MAGAN'S WORLD:IT WAS ONLY as I clicked the "book this flight" tab that my eyes glanced to the top of the screen and, lo and behold, a tumult of boiling water rose up from the lake and swept in across the fields, smiting the calves, foals and myriad cloven-hoofed beasts.
I held fast to the desk until the worst excesses of the cyclone retreated and I gradually came to realise what had happened. I had clicked the wrong box, selecting the Friday flight, instead of Saturday.
“O God, no!” I bellowed at the screen, as flashes of lightning shot down upon me from the coal-dark sky.
“It’s a simple misclick, a slip of the wrist,” but already the waters were lapping at my feet, and I had to hold down the laptop lest the torrents tear it from my grip. In desperation, I reached for the phone and was put through to a woman somewhere in the vast-ceilinged rookery of metal birds on the plains north of Dublin.
“Can you make this right?” I cried into the receiver, more out of blind hope than anything. Gales were raging through my mind. “You have the power if you choose to wield it,” I pleaded, but before I got any further I realised that it was just a drone voice, a fortress guardian telling me that “for quality and training purposes” she was recording the call, and suggested that I press 2 for internet booking enquiries. I did as instructed, stubbornly ignoring the futility of my actions, like a wounded mouse running from a cat’s paw.
To my surprise, a melodic angel came on the line asking how she could assist me, and in spite of myself I felt heartened. I explained the ill-judged wrist movement and begged for clemency, but all I got was, “The change fee is €75,” in a chilling tone.
“It was a mistake!” I cried. “Isn’t there a cooling off period? It was seconds ago. When was it sealed in blood?”
“Hold the line,” she said, presumably going off to gaze into her crystal screen which glints with the lore of vast swathes of lands beyond – an all-seeing looking glass from a demonic realm.
“There are no other flights . . .” she began, but the line was suddenly cut, either by accident or deliberately, and I didn’t have the heart to face the fortress guardian again.
The following day I happened to find myself at the curvilinear crystalline structure that is the Dublin lair of these long-nosed griffons and rubber-taloned vultures. I managed to penetrate the sheets of sliding glass, and even slip through the phalanx of foot-soldiers armed with L-shaped metal grates on castors and the cavalry of box-like black animals on stiff leashes. In front of me was a neatly liveried handmaiden with well-pinned flaxen tresses who, upon hearing my predicament, smiled and gestured me to a metal stair.
I ascended into the upper reaches of the building and onwards into a maze of twisting corridors until I ended up in a great hall where I was corralled into a line of deferential plaintiffs standing in front of a balding knight with a goatee and a baby-rattle laugh.
As we each approached him he kept his eyes dolefully upon us, listening to our entreaties while his hands danced on a chequerboard tablet.
It took him seconds to pass judgement and I regret to report, dear reader, that I was shown no mercy. Our national airline, which we have baled out repeatedly with our tithes, is as susceptible to committing extortion as the most ruffianly brigand one might encounter among the savage heathens of foreign climes. Caveat viator.