Suzanne Harrington: 'Why are they offering me a mineral? Do I look rundown?'
Daughter is visiting the fam in Ireland for the first time in plague ages, and has lots of questions. Starting with one which sounds like a maths riddle: if a plane leaves Gatwick airport and the flight takes an hour, why does the journey to Cork take a whole day? I explain about Cork airport being shut because they’re painting the bollards or something. Why couldn’t they have done that during lockdown, she wonders, seeing as it was outdoors anyway – couldn’t it have counted as exercise?
Before I can convolute a feasible explanation – not that I can find one that logically explains an airport shut down straight after a global shut down, just when everyone is gagging to get going again – she wants to know why is everyone still wearing masks and acting as if Covid is still a major thing. Or, she adds, why in the UK are we not? Because Brexit won’t let the virus in, I suggest weakly. I don’t know, ask Boris.
But she’s moved on. What’s a mineral and why do people keep asking her if she’s like one? Are they offering her health supplements? Does she look run down? Speaking of run-down, why do people jog / run / walk the dog on main roads, as traffic roars past, rather than on bridle paths? Why does the cycle lane stop dead in the middle of the cycle lane, and what are you supposed to do then?
The parking disc concept has to be explained twice, as she scans the street for meters and finds none. Which app should she use? I point to a distant shop and tell her she has to go in there and buy a piece of paper like a scratch card and put it by the windscreen. She looks genuinely bewildered. Why is there no public transport, she wonders? What’s with all the cars? Why are there 92 four wheel drives outside the rural primary school at pick up time?
She grasps an instant understanding of why everyone in Ireland shops at Lidl and Aldi after she accidentally doesn’t, and is mugged in a rival outlet whose name proves something of a contradiction to the reality. Nothing super about its value at all. Why is Ireland so expensive, she wails. Where are we, Japan?
No, Cork. Where a bottle of mediocre wine costs the same as a package holiday, and you could sell both kidneys and still not be able to buy even the porch of an ordinary house somewhere unremarkable quite far from everything. And why does everyone keep reminding her not to forget her gansey? Is it something to do with geese? Why do people call a half pint of lager a glass, when a pint is also served in a glass? Is this some kind of trick question?
But the one that utterly stumps her is this. What the hell is an immersion, and why does everyone keep talking about it?
