Writing from United’s UA 930, en route once again to the hills of Donegal, Dad time and Irish wedding time, a favorite Irish cousin marrying an Englishman (local controversy). As they forecast here, ‘the craic will be mighty’!
I noticed the feeling that when you make a journey regularly, it becomes part of the map of who we are. And it’s the journeys that start to make our maps.
Keep moving…
On landing at DUB, Dad and I will tend to pull in for a coffee at the posh cofferia to the left of arrivals. Dad will have an Americano with milk (which is not an Americano) and I have an espresso doppio (simpleton, still). It’s unsaid but crystal clear that we’ll both be thinking about how Mum would usually be there, too (same coffee as Dad). At Christmas time, the voices of a live choir fill the terminal, in this beautiful gesture that Dublin airport lays on for the returning ex-pats.
And, with coffees in hands, the scene is set for the catching up allowed by the three hour drive, where one of Ireland’s only highways – reaching out of Dublin – soon narrows to single-lane roads as you cross the flats of central Ireland, narrower still in that last hour (horribly tired by then) of increasingly rugged wilderness of the North-West. Small talk evolves into career and relationships and Pete and Keara and Mum and politics, and how hard writing is. Not necessarily in that order…
