How I learnt to stop being a whinging dick

DON’T be angry, don’t be sad/And don’t sit crying over good times you had/There’s a girl right next to you/ And she’s just waiting for something to do I know it’s a first-world problem given everything else, but I was sour about not going to Italy. Don’t get me wrong. I understood that, green list or no green list, we shouldn’t go. So after playing chicken with Ryanair for a while to see if they’d cancel the flight, we gave in and changed our booking for another unlikely time and destination. And then I worked on owning it, on making it feel like my choice not to go. It wouldn’t have been any good anyway. We wouldn’t have enjoyed it. We would have been stressed out. It would have been grim there. Etc etc.

But every time I heard about someone else going abroad, generally to places not on the green list, I would get sour again. We had been going to a very isolated situation in Italy, in an area where there had been little Covid, and there was less now. It was low-risk compared to what other people were up to. And yet they would get their holidays, and I wouldn’t, but we would all bear the consequences of any further restrictions that resulted from Covid brought back from foreign red zones. These were the disgruntled thoughts I would run through in my head every time I heard of someone heading off to a hotel in Portugal or Spain. It was bringing out a bitter, judgy side to me that I didn’t like. And it was doing me no good either.

I was talking about it too much. Virtually stopping strangers on the street to whinge. I was being a real moaning dick. One guy I moaned to staged an intervention by quoting me the words above, from the Stephen Stills song Love the One You’re With. This wasn’t about the circumstances, which were out of my control, it was about how I was choosing to respond to them. I am lucky to be having a holiday at all. I am lucky my family are healthy. I am lucky I have a livelihood. And I am lucky I live in such a great country. You just have to accept that the weather is, well, unreliable. And as much as I feel that I need to get away to the light and warmth of the feckless south of Europe to recharge me, to get away from everything and everyone I know in order to see things clearly again, you can change how you see Ireland too.

I write this looking on an awesomely wild seascape. There are a few surfers braving Inchydoney beach. The weather has actually been okay for the last few days, and today I’m not pushed really because we’re heading home for a few days. We’re not facing into a day of travel, with airports and whatnot. We will cram everything into the car again and head off. We can call in to my parents for a cup of tea, and we’ll bring them some spuds and strawberries from the lady outside Clon. And we can get home and regroup and wash our clothes and take a break from each other and see other people before we head off again for a few days.

Last night, after dinner, my elder daughter asked me to go down and jump in the waves in the shallows with her, a little daddy-daughter micro-adventure. The day before that we got a surprise performance of what I suspect, from googling, were humpback whales, leaping out of the water, visible from the land. We had blowy walks on sand dunes and we even managed to get surprise sunburn on the beach one day. We swam in the sea a few times every day, braving forests of seaweed at times. Every morning I got up before the others and joined the other early birds in the heated seawater pool here in Inchydoney, swimming a bit, and blasting ourselves with the various jets, so you felt like you’d been to a Swiss sanitarium before breakfast. We shared a seafood platter to die for at Dunmore House across the bay. We discovered that while Skibbereen has Fields, Clonakilty has Scally’s, another fantastic SuperValu with all kinds of in-house goodies. I’m a sad soul really, but one of the exciting bits of Italy for me is the trip to the supermarket. But it turns out that Ireland has exotic supermarkets too!

We drove down roads we never drove down before, ogling architectdesigned cliff-side houses with giant windows and amazing views, houses, we decided, that must be owned by foreigners. We basked in the warmth of Irish hospitality, of all these wonderful young people who are glad to be working and glad to be busy. I had random chats with older people who stop out walking to tell you how it is and what’s really happening in the world. Is it me or is everyone randomly chatting a bit more this summer? And even when the news in the background seemed grim, everyone is determinedly getting on with it.

And we’ll hit the road again in a few days, for more west Cork and a bit of Kerry. We’ll do some visiting and swimming and exploring down other roads that bring you into different worlds, and the weather even looks a bit promising. But whatever the weather, we will forge ahead, powered by good brown bread and the bounty of the sea and the odd pint or a 99. And we will agree that Ireland is magic really. And that as much as we need to get away, sometimes it’s good to be forced to give into the mystical, elemental draw of this place, to notice the one you’re with, that girl right next to you.

Don’t laugh, but I’m even thinking I might try learning to surf.