The way we live NOW
Pat Fitzpatrick dissects the new world order
Hell is other people — Jean-Paul Sartre.
You have to get out and meet the people — Dave McDonnell (my grandfather).
My grandfather wins this one. His take on life was that you couldn’t experience it at home reading a book or listening to the wireless.
You had to get out and meet ‘the people’, as he called them. Covid-19 lockdown proved his point. Zoom calls
COMFORT OF STRANGERS
and four hours a night on WhatsApp got us over the first few weeks, then they just highlighted what we were missing.
What we were missing is the comfort of strangers. It turns out that hell is being cooped up with the same people, with no idea when it will end. We need the energy and sense of connection that comes from sharing space with people from a hundred different backgrounds.
In short, we need each other.
Time will tell if this rediscovered connection will change the world for good — fascists gathering for an anti-immigration march get a buzz off each other as well. But if nothing else, lockdown showed us that you can’t beat a good crowd.
Something my grandfather knew only too well, because he owned a pub.
NOISE LEVELS
My grandfather probably knew the trick of turning up the music to get people to drink faster, but I doubt he ever used it. And now, it’s hard to see when it might be used again.
If you want to see why, chase down a clip from Claire Byrne Live, when it was shot in McCoy’s pub from Fair City. Claire interviews Joe Duffy, Nuala Carey and
Billy Keane, all seated two metres apart. It was a brilliant bit of TV, with a star turn from Billy Keane, a publican and superb writer, explaining that this kind of distancing would make it very hard to turn a profit in a pub.
But then, as he said, we’ve been through worse things before. Irish people will figure out a way to serve booze indoors. That means lower noise levels and maybe the end of live music in the pub, for a while at least.
The last thing we want to do while sitting two metres apart is shout over some one-man-band doing his best to murder American Pie. The alternative is to sit there and listen to him in silence. No one wants to do that in a pub.
LOVE/HATE IRELAND
This time of year usually finds a lot of us looking at the seven-day forecast for Lanzarote, Crete or Perpignan. It’s good for the endorphins to see all those yellow discs and 30 degrees.
A lot of people have given up on that, for this year at least, and we’re putting Dingle, Wexford and Strandhill into the weather app. That’s gone badly wrong for us in the past.
There’s a reason Connell and Marianne didn’t whip off their clothes and have a Sligo beach shag in Normal People, pictured. That reason is the freezing cold. Even teenagers would have performance issues at that temperature. And those scenes were probably shot in July. The weather for the next couple of months is going to determine what we think of Ireland for a long time. That might seem a bit unfair, but then coronavirus isn’t known for its fairness. Five days in the high 20s and a plate of calamari outside a pub in west Cork, and this will be the best little country in the world.
A week of 12 degrees and rain with three kids in an overpriced rental by the sea? That will be the final straw for a lot of us, especially since we discovered that we can work from anywhere — bye, bye baby, I’m moving to Bilbao. The next two months will define our relationship with Ireland for a whole generation.