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.

 

 

First World Problems

Seth is about 18 months old with chubby cheeks and a flock of blond hair. In normal circumstances you would think he was as cute as kitten. But with a sixteen-hour non-stop flight on a packed airplane, he is public enemy number one.

We had boarded in Dubai. Like me, most passengers had come off connecting flights of varying lengths and had forsaken sleep on that leg with the anticipation of making up for it on the long journey to Auckland.

Seth, however, had different plans. He started crying before the plane took off. As a parent, I immediately recognised the type of wail. He was overtired. Had probably come off another connecting flight where his Mother had desperately tried to get him to sleep and had unfortunately failed. He had missed his window and no amount of gentle rocking was going to carry him into slumber.

This crying went on for two hours until the food arrived. Then his mother released him so that she could sleep and he took off like he had just stolen something. It seemed that he had an issue that he wanted to take up with the Captain, because that’s the direction he headed for on about 25 occasions. Each time he took off he would mutter a high-pitched scream and repeat the word “Bubba” at an ear splitting frequency. Each time, his exasperated Mother or one of the even more exasperated crew would pick him up and carry him back to his seat as he screamed and wriggled in an attempt to escape.

This went on for about five hours, by which stage the other 300 passengers would have happily strung him up in the galley. Thankfully, he must have fallen asleep for a few hours before the wailing started again as we approached Auckland.

It wasn’t like in the good old days when Children were seen but not heard. I took my first long haul flight in 1988 in the glamour days of international travel. Mind you, it was with Aeroflot, so there wasn’t much glamour involved. I can’t remember if they showed a movie, but if they did, it would have been in Russian. Smoking was discouraged, apart from down the back by the toilets. The flight crew all seemed to be undercover KGB agents or former Olympic shot putters. I remember at one point a muscular stewardess walked down the aisle with a basket of apples and flung them to the passengers in the way a kid on a bike delivers newspapers.

But at least the airport experience back then was pleasant. A nice lady would look at your silky tracing paper ticket and take your bags with little fuss and very little queuing. In the years before cost accountants had looked at staffing levels, airports had appropriate staff to deal with the passengers coming through. It’s an industry that knows exactly how many customers to expect each day and pretty much how many there will be each hour. But you still queue for hours at check in or security, as though the airlines and airport staff are surprised that so many people who had pre-booked flights had actually turned up.

In 1988, after a perfunctory look at your passport, you could sail straight through to the plane. None of this belt and shoe removing nonsense.  Back then, you could bring a rifle or a live animal on board and nobody would bat an eyelid.

My next long haul excursion was the grand daddy of all my trips. This was a round the world tour in 1995/1996. I flew on the queen of all long haul aeroplanes, the mighty Boeing 747. They definitely would have played a movie on these flights, but it would needed to be bland enough to meet the tastes and needs of two year olds and eighty year olds. Once airborne and after dinner was served (the food was better then too) a large screen would descend in the cabin and headphones would be distributed. A caption would explain that the inflight movie had been formatted for airplane enjoyment, which was code for “cut to ribbons to exclude all the naughty bits”. This meant that it would run for about an hour and make no narrative sense.

If you didn’t fancy the movie, there was another option. You could listen to a selection of golden oldie songs introduced by an octogenarian BBC DJ, who mentioned the airline after every song in return, one assumes, for free flights.

I started making more regular flights after that to Australia and New Zealand. And then when I moved to the Southern Hemisphere, I could regularly fly home to Ireland.

The entertainment got better. TVs in the back of seats brought variety and meant that you could watch what you wanted, rather than having to settle for the common denominator. But comfort went the other way. As I became physically bigger, the seats became smaller and with tighter leg room.

In the past month, I’ve finally been able to sample the delights of long haul travel after a four year hiatus caused by “the Thing”. I was curious to see if anything had changed. The needless queuing at check in, passport control, security, boarding, disembarkation and baggage retrieval has got worse. A two flight I took in Europe swallowed up six hours of my time from arriving at one airport and leaving the other. Four years ago they insisted you turned off your phone during the flight in case you interfered with the electronics and risked crashing the plane. Now they insist that you keep it on, so they can sell you overpriced Wifi.

All in all, it’s become a very uncomfortable and boring experience. It used to be just as much about the journey as the destination. Now it’s all about the destination. The days of glamour travel has gone the way of VHS and Walkmans. I’d even watch only Russian movies on board if we could get them back.

Sue, The Sovereign Citizen

Sue is angry. She can’t remember when it started. Maybe it was when she moved out of the city and bought a lifestyle block in the country with her husband. But she doesn’t think so. In her now hazy memory, the first few years were good. They escaped the rat race and bought five acres and some animals and spent a couple of years doing up a draughty 1930’s villa.

It was all good until the council told them they couldn’t get access to the town’s water supply. Then that “bloody goofy toothed” woman became Prime Minister and in Sue’s mind the whole thing went to shit.

All the environmental laws that the new Labour government brought in seem to be targeted directly at Sue. And after all the hard work that she and husband had done, the layabouts and work shy people seemed to be winning out.   

Then Covid came along and Sue disappeared entirely down the rabbit holes that the pandemic offered. She was already suspicious of anything Jacinda Ardern said. She was trying to ban cows after all and was poisoning the land with 1080 bait. And Sue had moved to the country to immerse herself in the freedoms that New Zealand life is supposed to offer. The freedom to slaughter your own animals, to own as many vehicles as you like, and to beat your kids if you saw fit.

Ruby was one of the first people that Sue had met when she visited the local farmer’s market on her first weekend in the country. She was a naturopath and a life coach and had sold Sue a home-made remedy that cured the hay fever that several Auckland doctors had failed to mend.

She had never been sick since, so she wasn’t going to listen to some bloody woman in Wellington telling her what to do. Particularly when it came to wearing a mask in the supermarket. Sue didn’t even wear shoes when she went there and was often in her pyjamas.

It was a short trip from hating Covid rules to liking Trump conspiracy theories on Facebook and believing that Pfizer had secret plans to buy the South island to house the illuminati after the vaccines had killed off all the regular people.

Then in February 2022, Ruby invited Sue to a demonstration in Wellington. Three weeks later Sue was throwing bricks at the police and setting fire to tents. She got home and was fully radicalised and started reading parts of the Internet you can’t find with a google search.

Ruby was the first to mention the term Sovereign Citizen. Sue embraced it enthusiastically. She stopped paying her rates, car tax and rego. Sent back every letter that came from a government department, with a message that they had no authority over her.

I belong to the side of politics that laughs at people like Sue. I’m a city living liberal, who wouldn’t know the right end of a cow to milk.

But when I was younger, I dabbled with left wing politics. We were the ones who wanted to overthrow the state. We believed that society was rigged against us. That it was controlled by hidden forces in dark rooms, smoking large cigars in their stuffed waistcoats.

I realise now that these are the same arguments that Sue makes on Facebook. Except these days the arguments come from the right and not the left. I guess the other difference is that our heroes were trade unionists and revolutionaries that lived in bed sits. Sue’s heroes are billionaires like Trump or Alex Jones. We also liked to protest by joining marches and picketing visits by foreign leaders that we disagreed with. We still paid or taxes and fines. We wanted to build a better society and not to withdraw from it. 

Sue wants to withdraw from society, not to change it. Every country has its own version of sovereign citizens, but I sometimes wonder if New Zealand has more than its fair share. Unlike Australia, which was colonised by convicts who didn’t want to be there and rapacious gold diggers, New Zealand white settlers came from British and Irish people searching for a bucolic lifestyle. They wanted to escape from the smoke filled cities of Victorian Britain and to live out their lives on the verdant pastures of the Southern Isles.

The reach of Government was pretty thin back then. She had to home school your kids and rely on family remedies and the kindness of strangers if anyone got sick. It bred a culture of independence. Many city dwelling Kiwis have a desire to move to the country and live ‘off grid’.

Most of Sue’s friends have taken that first step to live outside the real world. Unfortunately, they have also tapped into feelings of neglect and despondency within the Maori community. This is a country built delicately on the foundations of a treaty signed in 1840. It’s a treaty that hasn’t always been adhered to and it has built up a culture of disconnect between many Maori and the state.

The sovereign citizen movement was quick to ferment this disconnect and like many revolutionary movements and governments for that matter, they are quite happy to use Maori as the muscle in their clashes with authority.

We live in strange old world now. Nationalism, nativism and isolationism is rampant throughout the western world. It’s like we’re living in the 1930s again and that most people have ignored the past and are now condemned to repeat it. Sue doesn’t like being called a Nazi, but that’s what she is. I just hope she never needs a state provided hospital or has to drive her untaxed car on government built roads. I hope she never has to post her toxic messages on Facebook that connects to a Government built cell phone tower. She also doesn’t like being called a hypocrite. But then neither did I when I was a young radical who wanted to work for American Banks.

I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled

I moved to New Zealand at the venerable age of fifty. Some say that fifty is the new thirty, but only if they are innumerate or refuse to accept the concept of linear time. 

I certainly didn't feel like thirty when I stepped off that plane from Edinburgh but I think it's fair to say that my body was in pretty good working condition, give or take a missing testicle or two. I wish I could say the same now.

The first thing to go was my left shoulder. I leant back from the driver's seat of my car to retrieve a bag from the back seat. Something popped and when you're my age and hear that sound, you're best to freeze and to check your extremities from the outside in. I found that I couldn't lift my left arm beyond elbow height. Luckily for me, that's not the arm I use to hail barmen or to reach the cookie jar on the top shelf at work. So, it took me a day or two to drag myself to the physio. He poked and prodded me like a farmer inspecting a bullock at a country mart. 

After a few non-productive sessions and a scan, he announced that I had 'frozen shoulder', which I took as code for 'we haven't a bloody clue."

Next to go was my right knee. I remember descending the escalator at Auckland Central station and being in a hurry to catch a soon departing train. I tripped on one of the steps. It was so slight and my recovery so balletic and graceful that none of the other commuters even noticed. But a pain similar to being stabbed shot through my knee. This time the physio was more on the ball, or patella to be more precise. She diagnosed some arthritis and warned that this was a ticking time bomb that would lead to canes and Zimmer frames in later life. 

It's unpleasant to lie on a bench in a cold and clinical treatment room, looking at posters of fit and healthy athletes and having your future mapped out to in such depressing tones. 

She kindly put it down to all the football I played in my twenties and not the extra twenty kilos of weight that the knees have had to support since I stopped playing football.

At this point you might be assuming that these physio visits were not only treating but costing me an arm and a leg. Thankfully, New Zealand has an excellent system in place for such events. This is a country famed for its physical sport and outdoor endeavours. 

Accidents are common, so to avoid the leisure and sports industries from being inundated with law suits an Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) was set up. This is funded through taxes and pays for treatment when you have an accident. The only issue is that you have to have had an accident to avail of it. “Tripped on the stairs at the station and twisted my knee” will generally pass muster. But “woke up in the morning with a sore ankle” is going to be refused.

This happened to me when my left knee popped. It clearly got upset that his right compatriot was getting all the attention from the pretty physio. I woke up one morning with a pain in my knee that wasn’t there before I got out of bed. When I filled out my ACC claim form at the physio, I had to use the full power of my imagination to conjure up an excuse that had elements of truth layered with exaggeration. Dreaming of scoring the winner at Highbury didn’t make it onto the form.

My back, however, is the most regular offender. It first paid a painful visit about three years ago and has popped back about once a year since. On that first occasion, I was seated at the station and stood up to walk towards an incoming train. My back suddenly went into spasm and I crawled, almost on my hands and knees towards the carriage.

I spent the morning on the boardroom floor at work with a lap top nestled on my chest. Luckily, I was able to procure a lunchtime physio appointment (at this stage I’m such a regular customer, I clearly have gold card status) and the application of some strange smelling ointments and some acupuncture did the trick. I was able to shuffle home that night and within a week or so, I was back to normal.

For the purposes of my ACC form on this occasion, I was able to reference an incident two days earlier, when I helped carry an 80kg table top up two flights of stairs. I probably didn’t bend my knees properly on this occasion, but then I was probably scared of doing more damage to them at the time.

You would think I would have learned from this experience, but two of my subsequent issues with my back can also be traced to lifting things that a man of my age should be avoiding.

New Zealand is, of course, an active place to live. Part of the attraction of living here is the great outdoors. Hiking, swimming and generally being a sporty bloke is part of the deal.

I’ll be 58 in a month’s time. That’s an age when you tend to look towards retirement as opposed to a new career, for example. I think part of my problem is accepting this. That my body is showing the normal levels of aging and decay. Time, after all, waits for no man. When I was in my twenties, years moved like treacle, these days they race like an express train.

In the words of the great Leonard Cohen, I ache in the places where I used to play. But I’ll keep fighting, raging at the dying of the light. I’ll just be a little more careful when descending escalators and lifting anything heavier than a pint of beer.

Before the Deluge

There was a time when I could think of nothing better than having the opportunity to work from home. In my first job, I shared a small office with two smokers who seemed to be engaged in a daily competition to ingest the most nicotine. Back then most communication was done by telephone and when I had my head down trying to work I would be regularly interrupted by one of them shouting abuse at a tax officer or client who was slow in paying his bill.

At least the commute was easy. It was about ten minutes on a bike, eight if the gale from the Irish Sea was behind me.

Commuting has been an issue in every job I’ve had since. I’ve sat in traffic jams for hours in London, Luxembourg and Dublin. Melbourne was probably the best in this regard, but we couldn’t afford to live in the city centre, so even with excellent public transport, I still spent two hours a day on a tram or on my bike.

The technology to work from home was not in place for most of my working life. I’ve owned a PC since the early nineties, but it was only when I got to Australia in 2007 that I found a job that would allow me to connect to work.

But I was working for a Corporate Bank then, with a boss with the management style of Tony Soprano. The work from home option was set up to allow you to work at weekends or in the evening.

My then boss was so old-school he was probably educated in Latin. I had a colleague with a two hour each way commute who wanted to work from home between Christmas and New Year. He was treated with the contempt that a conscientious objector would have received during the First World War.

My current employer has always been more flexible. They were pioneers of the concept of the four day week which they adopted into a flexible model long before Covid came along.

When that little respiratory tickle came along, the game changed for everyone, in New Zealand and beyond. The first lockdown was a novelty I guess. It lasted for seven weeks and we were amused by washing our groceries with a damp sponge, zoom calls with friends and family overseas and the chance to walk in parts of the city that are not normally open to plebs like me.

Auckland has had several lockdowns since and they became progressively more boring as the novelty wore off. With each lockdown I became more nostalgic for the old days of commuting and office life. Commuting in particular is seen as a total negative. But my cycle to work kept me healthy and gave me a front row seat of the city waking up each day. Even when I was stuck in a car, I could listen to whatever I like without being told to ‘turn that bloody racket down’.

Time in the office is a delicate balance between fascinating social engagement and annoying assholes that you have nothing in common with other than the same employer. But you can work this to your advantage. I spent two hours today chatting to the people I like. We discussed whether the new Auckland Mayor is as big a dickhead as the media are portraying him and whether Ireland should throw the six nations championship and concentrate on the World Cup. I work in a large open plan office were you can see the dickheads approaching like slow moving Wildebeest on the savanna and take appropriate avoiding action.

But I also got lots of work done. Technology has come a long way but you can’t beat standing at a whiteboard with somebody to nut an issue out or having three screens and a colour printer at hand. I’ve made a lot of improvements at home in the three years since Covid came along. But it’s impossible to recreate the office set up experience. When I’m in the office I plug my laptop in and sit back in my comfortable chair and watch all my applications pop up magically. At home, I have to jump through more hoops than a Russian hacker trying to get into the CIA database.

These days I can work from home as often as I like. During the school term, I drop my daughter to school, grab a coffee and then amble into work. I work from home once a week, mainly to catch up on admin. And I have to admit it’s nice to have the house to myself.

School was supposed to start again today and normality would have resumed. Then the rain came and all that was thrown in the air. Last Friday, parts of Auckland got 300mm of rain in 24 hours. That’s about 40% of the annual rainfall in Dublin, a city that I knew from personal experience is wet and miserable for most of the year.

It brought landslides, power cuts and flooding to many parts of the city. We were told to work from home for the rest of the week and school reopening got pushed back to next Tuesday. We got the dreaded “home schooling” text from the school principle.

Triggered is a strong word. It invokes trauma, memories of dark days buried in your sub conscious. But it feels appropriate. Being told to work from home for even a day or two brings back memories of those lockdowns. I’ve been working for forty years, most of that in an office environment. I don’t exactly pine for it but I don’t like being told I can’t go there. Covid brought more than a virus, it also unleashed an existential crisis for many people. We have lost the ability to plan for the future with any confidence. I’ll be back next week. At least I hope so. You can’t be sure of anything these days.