Joyce Fegan: Am I the only one staying put this summer?
But Abroad An Than Easier Always Safer The Some — During Doesn't Us Irish — It's For And Shine Summer Going Sun Of
Several years ago a man I knew was recovering from surgery. He noted his joie de vivre was lacking post-op — for months on end. He described it as the surgeon having taken "the drinker" out of him.
Not that the man was a drinker, but what he meant was that the spontaneous, fun-loving part of him who met with friends old and young to swap stories and who sought out adventure without even thinking about it, was gone.
One pandemic later, I am borrowing his self-diagnosis.
This time last year, if you were to wind the papers and your social media feed back by 12 months, you'd see we were full of chat about the bountiful beauty of Ireland. Previously tranquil spots in the nooks of Connemara were more Khaosan Road than Renvyle retreat.
There were long traffic jams to get down to Kerry's Derrynane beach, and at Wexford's Curracloe beach, unless you were parked up by 8.45am on those hot sunny days in July, you literally had to forget it.
I was all in. We got to the four corners of Ireland. When you couldn't dine in, we sought out the quirkiest of food trucks. Friends, who'd previously never set foot on native sand, were the first to invest in those hard-to-get beach windbreakers. So expert, the recent novice suddenly became, that they morphed into a sort of WhatsApp consultant advising friends on how you needed to take a hammer in your picnic basket to get the wooden spokes into the sand good and proper.
My friends have all moved on. Relatives and in-laws too. I'm borrowing the windbreaker for Strandhill tomorrow. While they worry about queues at Dublin Airport, I'm off checking Met Éireann's rainfall radar.
Set my parameters and I will optimise them right up to the edges. Give me boundless freedom and it's like I'll just stay put.
This wasn't always the way. So I'll put it down to the pandemic. While surgery took "the drinker" out of my friend, the pandemic has taken the spontaneous adventurer out of me.
Where once I could have these sorts of conversations with friends, and be met with a shared resonance when confessing to pandemic fatigue or that sense of languishing, I fear I am on my own now. I've been keeping this to myself.
For months people have been up, up, and away. Despite predicted rainfall, people cannot wait to wade through muddy fields of madding crowds to hear live music and dance until dawn. Leggings are a thing of the past for many (not me), and no one talks about needing to get their hair cut (except me).
When all the restrictions were finally lifted last February, I remember reading an article about how long it will take people to re-emerge into what once had been normal life.
"It will take many people between six and eight months to find their feet again," said Dr Paul D’Alton, head of the psychology department at St Vincent’s University Hospital. But that's only for a portion of the population, there is a sizable cohort who went straight back at it — of which I was not one.
Paul Gilligan, chief executive of St Patrick's Mental Health Services, advised that there was a "psychological journey" for what we couldn't do, and in February that shifted to a "psychological journey around what we can do".
While friends and family separate liquids at airport security, I am still on my little post-lockdown journey. A DART trip to Dublin is like planning a red-eye flight to London. While driving in the capital is nearly like navigating the seven-lane highways around Miami International Airport.
How do you get the eye back in?
It would be helpful if I had a passport for my pandemic-born child. And in this incidence, responsibility does not lie with the processing people in the Department of Foreign Affairs, but with her parents. We have the photo taken and the birth cert to hand, but we've yet to do the life admin.
There was a lot that got put on the long finger these last two-and-a-half years; driving licence renewals, car tax, NCTs, smear tests, first-time passport applications.
While I thought I was the only one, I recently got talking to two people who work in my local coffee shop. I was doing that old-school small-talk thing of asking them if they'd any holidays planned. But the male barista did that new pandemic thing of cutting straight to the chase.
"We've no passport for the youngest. After a day's work and then getting the kids to bed the last thing I feel like doing is sitting down at the computer to do life admin," he said. Me too, I confessed, to both passport void and life admin avoid.
Next up to confess was his colleague. "To be honest, there's a lot I liked about the slower pace of life and I don't want to lose that," she said.
Me too. To be honest, I've hated music festivals since I got sunburnt and covered in sawdust at Oxygen in 2002. And I don't think my toddler would do well in the mid-summer heat of the Canaries.
I went to my GP last week, a stab at the pandemic-induced life admin backlog, of which I was telling him about. He's off to London with his family of six next month.
As he drew blood from the vein in the crease of my right arm he said: "You know what, toddlers don't really understand restrictions and airports and seats. It can be more sensible to not travel with them."
So it's not just the pandemic then, it could be the parent thing too? If I had become a parent outside the lines of a pandemic, I'd probably have a clearer answer, but my hunch is that mothering did not clip my wings, two-plus years of obedient living did.
So frustrated I became with the inertia that I began thinking of ways to break the deadlock. One suggestion I had given to my friend in the coffee shop was to just book flights for September, then he'd have to sort the passport. I didn't even take my own advice.
But I did succeed in one area. There's a room in my home that housed two-plus years of baby clothes, various other infant accoutrements and Christmas decorations. Its tackling lay at the bottom of each iteration of my forever undone to-do list. If I knew anything about feng shui, I'd guess the room was an external manifestation or metaphor for something.
Room still chock-a-block with stuff, so I opened my phone and invited a group of yoga people over for a class. The yeses were plentiful and so began the folding and vacuum-packing of two years of grown-out-of clothes.
It's not the crossing of international airspace, but at least it's something. Deadlines break deadlock when nothing else works.
But there's also a sense that things aren't as simple as retrieving lost mojo, things have changed indefinitely and it's about a conscious integration of that.
But also a gentle reminder to move forward is needed in there too.