I don’t know about you, but even before the Government announcement of our new annual public holiday, which this year will fall on Friday, March 18th, I was hard at work on my favourite app. I was hopeful that the rumours would prove to be true, and we would have a one-off bonanza of essentially a four-day weekend. My intention is to spend all of those days outside Ireland.
I deleted several apps from my phone during the long months of lockdown. My Aer Lingus app. The Ryanair one. Booking.com. The one that was the most difficult for me to delete was Skyscanner. It’s an app that does what it says on the tin. You put in your dates and see what flights come up: it scans multiple websites to see what airline is going where. My favourite thing to do with this app was to put in dates, with “Dublin” as the departure point and “Everywhere” as the destination.
During lockdown I had to delete that app, along with all the travel-related others that I had once used so frequently. We couldn't even go more than 5km from our homes
The destinations that turned up at random were like looking at a score of different virtual magic carpets. They are listed by whatever country has the cheapest flights on those particular days. You go into the country listing and find out which cities those flights are going to. I could, on any particular day, go to Venice, or Nice, or Oslo, or Boston, or pretty much anywhere.
It wasn’t that I was constantly travelling to these places. The delight was in the possibilities, and occasionally I would even book a flight I found on Skyscanner and head away for a long and marvellous weekend.
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During lockdown I had to delete that app, along with all the travel-related others that I had once used so frequently. We couldn’t even go more than 5km from our homes. The wider world was closed to us. We were shut off from other countries. For months, those countries might as well have been as far away as the moon; a place I will most definitely never go.
When you live on an island, as we do, it’s so important to be able to leave it. That’s always been my philosophy anyway. I crave the perspective that other countries, cultures and peoples give to my island life. Travelling is my favourite thing to do, and always has been. It’s an experience that lifts my soul, should I believe that I possess one.
When Ireland first went into lockdown in March 2020, I was in Zimbabwe visiting friends. I was on the Aircoach en route to Dublin Airport when a colleague texted to tell me that everyone at The Irish Times was being sent home from the office, to work remotely for an unspecified period of time. I felt a deep unease at this news. I had already checked in online for my flight. Should I cancel the trip? What was going to happen next?
The Aircoach arrived at the airport as I was tussling with a decision that had to be made based entirely on uncertainty about everything the next days and weeks might bring, whether I was in Ireland or Zimbabwe.
I took the chance, and flew to Harare. There was no mention in Zimbabwe of any pandemic. There was electricity only for a couple of hours a day, and a fragile, intermittent internet connection, so the news from Ireland was infrequent. Then Ireland went into lockdown, and at the other side of the world, in a dysfunctional country where even simple things are difficult to achieve, my friends had to help me find a way to book a flight home as soon as possible, before our border closed.
I recall so vividly waiting for hours in Heathrow for my transfer to Dublin. Flights kept getting cancelled throughout the day because there weren’t sufficient passengers to justify them. People were wearing white plastic hazmat-esque suits. The televisions streamed rolling news of the ever-rising spread of Covid-19 around the world. Airports had always been joyous portals for me before. Now this one suddenly felt in some strange way frightening, as did the act of travel itself.
The happiness I felt when I reinstalled those travel-related apps was almost visceral. The world was opening up again
My friends ended up following me back to Ireland a week later, leaving behind their daughter’s school, their pets, their home and the lives they had established there over the previous years. It was months before they could return.
There were many hardships many of us went through during the pandemic, not to mention losing people too soon. My own family was personally bereaved through Covid. I have lived through some of the most traumatic days of my life these past 22 months. In the scale of things, to lose for a time the opportunity to travel doesn’t seem much. The world is still out there, waiting.
The happiness I felt when I reinstalled those travel-related apps was almost visceral. The world was opening up again. Possibilities were returning. I keyed some dates into Skyscanner, and spent literally hours and hours thinking about different destinations. The ability to travel – something I have never taken for granted – had never seemed more of a privilege.
So even before the news of a new public holiday was confirmed, I had opened up Skyscanner, put in those March dates, typed in “Dublin” and let “Everywhere” come up as the destination. And that’s where I’ll be going over the long bank holiday weekend. Everywhere.