For the past two years my colleagues and I have been working remotely. At the beginning there was novelty; the weather was fine and the prolonged lack of distraction was good for body and soul.
But I missed the banter; the social side of work. Then I got used to it. Soon I began to believe that I could happily live in one of those beehive huts on Skellig Michael. I had, in the words of English poet William Blake, learned "to see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour." So I thought.
It helped, of course, that I had no alternative. No going beyond 2km, no pubs, cafes or restaurants. Nothing but the unbearable lightness of being in the supermarket for groceries while masked to breathlessness. Or long walks in the spring/summer/autumn/winter air.
After 23 months of such peace, I was eager to meet colleagues at a get-together organised in a Dublin pub last month. In fact, I haven’t been as excited since discovering one Christmas years ago that Santy Claus knew my mother.
What I hadn't expected was to be reminded of Churchill.
It was so good to see everyone and to be in a crowded pub again that, intoxicated by the atmosphere, I flitted from colleague to colleague catching up and – here I squirm – telling them how much I’d loved their recent work.
I mean, who does that? On reflection, it felt as unacceptable as praising a sibling. I’d do anything for family/colleagues, but I won’t do that!
But, I was soon brought to ground with the force of an unexpected rugby tackle. When ordering a round, I rediscovered I was dealing with the rudest bar staff in Ireland.
Churchill came to mind and his comment how, after the great conflagration of the first World War, “we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.”
Yes, millions may have died in the pandemic with a worldwide trauma in its wake, but the unsurpassed rudeness of bar staff in that pub remains constant.
Constant, from Latin constantem, for "stable, steadfast, unshakeable".
inaword@irishtimes.com
