One night in December I took down my computer and started looking for cheap flights in early January.
I found a bargain from Dublin to Bucharest and put my name on it instantly, imagining heavy snow and bare trees in a city park, and me like Dr Zhivago looking for some Lara to smile at in the white flurry.
But I forgot about it during Christmas, until one night near the new year. I was driving in the rain along the coast in Donegal, and I began wondering was it snowing in Bucharest.
It felt like one of those moments when the universe is about to change suddenly; when you can walk out of your skin beautifully and find yourself becoming something different.
I was driving my Citröen C3, a dainty little thing I got on Christmas Eve when I bade farewell to the Pajero. My masculinity wilted in Keenan Bauer’s showrooms outside Mullingar as they drove the old Pajero around the corner and out of sight. I could hear the General gasp as he stood beside me.
“It happens us all,” he whispered as he dried his eyes with a handkerchief his ex-wife gave him for Christmas.
“I’m going to miss that Pajero,” I confessed, as the two of us squeezed ourselves into the little Citröen.
“I made an appointment for a check-up on the prostate this morning,” the General declared. “A Dublin hospital. The nurse actually asked me not to ejaculate for 48 hours before the test.”
He sighed. “Life is cruel,” he whispered. And then to cheer himself up, he changed the subject.
“Did you ever actually watch a woman eating a lamb chop?” he wondered. “It’s positively pornographic.”
Talk about evolution
He spent Christmas with the family again, forcing himself back in to the domestic zone for the sake of the children and suspicious that the lady wife is using the children to lure him home.
“And what does she put in front of us?” He asked. “Chops. A rack of spiced lamb cutlets. And she sucked them like the Queen of Sheba enjoying the bones of a buck goat.”
I suggested he should explain to her that his libido is weakening with the passing years.
“Are you joking?” he asked, his eyebrows stretching like rushes in a gale. “Do you think it would benefit me to confess weakness?”
There was a long silence, which is not a comfortable condition for two large males squashed together like silverback gorillas in a small car.
“It’s not always the strongest gorillas that survive,” I said, as we passed Maxi Zoo, the pet shop outside Longford. “It’s usually the vulnerable ones.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Evolution is not about the survival of the fittest or strongest,” I said. “Otherwise the world would be run by gorillas. In fact it was us hairless creatures who succeeded by finding how to negotiate our way around the big ones. So to admit weakness now and again to your wife or doctor is not going to signal the end of the human species.”
“Are you ill?” he wondered.
I admitted I had a cold. And I was stressed because of my pending trip to Romania. I had squandered money on a ticket, so I felt obliged to go. It’s a neurosis I got from my mother the day she pushed an expensive bun I had chosen from the trolley at me in Wynn’s Hotel many years ago, because my eyes were bigger than my belly.
“Eat it,” she said. “It cost 1/6d.”
An affinity with the fire
But I hate leaving the fireside, especially in January when mists hug the house and my bones are marinated in malt whiskey, and the light breaks through the mists transforming Lough Allen into a watercolour that Turner might have painted.
Even on the night before my flight I didn’t feel like travelling. I sat at the stove listening to a CD of Chris Miles, a woman from Scotland singing sad songs about war, and fishermen lost at sea. Her voice was a beautiful drone, a mellow organ, and she wrenched feelings from deep in her own heart to fill each song. It dawned on me that a song is beautiful when the singer is utterly committed to each word and phrase, and that thought suddenly roused me from my winter lethargy.
Perhaps this could be the moment, I thought, when I might shed my life again like an old skin, and walk beautifully into something new. And so, with renewed enthusiasm for the future, I opened the Ryanair site and checked in for flight FR7346 the following afternoon.