A DAD'S LIFE:How have I let such a miserable scenario become reality?
I FLOAT through January on a wave of disbelief. I hate it. The missus always tells me not to use “hate”, she says it’s too strong, that I should adopt “dislike” or, even better, express a strong preference for the opposite. Well, I hate January. And I hate February. They’re cold, wet and don’t pay enough.
The disbelief stems from two things, the first being that we’re still here at this time of year when I’ve been swearing for 20 years to spend these months of horror in the sun. Other people wangle it but we can’t, and the possibility becomes ever more remote as school and family commitments develop. My self-disgust for letting such a miserable scenario become inevitable cranks up a notch.
The second strand of disbelief is based on the tragi-comedy that is normal life continuing around my maudlin, self-pitying self. The comedy has become so pervasive that you have to stop and stare sometimes, scratch at it, to remind yourself that this is how we’ve allowed things to develop.
I throw the kids in the car every weekday morning and head for school. The road we negotiate, a secondary tributary, is like the surface of the moon. It is a series of deep, dark holes, linked by ledge-like mountain passes of crumbling tarmac. I’m afraid that if we tip into one of these holes we will disturb families who have developed them as shelter since their houses were washed away before Christmas. The kids love it because it feels like we’re on safari but occasionally, when my undercarriage suffers a particularly vicious scraping, I wonder who I can bill. Then I remember where I am, realise no one has responsibility and laugh.
While performing off-road contortions on-road each morning, the kids pose the question as to who is supposed to fix the surface. I wonder too, while negotiating a slight bend that’s impossible to see around as the verge has assumed jungle status, not having been cut back in over two years. I suggest that there are people employed to look after the roads, and by extension, our safety, but they seem to be away on secret service duty.
We enter the town and the elder discovers our council workers’ hiding place. “Look dad, there’s a fella up that pole!” And there is. At the end of January, a team of four are setting about taking down the Christmas decorations. One in a cherry picker bucket, another controlling said bucket, and two shouting encouragement and waving at cars. We wave back and bump by.
Finally, the school. Which isn’t a school. It’s an office building which the principal had the savvy to commandeer when word got round the community that it might lie empty on completion. As a result, the kids got to shift out of the warren of decrepit prefabs (which the Department of Education was renting for a few hundred thousand each year) into somewhere warm and dry. It still costs a similar amount per annum, but we’re all happy that our children are now being educated in a concrete construction. I drop them and on the way home pass the plot of land the department bought, a number of years ago, on which to build their own brand spanking new school. It’s a nice green field still.
I’d like to stop at the doctor to have an odd growth on my head examined, but I can’t afford to this week. I’ll save up and go back in a month, grow my hair to cover it in the meantime.
Get home, get online and perform the usual trawl of houses we can’t buy because neither of us works in a bank, the civil service or in illegal narcotics importation. I might even ring an estate agent to see if he has considered dropping his price for a house that’s been for sale since 2007. He’ll patiently explain that the property crash hasn’t really affected this part of the world and that the three-bed semi is, in fact, a bargain. He’ll insist the bottom has been reached and now is the time to buy, as soon 20 per cent of houses in the estate will be occupied. He’ll nearly convince me, but before I write the deposit cheque I have no way of backing up I’ll be saved by having to return to town and pick up the kids.
Back over the moon ditches, in through the decoration-free streets and pull up outside the state-of-the-art, 21st-century, glass office construction. Out they stream, pushing, pulling, laughing, screaming. It’s all normal to them. Who am I kidding? It’s all normal to us.
abrophy@irishtimes.com