‘We should really check that,’ I say to my wife about our son’s passport, which we’d suddenly remembered might be going out of date soon. With a sharp dart of sweating horror, I grab it from the drawer and discover it has indeed expired, just two days earlier – and we are due to fly to Dublin in six days. We decide our only option is to book ourselves on to a later ferry instead.
The problem with the ferry is it means six hours of driving through England and Wales. (And if you’re wondering whether our kids were sick during this trip, you’ll be delighted to know that our daughter vomited twice before we’d even reached the M25. Our son, perhaps affected by the miasma, or maybe sensing a deficit in attention, caught up and was himself sick three times, before his sister chimed in with one last spew 20 minutes before we reached the boat, to make it a creditable 3-3 draw.)
Well and truly wiped – in every sense – we stumble onboard with three and a half hours of seafaring ahead of us. Luckily, the ferry itself is great. As a rural Irishman myself, I recognise my people everywhere I look. Almost every male adult here could give you a quote for a horse and a lift to collect it. Moreover, about 80% of the passengers are children en route to sporting tournaments, which adds an air of prestige to proceedings.
Any time spent on a boat reminds one how odd it is that air travel is such a drudge. The latter is, after all, new. The miracle of human flight was solely the province of poets and sorcerers until about a century ago. Two of my grandparents never saw the inside of a plane in their entire lives. Sea travel, by contrast, has been a staple of human existence for at least 50,000 years, and yet its wonders remain intact.
My kids crowd the windows to watch the vast expanse of water surrounding them. We cheer when we see land or another ship somewhere in the distance. There is everywhere the convivial feeling of people making the best of a situation beyond their control, like red-faced holidaymakers drinking it up in a Greek hotel during a power cut.
A man at the bar reacts to my daughter’s crying not with disgust but kindly laughter and asks me to pass a lemonade to his son, the under-15s Taekwondo champion of Kildare. Admittedly, half an hour spent tumbling around the soft play area with 115 shoeless children would have you wondering how often kids wash their feet, but it’s a small price to pay for a mode of transport that gives your irritable brood a decent runaround.
It seems to have ended too quickly, as we tumble downstairs to the car, ready for the last 30 minutes of our journey. As we disembark, we wonder why it is we don’t do this more often. ‘I feel sick,’ says our son, and suddenly we yearn for airport drear.
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Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78