The Eamon Ryan hair dilemma
Monday
I ran 5K today. It wasn’t meant to officially happen for another two runs. But today the instruction on the schedule I mindlessly follow was to run for 28 minutes. So I ended up running more than 5K.
I should have felt a sense of achievement. I couldn’t run to catch a bus at the beginning of this pandemic, and now I can run 5K.
But what’s the point really? Rather than achieving something, I’ve actually just set a new bar for myself, a new rod for my back. Now I have to run 5K every day. And any day I don’t, I will feel like a lazy failure.
It’s not like climbing Mount Everest. You can’t just do it once and then dine out on it for the rest of your life.
‘Why did you run 5K?’ they’d say to me. Because it’s there, I’d tell them.
I asked a runner what I should do now. Should I try and speed up the 5K or what?
“You should try and do 6K or 7K now,” she said.
Clearly no matter how far I go, I’m never going to get there, wherever there is. Maybe there is no there. Right now it seems apt enough, Running to nowhere. And all I get is a big fat red sweaty head.
Tuesday
Some days, you suddenly get perspective on what is actually going on, and it feels for a second like a bad dream — and then you snap back into just accepting it all again.
I feel you need to say it, though. When you have one of those moments you need to say it out loud or text someone.
“This is like a bad dream.”
They will text back: “Yes, it’s a nightmare.”
And once you have marked the moment and acknowledged it, on both of you go.
Wednesday
Eamon Ryan has a fine head of hair on him on the television news tonight. It’s great, thick Sliabh Luachra hair. I can say these things, because I also have what you might politely call strong Kerry hair. Myself or Eamon will never go bald, that’s for sure.
But at a time like this, we face a dilemma. Do we let the gruaig run free? Or do we mercilessly cut it back like you would unruly hedgerows on a boreen near the county bounds between West Cork and Kerry?
Not needing to be seen in public right now, I can take a chance and get out the clippers, and it’ll always grow back fast.
But Eamon couldn’t be engaged in government formation while rocking a number 3 buzzcut.
I’ve heard it’s July for the barbers. And it is clear already that Eamon is not the only one on the political scene or on the evening news who is going to face some tough decisions before then.
Thursday
5k in under 27 minutes today. Where will it end? Right back where I started presumably, as it always does. Sometimes, in the early morning, I see Filipino nannies out with kids, and
I make inquiries and apparently that is the case. And apparently that is the more desirable situation.
The real nightmare, apparently, is when you don’t have the help locked down with you. Apparently some people are having real problems surviving without the help.
Imagine it, having to clean your own house and do your own laundry and mind your own children.
Friday
I read this line in a story today: “Weirdness is part of the human condition, Bob.” And it’s so true. And we adjust so quickly to different weirdnesses.
But really, no one who ever wrote a book or made a film or anything else before now had any inkling of this particular weirdness.
There has been worse weirdness for sure. But this one has a strange flavour all of its own. This stillness. This Covid-19 Catch-22 of destroying the world as we know it in order to survive.
We walk on the beach some nights. It’s best when the tide is out. Miles of sand, and the blue hour, when everything is so vivid, and the huge impassive sky, and little clusters of people spaced out, walking along vaguely deranged, let out of the sanitarium for an hour. Everyone casts long shadows on the sand. And with the Poolbeg chimneys and the incinerator and sunglasses and scarves over mouths, it’s postapocalyptic.
And anyone who half-knows anyone pounces on them for the same chat, because we all want to talk in the flesh to anyone who is not our family.
Expert opinions are exchanged on where we go from here, and how it is. And we all say we’re doing fine because we can’t complain, with our health and our jobs. And we say how the kids are coping well apart from those odd moments where something entirely trivial sends them into a shuddering of sobbing, because they miss everything and they just want things to be normal.
And you just hold them for a few minutes, and then they snap back and on it goes.
One thing is for sure, we will never dare say we are bored again.