LIFE IN LOCKDOWN
IT’S very Irish, isn’t it? The lockdown restrictions start to ease ... and the summer turns into winter.
Last Friday morning hailstones were being lobbed out of the sky at me and the kids in the park — like a curse from God miffed at the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic or Trump’s use of the Bible as a photo-op. Or something.
Either way, my two young kids were confused by the weather, as we all were — not least because the previous Tuesday they were being lathered in Factor 50 to protect from sunburn.
We’d kill for a bit of sunburn now, wouldn’t we? The last few weeks — prehailstones and biting winds straight out of the Old Testament — were some of the hottest, sunniest days my family can remember.
At the risk of sounding like a bad parent, I think
I let my kids have an ice cream every day during the two weeks of hot weather. There are several reasons for this. Mainly, ice cream vans parked cleverly on the road across from beaches and parks are impossible to avoid, especially when the kids see them and point like their very lives depended on it: “Ice cream! Ice cream!”
Anyway, last Thursday afternoon, after our ice cream beside the Forty Foot, we spent the day pretty much swimming in the sea at Sandycove beach. I won’t say the sea wasn’t cold — it was — but after a while you could almost close your eyes and imagine you were swimming in the sea in Spain. We made sandcastles on the beach until 6pm, then packed up everything (why do little kids have so much stuff ?) and trekked to the car.
It was such a beautiful evening we decided to get pizza from That’s Amore in nearby Monkstown village and eat it — observing strict social distancing — in my wife’s mother’s back garden up the road. A bottle of wine was opened, so I enjoyed a few glasses of red in the sunshine with Monkstown’s finest pizza as my wife sunbathed and our kids ran around the garden.
We have to support our local businesses. Eating out can be our patriotic duty.
The wine and pizza reminded me of a night out in Rome many moons ago — May 2002 — with the great Frank McCourt.
“I don’t want anything, I don’t want priests,” the author of Angela’s Ashes told me over a bottle or two in a little place near the Vatican. “Like Jim Kemmy, who died a few years ago. He had nobody. One of his best friends, I think, was a Protestant bishop of Limerick. Jim had no use for the church, priests, bishops or anybody like that, and that is the way I feel myself, because I don’t want to contribute to their big scam. I don’t want them praying over me. Who the hell do they think they are anyway?”
Bizarrely, or maybe not so bizarrely, three weeks later, Frank found himself in front of Pope John Paul II at the Vatican and knelt, took the pontiff ’s hand and kissed his ring.
“I had a feeling he knew,” Frank would later say. “He knew what a fraud and a phony I was. Then I walked away. And I have to admit, as turbulent as my relationship with the church has been — although they don’t know it and they don’t care — I was walking on water practically. I was walking on air.”
Last Thursday night, I too was walking on air as I left my mother-in-law’s house in Monkstown after a nice bottle of wine.
Excess brings its own punishment. The following morning I felt like that Ogden Nash poem that goes: “How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle/ And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle.”
Self-inflicted headache or not, I took my young son to Marlay Park to feed the ducks while my wife home-schooled our fiveyear-old daughter. Then, when we got back from the ducks, I did some writing on the computer on the couch while my five-yearold played in the kitchen in front of me.
My little angel is invariably wittier and more insightful than anyone I know. “Why do people have to die?” is her latest existential enquiry. “How do they blow out the candles in heaven for birthday parties? Do the angels do it?” goes another question.
“Daddy,” she asked last Friday evening, “if God is so powerful then why doesn’t he stop the coronavirus now?” The one person I know who would have had a good answer for that is no longer with us, sadly, but he did know how to drink bottles of wine in Rome with me, once upon a time.
I’ll raise a glass tonight in Frank’s honour.