wife’s phone rang. I ignored it. She was deep into a well-deserved sleep and I didn’t want to disturb her. Then my phone rang and I realised it must be important. It was my brother-in-law telling me that Auckland was just about to go into one week of Lockdown. The road South was due to close at 6am the following morning, which meant that if we didn’t leave soon, we’d be stuck in Auckland and unable to make the funeral.

I immediately woke my wife who was bounding for the car before I could stop her. I reminded her that we had a sleeping child upstairs and that both of us had drunk more than we should if we were to take command of a heavy vehicle. We compromised on going to bed and rising at 4am to get through before the check-points were installed.

New Zealand has largely escaped the trials and tribulations of Covid. We had one serious lockdown last March and April, but otherwise, it has been life as normal here. But when something happens the country takes it seriously. While we had escaped Auckland before the shutters came down, others who had intended to come to the funeral weren’t so lucky. That included the Priest who initially was supposed to take the service. My first job on the day we arrived on the coast was to source a new celebrant and venue. While we were away from the hotspot of Auckland, the rest of the country was in level two which meant a maximum of 100 at the funeral. It also required two-meter distancing between groups in the congregation. A quick Maths calculation suggested that this will limit the funeral to about 25 if we used the small church in the township my in-laws lived in.

Luckily another Church in the neighbouring town was found and the Funeral Mass went off without a hitch. We even rigged about a laptop and set up a Zoom call for all those overseas who couldn’t make it.

My Mother in Law would have liked it, I think. And my Mother would have been proud of me too. All that Mass going as a child had finally paid off.

Social Networking

2020 has now passed. I guess a lot of people did things they would never have dreamt of doing in that year. Homeschooling, drinking wine at midday on a workday, googling ‘how to turn the microphone on for Zoom’, wearing masks, bumping elbows rather than shaking hands.

I’m lucky enough to live in the western country with the best record for managing Covid. But the pandemic has coughed over the land of the long white cloud too. We went into lockdown in March at the same time as I had been given what turned out to be a false cancer diagnosis. I was put into the high-risk category and banished to the garage. I fashioned a work station in the corner and prepared to face the world for the foreseeable future from that lonely space on an Auckland suburban street.

One morning back in March, in that bubble of boredom and isolation, I did something I swore I’d never do. I signed up for Facebook and Twitter.

I’d always felt that I was initially too old for Facebook and then too young. When it emerged in the early naughties, I was already in my mid-thirties and still obsessed with socialising in that old fashioned way of meeting people face to face. Facebook was used by teenagers locked in their bedrooms and raging with hormones and desperation to connect to the wider world.

Somewhere along the way, Facebook became uncool for this generation. Tik Tok and Snapchat better suited their short attention spans and when they discovered that their grannies had just befriended them and you risked your inheritance if you continued to post pictures of drunken orgies on a channel shared by your relatives.

Around this time, laptops and Ipads dropped in price and they became a common Christmas present for the over sixties, so they could email their kids who had emigrated to Australia. Email was the entry drug but Facebook became the crack cocaine for the older generation. Once they realised they could trace that girl they used to fancy in school fifty years ago, they were hooked.

Clever old Facebook then filled their timeline with racist and conspiratorially rubbish and we ended up with Trump and Brexit. But that’s a story for another day.

When this pivot to an older audience happened, I thought I was too young and hip to be on a crinkly’s platform. Facebook had become uncool but I found that as well as being a forum for gossip and racism, it was also the practical place on the internet for updates and information. I’m a keen amateur actor and wanted to know about upcoming plays. Groups don’t bother updating their website anymore. They just have a link saying “Check out our Facebook page for details”.

FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is another term I only became familiar within 2020. Stuck in that garage in March, I clung to the possibility of the world reopening and feared that if I wasn’t on Facebook, I’d still there while the rest of the world partied.

There was also the added attraction of our local community Facebook page, which along with an annoyingly high number of cat pictures contains many hidden gems in local xenophobia and naked racism.

I came to Twitter for different reasons. When it launched, I was hesitant to sign up. I’m a master in coming up with a witty retort days after it was needed. Twitter seemed to require instant smart and clever responses. But over the years, I noticed that the mainstream media I was consuming had become simply a conduit to Twitter. Journalists no longer researched stories independently. They simply scrolled through Twitter and published the best of what they found there. This accelerated in the age of Trump when entire articles would be based on his Twitter rants.

I would read articles in the Guardian that would link to a Twitter account. I could look at it but not see the replies or reply myself. I knew this was Twitter trying to tease me in and eventually I succumbed.

So, how are things now in the bright new dawn of 2021?

This morning I deactivated my Facebook account. It turns out there a lot of other ways to find out what’s going on and even though I only “Friended” three groups, I was inundated with nonsense about what people I hardly knew were having for lunch. It was like peering into the diary of a five-year-old with similar grammar and spelling capabilities. These were ordinary people, living ordinary lives and I had no interest in them. The people I’m genuinely interested in, stay in touch with Whatsapp and email and other ways of direct communication. I had no desire to seek them out on Facebook. And I’m far too settled into domestic life to need to seek out ex-lovers or long forgotten schoolfriends.

Facebook is a social network, but I didn’t find it very friendly. My brief visits were peppered with hostility and anger. In the end, we drifted apart. But like all those relationships were you still have to share the house because you can’t afford to pay the mortgage on your own, Facebook will always be living in the back room. Deleting it completely is almost impossible.

Twitter on the other hand has become invaluable. I check it five or six times a day. It’s the quickest way of getting news and because I’ve followed smart and witty people, my timeline is filled with clever commentary and sharp-witted responses. Facebook is full of the awful detritus of daily life. Twitter is a window into the minds of people you like and are interested in.

There are downsides, the need to trawl through lots of chaff to find the wheat, the disappointment of following somebody who turns out to be crushingly boring and the risk of being called an anti-semite after making a badly structured joke. But if this blogging business doesn’t make me famous, there is always the chance that micro-blogging on Twitter will.