IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:I don't register on her radar – she's early 20s and distracted – but I do want her to see me
THE ONLY way for me to see friends in Scotland is to fly Aer Arann from Cork to Edinburgh. This is “nice” – the way flying used to be “nice”.
It’s also expensive – the way flying used to be expensive. They charge at least twice the rates everyone’s favourite pugnacious businessman does and, in return, you squeeze, en masse, into a Cuban cigar tube on steroids. Please Michael, give us Caledonian-loving Cork residents a luminous, call-card-purchasing alternative.
My 6ft 6in frame enters the shrunken aircraft like Jack’s giant rumbling down the beanstalk. I have to make my way from the rear to the front row. Every overhead locker is open and I bump head and scrape hip until I can fold my embarrassing hulk body like an arthritic deck-chair into my appointed seat.
As I do so I mention to the air hostess stationed beside me that I’m not built for this type of plane. It’s an attempt at humour, not a very good one but I give it a lash with what I think is a winning smile.
She struggles to raise her eyes from the mid-distance point her brain has vacated to. She looks tired and emits the softest of bored sighs. “Sorry?” she says.
I repeat myself and it’s obvious she has no idea what I’m talking about. She didn’t notice my bumbling entrance.
Her only response is a weak half-smile and a “Oh yeah”. Professional courtesy demands it but it’s a struggle she can only just manage.
What has really happened hits me a little harder than being misunderstood. I don’t register on her radar. She’s maybe early 20s and distracted. Doing a couple of puddle hops a day from Cork to Edinburgh and it’s all she can do to stay upright as she contemplates where she’ll be drinking happy hour cocktails that night.
I’m 37 years old, a bit worn and stooped. I don’t find this pre-occupied young woman remotely attractive and am not concerned at her obvious lack of interest in giving it all up and running away, my hand in hers, to start a new life in an affordable suburban semi-d. But I do want her to see me.
We settle in. The guy beside me's working through The Sunand the lady across the aisle has her Helloon view. Out comes my Esquire(bought because it is guest edited this month by Ricky Gervais and Nick Hornby among others) and I reckon within minutes my hostess will have to recognise my sophisticated charms. Maybe a free Chardonnay will be dropped suggestively into my lap.
Stop it, fool boy. What early twentysomething geezer would look up from Zooonline to bother with a squint at Esquire. It's 80 per cent ads for watches that cost my annual income; its readers need to ensure punctuality for board meetings. I'm reading an old poser's mag and sulking that a young girl hasn't noticed me. Sap.
I didn’t announce my weekend away to the kids until the morning of departure. The elder, in particular, was disgusted: “Scotland? Why? You were there before. Why can’t we come?”
The answer that there isn’t room in my friend’s flat sounds as weak as it is. As does: “I need a couple of nights away, by myself.”
I don’t, I’ve had too many recently.
Like the 22-year-old air hostess (who I’ve crabbily christened Vera in my mind), they don’t see me as having an existence beyond their interaction with me. This isn’t news, it’s accepted policy.
Most of you reading this are in, or have been in, similar life phases. The difference is most of you have probably accepted and embraced this.
Years in and I’m still taking the hump at not being regarded as a contemporary by someone a generation younger than me.
She's probably never written a letter, she didn't have the hairs on her neck stand up on first hearing the drums at the start of Blue Mondayand I'm sure she didn't have to save to buy a one-way ticket to London for her first summer away.
Instead, she had all the equivalents of those experiences within her own peer group, and they felt similar to mine. Yet I still experience a twang at my lack of relevance in her world.
The kids regularly ask how old I am. No matter how often I tell them, it doesn’t go in. Why would it? 21 or 41, it’s the same to them: ancient.
They don’t care, nor does Vera. When will I get that and smile?
- abrophy@irishtimes.com