I took a deep, heavy breath, and listened as my lungs rose in my chest like two hot-air balloons filled with porridge. Through the bay windows of the departure gates, airplanes dipped and buzzed along the runways like crested dragonflies, their wings laden with promise and possibility.  I gazed blankly out at them, over them, through them, beyond the airport, all the way back to the home we’d left behind nary an hour before, where I imagined our beds were still holding the warm imprints of our bodies.

I strode to where I could get a better view of the departures’ screen, a spot in which I’d anxiously hovered at least twelve times over the last six minutes, each time wearing the same look of crushing disappointment upon re-absorbing the news that our flight to Belfast wasn’t any less delayed than it had been the previous minute.

Our entire holiday – which wasn’t really a holiday at all, more of a day-trip with delusions of grandeur – was in danger of crashing to the ground. And I know that’s not an ideal analogy to be banding about in relation to an airport.

I felt like crying. I felt like jumping up and down like a giant angry toddler, and shaking my fists at the empty heavens above, willing the gods into existence just so I could smash them out of it again. I felt like tobogganing down one of the baggage chutes, retrieving a golf-club from the spaghetti’ed intestines of the airport’s conveyer belts, climbing back up and smashing the departure screen like a pinata. I felt like punching a hole through the wall of the airport; hell, knocking a hole through time itself: all the better to reach back and grab my own throat just before the point of no return of this cursed plan’s inception; to choke myself out before I had the chance to press ‘Proceed to Check-out’ on Ryanair’s booking app, then leaving a note for my younger self for once he’d regained consciousness, in which I pleaded with him to spend the money on ten trips to McDonalds instead.

I looked down at my two kids, Jack, 9, and Christopher, 7, wedged into those uncomfortable plastic seats, and smiled weakly at them. They were staring down into the comforting unrealities of their gaming consoles, oblivious to the great gamble in which we were all currently tumbling like dice in a cup.

After a shit couple of years – all the shitter for having masqueraded as something pure and sanguine – I’d wanted to do something incontrovertibly nice for my kids.

And I’d failed.

So much had gone wrong already, and we’d barely even reached the airport.

My plan to save money by parking for free in the Ingliston Park and Ride (a mere minute’s tram ride from the airport) had already back-fired. We’d arrived at the tram-stop just after half past eight, and hopped aboard the first tram that appeared without first securing tickets from the main ticket office. I hadn’t wanted to dilly-dally and risk being held up in airport security. I know I should’ve checked the revised departure times on my phone as soon as I’d pulled into the Park & Ride car-park, but I was in the grip of panicked tunnel-vision, and I didn’t think the universe, having already fucked quite considerably with our trip, was going to fuck with me that morning – even though I’d become one of its favourite fuckees, with my own loyalty card and everything.

Although the journey between Park & Ride and airport was finger-click short, there was apparently plenty of time for an officious little ticket-collector – who looked like Nick from the Handmaid’s Tale – to accost us and make us pay the all-day, full-route price of £15.50 as a penalty for not pre-buying the tickets at the station. I tried to appeal to his humanity, but when I realised he didn’t have any I went on to bait and berate him instead.

I turned to the kids with a cold smile: “We’ll have to remember to thank this guy when we run out of the small amount of money we’re taking with us on our holiday today.”

He cast his head down and let his eyes fall to the floor of the tram. “I don’t make the prices,” he grumbled.

Et tu, Nick! You never would have done this to June if she was trying to get some kids out of Gilead, you favourite-playing fascist!

“Thank you, Mr Jobsworth,” I said, as I beeped my bank-card on his hand-held debit device.

Horrifically, if I’d realised the flight had been delayed we could’ve comfortably walked to the terminal and it would’ve cost us nothing. This delay, though, had the potential to mushroom over the day and cost me a lot more than £15.50.

I vaguely remembered from my own days working at the airport that one plane sometimes goes back and forth on the same route all day long, meaning that if it’s delayed in the morning – and it fails to make up time – then it might be delayed on the final leg of its journey, too.

And if that happened to us – if our return flight left Belfast even a little later than scheduled – then we might arrive back in Edinburgh later than two in the morning, which is precisely the time that Edinburgh City Council locks down the Park & Ride, and sends tow trucks for any vehicles still lingering within its limits. And that eventuality would cost a lot more than £15.50 to rectify.

I was desperate. So desperate that I actually sat back down on the departure lounge seats and prayed. Not in the conventional way, you understand; no, it would take a much more extreme foxhole to snare this old atheist with the business end of a halo. Instead, I did the modern, secular, sci-fi wi-fi equivalent of praying to god: I bemoaned my fate in a publicly-posted Facebook status. All that was left to do after that was to wait impatiently for a sign from above that I knew would probably never come.

I mean, what the hell was I expecting?

“Hey Jamie, Mark Zuckerberg here: that’s me just putting the finishing touches to a Star Trek-style transporter capable of beaming you and the kids across time, space and reality. Be with you in a jiffy.”

“Hey Jamie, it’s Gandalf. How do you fancy travelling to Northern Ireland on the back of a giant eagle? It’s on its way, pal.”

Never-the-less, my eyes were ping-ponging between the departures’ screen and my own phone.

Watching. Waiting.

Hoping.

I reasoned that if a pointless appeal couldn’t help, then it surely couldn’t hurt. I tried to resist thinking the words, ‘At least it can’t get any worse,’ because I always find that saying things like that is the equivalent of waving a matador’s cloak at the angry, flaring nostrils of the universe.

And although I don’t really believe in fate and mysticism, I saw no sense in making the universe any angrier than it already appeared.

The unsinkable trip

It had been a simple plan with no frills, and a singular objective: take the kids to the Titanic Museum in Belfast. What could possibly go wrong? (See ‘Get any worse, At least it can’t’) As a cynical man who admires irony, I really should’ve seen this one coming.

As I sat there in the airport frowning and fidgeting, and occasionally rising from my seat to pace the departures lounge like an expectant father in Hell’s maternity ward, I couldn’t help but reflect that the curse of the Titanic – one-hundred-and-twelve years after it had originally sank to the bottom of the ocean – had just claimed three new victims. Add us to the ledger alongside the victims of 2023’s imploding submersible, and, worse: all the poor souls who’ve ever suffered through the movie ‘Titanic 2’.

I’d booked our flights to Belfast ten days prior, a finicky bit of fiscal engineering that had necessitated tinkering with times and prices to ensure maximum time spent in Northern Ireland against minimum spend. We were very much destined to be third-class passengers on this Titanic-themed voyage: there would be no overnight stays in a proper ‘cabin’; no opulent dining options for lunch and dinner. But, hopefully, no being chased around Belfast at the end of our trip by a vengeful Billy Zane, either.

Return flights for all three of us came to £60 through Ryanair, provided we exited Edinburgh at 10:25 and bade bye-bye to Belfast at 23:55 later that night. For reasons of belt-tightening, I’d already ruled out both an overnight stay in a cheap hotel, and a round-trip on the ferry from Stranraer, so logistically and financially this was our best option. Well, it was our only option. Well… OK, it wasn’t strictly our only option, but I hadn’t left myself enough time in which to strike up a friendship with an agreeable millionaire who owned a helicopter.

[Lesson learned, though. I’ve already emailed Noel Edmonds in advance of our next trip, buttering him up by telling him that his little bargain-bin Beelzebub beard in NO way makes him resemble a camp baddie from a 1950s American TV sci-fi serial, and that his belief in cosmic ordering in NO way makes him seem like the sort of dead-eyed mental-case who keeps a sex dungeon in his basement. How could he fail to be charmed by that level of patter? I’m confident that his helicopter’s in the bag for next time. And if all else fails, I’ll offer to sweeten the deal with a week-long residency in his dungeon dressed as Mr Blobby.]

I’d hired us a car for the day, too. Not quite as fast or as versatile as a helicopter, granted, but it meant we’d have a lot more freedom and flexibility in the face of our time pressures – plus there’d be somewhere to sleep if the kids got too tired near the end of the day. Despite the long slog ahead of us it was all going to be worth it just to see the happiness in their eyes.

A watery rave – Why we love the Titanic

Over the last year or so we’ve devoured all sorts of memorabilia, entertainment and reference material relevant to the Titanic disaster, a veritable banquet of books, movies, articles, and YouTube videos (added the word ‘veritable’ in case you thought we were actually sitting down to eat these things). We’re all fascinated by the ship and its doomed voyage, but it’s little Christopher who loves it more than any of us combined, to the point of near obsession. I once sent him to school with a pack of contemporaneous reproductions of Titanic-themed adverts, tickets, brochures, newspaper cuttings and posters, and he swaggered in there with his cellophane bag of sexy facts like some time-travelling, rock-star Jesus.

I don’t know why the mass-drowning of hundreds of people on a fast-splintering cruise-ship in a freezing-cold sea scattered with the screams of the dying should hold such treasured appeal for our family, and millions like us around the world, but it does – the weird sickos that we are.

I guess, on some level, we’re drawn to the Titanic because we recognise ourselves in its stories. More than a century has passed, but the widening gaps between the haves and the have-nots – and the impacts and implications those gaps have on justice, fairness, opportunity and mortality rates – are still depressingly familiar. Maybe some of our collective fascination is down to schadenfreude; maybe some of it is like watching a horror movie: that thrilling feeling of controlled helplessness and vicarious terror we get when we’re viewing extinction from the safety of the gallery. The ‘Thank Christ it’s them instead of us’ effect. Bono knows what I’m talking about.

Well, on this trip, it was us – if you’ll excuse the mild hyperbole present in the claim that our experience was in any way analogous to drowning in the Atlantic.

I’d tried to book the museum tickets at the same time as I’d booked the flights, but my work’s computer had blocked the museum’s website for security reasons, perhaps because ‘Titanic’ has the word ‘tit’ smuggled inside of it, and the algorithm was worried I was trying to organise an afternoon for my family in an Irish titty bar. Even though advanced booking wasn’t strictly necessary, I didn’t want to leave any margin for error.

So, three days before departure I accessed the museum’s website again, this time on a different laptop, only to discover that every single day of the following week, including our departure date, had an unsightly ‘X’ scored against it. There were no tickets available. My first impulse was to panic. So was my second and third. Maybe even my eighth and ninth, too. They’d sold out! I’d left everything too god damned late, exactly as I’d feared, and now I’d sunk the whole trip! The swear word I hollered into the heavens at that point was loud enough to ring a bell in a cathedral’s belfry –one built on the surface of Mars.

My strongest reactions always come in response to things that are – or I imagine to be – my fault. I always fear, and on some level expect, to a) fuck things up, and b) get punished severely for it; a lovely little throw-back to my childhood that sometimes sees me not doing things in the first place simply to avoid the deleterious stress of a) and b).

After some mantra-like ranting and frenzied pacing around the house – alternating long strings of fucks with occasional super-strength, bell-ringing fucks like the one I used as a warmer-upper – a calmer, quieter voice started hushing and shushing me from within. Its insistence, if not its volume, eventually broke through the bullshit, and I sat myself down – breathing deeply and deliberately – until clear-headed sanity reigned once more in the kingdom of my conscious mind.

I phoned the Titanic Museum, and what I learned instantly robbed me of both panic and fury: Storm Kathleen had ripped some of the roof from the museum, and now it would be closed until at least Tuesday while they assessed and repaired the damage. I could live with that on the grounds that a), this wasn’t my fault (an act of ‘god’, not an act of clod), and, b), there was still a chance everything would turn out okay. There was hope. A slim scintilla of it, yes, because we were scheduled to fly out on the Tuesday, but hope nonetheless.

It was quickly squished like a bug. On the night before our departure the museum’s website said that the storm damage had been more extensive than feared, and the building wouldn’t be re-opening until at least the Thursday.

I refused to let rage re-enter my lexicon, and committed to making as much lemonade as possible from this rolling conveyor belt of lemons. With the help of my common-law wife, or Google as she’s sometimes known, I re-modelled our itinerary. We would visit the Giant’s Causeway and the Carrick-A-Rede rope-bridge instead. OK, so it wasn’t the Titanic museum, but those two locations are hardly poor consolation prizes, especially the Giant’s Causeway, which is arguably a mini wonder of the world in its own right. And the Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge lets you walk between two craggy islands over a rickety bridge suspended one-hundred feet above the angry ocean, a death-defying activity you just don’t get to experience on a package holiday to Mallorca (unless you count ordering a chicken and egg salad in one of its filthy-kitchened restaurants). Besides, we could always return to Northern Ireland in the summer, and visit the museum then.

The success of this revised plan – which now involved a reasonably long drive from Belfast International airport to the northern coast of the country – was now subject to much tighter time pressures than before, and the clock was in danger of running out before we’d even boarded the plane. Having one hour and twenty minutes less in which to travel, eat, explore and enjoy was almost enough to make proceeding with the trip pointless. Almost…

The bigger problem was that the delay was by no means finite. What the departure screens had promised us one hour and twenty minutes hence wasn’t a guaranteed revised departure time, merely more information. And in the absence of concrete information about the near-future I was fast approaching the point at which I’d have to pull the plug on the back-up plan, and break my children’s hearts a second time.

I confessed to my first-born, Jack, how precariously our fortunes were balanced, though I phrased it rather less pretentiously than that. I figured I’d spare Christopher the emotional turmoil, on the grounds that he was the younger and thus more vulnerable and volatile child, but it was also because I knew that Christopher was more likely to ask eighty-six-thousand follow-up questions, and, right in that moment, I just couldn’t be fucked with that.

“If the flight looks like it’s going to be delayed any more than it already is, Jack – and I’m so sorry about this – we’re going to have to cut our losses and go back to the car – just walk away from the whole trip. We’d pretty much just be flying to Northern Ireland to drive up to the coast and straight back again without having time to see anything, and that would be a waste of a day.”

He pursed his lips, and I could see disappointment clouding over his eyes, but he nodded with as much muted understanding as he could muster.

“But I promise you, if that happens, we’re driving straight to Edinburgh Zoo, and we’ll spend the day there. We’ll still have a fun day.”

He smiled at that, which made me smile, too, because, really, on one level, what did it matter what we did or where we went? OK, I’d be miffed if I had to lose the £100 I’d already committed to flights and car hire, but however the day unfolded, whatever way you looked at it, the chances of my kids smiling much more often than they frowned were virtually one hundred per cent. And those were brilliant odds. I smiled as some optimism slow-released into my brain.

Then my phone pinged.

It was my friend who worked at the airport.

“Give me your two outbound flight numbers,” he said. “I think I can help.”

Hope takes flight

Even though my friend was on holiday abroad with his family he was able to remotely access a raft of live flight information. He told me where our delayed plane was, and when it would likely land – which, mercifully, thanks to an accelerated 21-minute turn-around between landing and take-off to make up for the delay, would be no later than the one hour and twenty minutes we’d already endured.

Best of all, there would be no incremental delay, because the plane taking us home would be entirely different from the one flying us out.

It looked like Northern Ireland was going to happen.

Fuck you, universe. Fuck you right in your swirling, multi-galaxial eye!

I wasn’t just smiling, I was cracking jokes again. Laughing. So were the kids. The relief was so palpable it was almost visible. This must be how gamblers feel, I thought to myself. Except I wasn’t gambling for kicks or to get rich: just to be able to do nice little things like this every once in a while.

“An hour ago it looked like we were doomed, and we were all long faces and misery,” I said to the kids. “But here we are, grinning and about to go on holiday. A million other things might go wrong once we reach Northern Ireland – and we may yet get our car towed from the Park and Ride in the early hours of tomorrow morning – but right here, right now, in this moment? The gamble’s paid off. And we’re winning, boys. Now who’s ready to have a fun day?”

It was a rhetorical question, but they responded in the affirmative. Our spirits were soaring so high we were airborne before the flight even left the ground. We wise-cracked our way through take-off, giggling and laughing so much at each other’s daft jokes that I forgot how terrified I was of flying. And by the time I remembered, I didn’t care. We were going to be okay. I was in charge now, not the universe. I leaned back in my seat and smiled. I laughed at the kids’ nervous, giddy giggles as the plane began accelerating and ascending; marvelled at their wide-eyed wonder as they gazed over the wing at the clouds. I watched as they wore my peace of mind across their little features like sunbeams.

Something about the world makes sense when you’re that high in the air. I think it’s the distance; the size everything looks. Everything is shrunk down. It’s all so far away. You feel like the opposite of a god, but no less mighty: powerful precisely because you’re so powerless. Nothing can hurt you up there. Sure, if the plane goes down, and once it’s landed again, things can hurt you. But up there? Everything makes perfect sense, precisely because nothing needs to.

At the car hire desk at Belfast International, I landed with a bump. “Didn’t you read the small print?” asked the guy.

Anyone who’s ever known me would never have had to ask me that question. Of course I didn’t.

“If you don’t have a credit card to hold open against the hire, then you have to pay for insurance for the day, and that’ll be £40.”

Of course it fucking will.

The universe appeared to have suspended hostilities while we were in mid-air, but now that we were back on the ground it had resumed throwing punches. Plus ca change. Different city, same shitty.

“And we’re going to have to put a freeze on £200, which we’ll return back to you within 10 days of the car being returned without damage.”

I sighed in weary resignation, and shrugged my consent. Fine, sure, take the money. Take all of it. What choice did I have?

Financially – not to mention psychologically and emotionally – the last four years have been like a gameshow presided over by a maniacal, swivel-eyed psychopath: Blockbusters meets Squid Game. In early 2020 I got a new job near Edinburgh, so I splashed out on a second-hand car with the finance spread over 5 years. A week later, my marriage was dead. As I was still working my notice period I pleaded to stay with my current employer, who are based in my home-town, a request to which they acquiesced on the grounds that it saved them the ball-ache of advertising and filling my position.  I asked for and was granted reduced hours, on a temporary basis, so I could deal with any unexpected complications from the fall-out of the family break-up, and especially to be on hand to collect the kids from school. Then Covid happened, and what gains were made from not having to travel anywhere were lost by the company not being able to raise my wages and hours back to what they’d been pre-Covid for a year or more. I relied more and more on my credit card, and a loan, and an overdraft: not to coat myself in luxury, but so I could afford both basics and bills, and things like day-trips with, and birthday and Christmas presents for, the boys. I have them with me half of every month, but I get no extra money crisis payments, governmental relief, towards their upkeep – and as much as the greater part of me thinks, ‘Well, that’s the way it should be’, it’s very hard indeed sometimes.

Then the recession happened, and, as we all know, the price of energy and petrol and food, not to mention my mortgage, insurances, loan and credit card interest, sky-rocketed, leaving me – and I’m sure millions like me – unsure how to meet our financial obligations. Fast forward to now, and each new month arrives hammering on the door of my heart and bank account like a mafia money lender. We don’t appear yet to have reached the ceiling, or indeed the basement, of this global recession. Every other day yet another bill goes up, another essential appliance breaks, or another seasonal bill falls due. The sensible thing to do would be to sit in a hermetically-sealed room existing on rations for the next three or four years, but when you want to live your life and expand your children’s horizons, and you’re Scottish with a short life-expectancy to boot, the sensible thing isn’t so much an option as it is a sentence.

At the end of our rope

We immediately headed north upon leaving the airport, up single-track roads flanked by fields on both sides, a semi-rural uniformity only occasionally interrupted by pockmarks of retail and industry.

Driving through Northern Ireland for the first time was like driving through an alternate version of Scotland that only differed from its mother universe by the subtlest of degrees. We could’ve been driving north to Aberdeen from Brechin or Laurencekirk if not for the light pepperance of petrol stations with unfamiliar sounding names, like Maxol, Applegreen and Solo. I tested their names in my mouth like they were the Taj Mahal. Everything was alien yet familiar. Exotic yet commonplace. It was like I’d woken up in a universe where the only differences were that door-handles were two-inches higher from the ground, or Tina Turner was called Bina Burner.

We stopped at a small shop for a quick snack. There were unfamiliar sights on the shelves, including Tayto crisps, which I gather are a big deal on both sides of the Irish border, but aren’t particularly well-known on the Scottish mainland. The price tags adorning the shops’ products were familiar, though: I was heartened to see that everything was as reassuringly extortionate in small grocery shops here as they were back home.

We passed signs for supermarkets further up the road, but as we’d arrived in Northern Ireland later than advertised we were now in danger of being late for our booking at the Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge, so I decided to push on, reasoning we could stop somewhere for something to eat later. I didn’t appreciate at the time just how empty of produce choice and people this particular stretch of road would prove to be.

Before long, there was nothing on either side of us but farmland and rugged rural wilderness. About fifteen minutes from our destination I started to see signs for The Dark Hedges, a road fringed by trees with dense, gnarly branches that had often doubled as the road to Kings’ Landing in the TV series Game of Thrones, and I thought, ‘What the hell, it’s only a two-mile detour, and it might be cool’.

It wasn’t.

Half of the trees had since been chopped down, and there was nothing else in that long, sloping stretch of road that marked it out from any of the other roads nearby. Were it not for the top end of the road being filled with Asian tourists, and the far-off end of the road being swollen with distant figures marching slowly towards us as though returning from war, I never would have known that we were standing in a scene from one of my favourite TV shows. Well, former favourite TV shows. The final clutch of seasons rather sullied my assessment of the series as a whole. I loved Game of Thrones as Jonny Depp no doubt loved Amber Heard, until the day she punched him in the face and took a massive shit on his bed.

In any case, the kids were entirely non-plussed to discover they were standing on TV history, especially since they had no idea what Game of Thrones even was. Even when I managed to find a relevant scene from the show on YouTube the locale looked so drastically different that their eyes couldn’t have glazed over more had I shown them a Ted Talk on 15^th century Chinese farmers. So, we left, as we’d once left Brookside Close in Liverpool (“Just stand next to the sign, trust me, this will be an awesome bloody picture!”): with my kids feeling underwhelmed and mildly bemused.

Somewhere on the road from The Dark Hedges to Carrick-a-Rede the scenery shifted from farmland to coastal. The sea opened up before us like Poseidon’s picnic blanket. The coastline had no right to look so majestic. It was at once both improbably tropical and primevally rugged.

The ocean – azure-tinged and topped with an oil-slick of forest green -shimmered below the bluish-grey sky, already starting to grow dark with clouds. The brown and lilac cliffs, soft in colour, hard in shape, looked like they’d been painted by a landscape artist of inestimable skill and passion. I actually stopped the car for a few minutes, and stared at the view slack-jawed, now and then cajoling the kids to appreciate the wonder around them, which, in fairness, they did.

It was a beautiful day to be defying the odds and gods by teetering perilously along a rickety rope-bridge. I stopped first at a nearby local shop (for local people) to get the kids another snack and a drink – forsaking my own thirst and hunger on account of the price – then nosed the car down the hill towards the car-park at Carrick-a-Rede. A lady in a hi-viz jacket who worked for the National Trust waved us to a stop.

“Good afternoon, sir…” she said, in her beautiful Northern Irish brogue. What a tuneful, melodious lilt the accent has when it isn’t being chewed and mangled through the mouth of someone bulldoggish like the late Reverend Ian Paisley. It’s a genuine joy for the ears to hear… “I’m afraid we’ve been experiencing forty-five mile-per-hour winds today, so we’ve had to close the bridge.”

Like I said, I’ve always fucking hated that accent…

“You’re still welcome to go down and park, and have a wee wander along the coastal path,” she said apologetically. I smiled and thanked her, then tried to avoid meeting the boys’ gaze in the thin strip of the driver’s mirror. I wasn’t ready to experience the feedback loop of disappointment that was poised to pyoing between our pupils like Forest Gump-propelled ping-pong balls.

“I’m sorry, dudes,” I told them. And I was. “I guess our back-up plan has fallen through, too. Who knew we needed a back-up plan for our back-up plan’s back-up plan.”

As I parked up and we prepared for our consolation prize, a curmudgeonly thought cursed, moped and kicked its way through my brain: “It’s health and safety gone mad, so it is. A little bit of wind and the whole bloody country comes to a stand-still.”

My first clue that this was a case of sour grapes mixed with morbid clinging came when I realised how difficult it was to open the car door. It was like God himself was leaning against it. The second clue came when we stepped out of the car – staggered and buffeted, more accurately – and I realised that if I tied string to my children’s legs I could’ve flown them like kites. And I’d have taken off and been dragged dangling into the stratosphere right behind them. “I guess the National Trust’s risk assessment was pretty bang on,” I thought to myself, as the wind tried to steal the teeth from my mouth. And they’re all still attached to my gums!

The walk along the coast to the site of the rope bridge – now ironically roped off for safety reasons – was like a workout for my adrenal gland. My mind was alive with myriad doomsday scenarios, inspired by the kids’ over-exuberance and cloth ears, each mini nightmare involving them stumbling, leaping, flying or toppling over the cliffs to their dooms before I could catch them. It was a bracing walk, filled with beautiful sights, but I couldn’t relax, plus I was tormented by this latest in a long line of disappointments, even though the kids didn’t seem all that bothered to have lost their chance to recreate a stunt from an Indiana Jones movie.

We spent about an hour battling the elements up and down the coastal path, then headed for The Giant’s Causeway, our replacement headline act. “Given how the day’s been going so far, I wonder if a meteor will have wiped it out by the time we arrive”, I thought to myself, only half-seriously.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

For some bizarre reason I imagined that we’d be able to explore the Giant’s Causeway unfettered by officials, and unbothered by fellow tourists. Because that’s normally the case when it comes to world famous landmarks at UNESCO World Heritage Sites that are administered by national historical and environmental preservation charities, isn’t it?

So I was shocked when we pulled into a car park clogged with coaches, next to a giant glass-fronted visitor’s centre that was swarming with people, all scurrying in and out the front door like foraging ants. For some reason I imagined that the causeway would stretch for lonely, endless miles in either direction, accessible to all at any time day or night. But then I remembered that people are assholes.

If the powers-that-be had allowed unrestrained access to the Giant’s Causeway it would long ago have become the Lost Causeway. Hordes of drunkards and sex cultists would’ve stretched used condoms over the hexagonal rocks, and lounged about naked and encrusted on the volcanic rocks like spent walruses. Plucky delinquents would’ve spray-painted giant penises on the basalt cliffs. Some ‘artist’ would’ve defiled the area with garish colours and obscure runes, believing their entitlement to expression more important than the preservation of a world-wonder for generations to come. A band of overzealous auctioneers with pneumatic drills would’ve removed as many hexagonal pillars as their white vans could hold and sold them on the dark web version of E-Bay.

So, I understood – however grudgingly – the need for containment, protection and preservation, but that didn’t stop me from feeling crestfallen when I realised we’d only have an hour to explore the site before it locked up for the day. If only we’d come here as soon as the rope-bridge booking had fallen through, or even directly from the airport. Hindsight, though, as they say, is 20/20, whereas my planning skills are 5/20, and my luck is approximately (-5000)/20.

We scored some cheap, cheerful sandwiches, chocolate and fruit in the centre’s café before boarding the subsidised bus down and along the short, winding road to the shore. I quickly worked out why I’d formed the mistaken belief that the causeway would be deserted. Many of the snap-happy people swarming the rocks were almost performing acrobatics in their zeal to make their pictures look empty of human life. We weren’t immune this impulse, either. Some of our photos look like they were taken on the surface of some desolate alien sea-world containing only the three of us.

The kids adored this strange place, at once otherworldly and prehistoric. They spent their time leaping, climbing, exploring rock-pools, and whooping with glee and wonder. Jack wise-cracked his way across the terrain, dubbing some of the giant rocks he found ‘lava testicles’; Christopher struck up such an intense friendship with a little Japanese boy that he was almost adopted by his family. You know, the usual.

We’d cooed over the Giant’s Causeway in one of our bed-time books, Lonely Planet’s 50 Strangest Places in the World, and it was magical to find ourselves standing within one of its pages. Next stop: the Waitomo Glow-worm caves in New Zealand!

[checks bank statements] Stonehenge! [checks bank statements again] Our own living room!

About fifteen minutes before the departure of the final bus back to the Visitor’s Centre, my neck, shoulders and stomach all united against me in somatic defiance. I could barely move my head without a jolt of pain searing down my side in a south-easterly pattern. I felt a cloying, sickly gurgle burrow its way through my abdomen.

Two things had happened: one, after a day of gobbling sparse nuggets of convenience foods to keep our itinerary from clogging, my metabolism was already on the back-foot. A recently and hastily devoured egg sandwich from the cafe, wedge-like in its construction, had entered my gut with the force of a coke-fuelled Mike Tyson. And, two: after my large frame had been crammed into a tiny hire-car for a couple of hours I’d then proceeded to dart, dance, and hopskotch with the kids over the causeway’s hexagonal foot-holds like Lionel Blair on sulph, and it was time to pay the price for that (hell of a lot of celebrity drug-use similes in this paragraph, eh? Like Stephen King on crack).

In the fruit-machine of my minds’ eye the same options kept spinning then locking into place, each in turn: YOU. ARE. OLD. Jackpot! Unfortunately, this particular fruit-machine pays out not in money, but in the grim realisation that almost everything I used to take for granted about my bodily activities – from the simple act of eating a sandwich, to hopping – has the potential to be listed on my death certificate.

We left the Causeway just before closing time, and I drove us to White Park Bay, one more spot of natural splendour before we had to enter the final phase of our trip.

After being fleeced by a fella at the juice bar that overlooked the bay from the top car-park (sounds exotic, doesn’t it?), the kids bounded down the vast, sweeping slope towards the beach with me staggering behind them, feeling every clunk of the journey in my bones. They followed the steep and winding path for a short time before abandoning the more regimented route in favour of scrambling up and over grassy juts of hillside, and sprinting over reedy knuckles of dune.

Below, the beach was majestic; the sea susurrating and dark; the sky gently dimming in hue around us, like mood lighting set by God. The sounds of my children larking and shrieking their way in loops and swirls across the flat expanse of sand rose into, and seemed to fill, the cool evening sky. Their happy racket joined with a chorus of cawing gulls, an open-air symphony that would ordinarily have had me smiling in closed-eyed reverence at the beautiful fragility of time and existence.

But the movements and sensations within my own head and body were putting the world around me out of phase. I wasn’t feeling any better since my funny turn at the Giant’s Causeway. My head was heavy and fuzzy. My legs were weak and deadened. A metallic tang covered my tongue and throat like rust. I couldn’t focus, both literally and metaphorically. Was I going to collapse face down in the sand in this wind-swept bay in some desolate strip of Northern Ireland, leaving my kids’ scurrying for help alone through the barren dunes and hillsides? Was I going to buckle and collapse under the weight of my own hyperbole?

I’m someone who knows what it feels like to malfunction. But even as a veteran of many a mental-health skirmish – most frequently fired from the smoking gun of my own adrenal gland – my body hasn’t felt my own these past two years. It’s an ill-fitting alien avatar; a flesh-rendered walking coffin.

Even adjusting for adverse experiences in childhood, middle-age, bereavement, life-long issues with interoception and a trauma-inspired Holmesian-level scrutiny of the external world, big changes at work, dabbles with substances both legal and otherwise, financial worries, and relationship breakdown, my body’s behaviour has been terrifyingly unprecedented, the most extreme manifestations of which only abated very recently: muscle quakes, shakes, twitches and tremors; strange tingling in the skin and brain; weeks and months of pain and vomiting; extreme weight loss; racing, feral thoughts; bizarre perceptual anomalies that weren’t any less perturbing for me being conscious of them; weeks on end of convulsive crying; severe weakness, hopelessness and suicidal thoughts; even a few occasions where my perceptions were fine but my legs suddenly collapsed beneath me as if someone had flipped an ‘off’ switch.

It’s taken me a long time to piece everything together, but over the last six months I’ve taken a forensic approach to outlining and evaluating the patterns and sequences of my life and the people in it, building up a clear – and in most cases cast-iron – picture of the root cause of these maladies. And you can bet your fucking bottom Baby Reindeer I’ll be expanding and expounding upon all of this in written form in the months to come, but for now it’s enough for you to know that recently I’ve been more worried than ever before about my general state of health.

“Get a fucking hold of yourself,” I growled at… well, myself.

I tried to reassure myself that I was probably just tired, malnourished and whirling with worry. But even if I wasn’t – even if something more sinister and frightening was unfolding inside of my body – panicking about it wasn’t going to help. No, if dying was on the cards, then it would just have to bloody well wait until we got home. There was no alternative.

“We’ve got to go kids,” I shouted above the wind, two fingers held to the pulse on my left wrist. “Get a fucking hold of yourself,” I said to myself again, angrily releasing my wrist from my own loose grip.

I trudged back up the hillside like something out of a Wilfred Owen poem, with the kids whooping and laughing at my side. Occasionally they broke their temporary ceasefire with each other to revert to full ‘Itchy and Scratchy’ mode, but with rather more girning and moaning, and rather less inventive violent artistry, than that comparison implies. We were all pretty starving by this point, so I programmed the phone’s sat nav to take us to Corelaine, the nearest medium-sized town.

We sat in a McDonalds, then picked up some fruit, juice and snacks from a nearby Tescos. That’s the best thing about holidaying in a different country, isn’t it? The opportunity to immerse yourself in a completely different culture…

I felt marginally better for having eaten something, even if it was mainly beige configurations of salt, fat and sugar. It was far too early to be heading to the airport – where we’d find ourselves trapped like Tom Hanks in The Terminal – so, keeping on the airport theme, we headed to the nearby Jet Centre, an entertainment complex that housed arcade machines, a cinema, and crazy golf.

On the way there I lamented everything that had gone wrong on, and with, our trip: the wasted opportunities, the failures, the disappointments. We’d missed out on the Titanic museum, then the rope bridge, then we’d only gotten to spend an hour at a mini wonder of the world, and finally, thanks to my internal maladies, had had to cut short our visit to the beautiful White Park Bay. And to top it all off we’d had the ‘Divorced’ Dad’s McSpecial™ for dinner.

“I’m sorry, guys,” I told them, starting to feel emotional, “Today has been a bit of a disaster and hasn’t turned out the way it was supposed to. I’m sorry if it hasn’t been all that fun. I promise I’ll make it up to you.”

“But, dad,” said little Chris from the back seat as we pulled into a parking space, “It was a great time, because we were with you.”

He actually made me leak. Then bubble. Before I knew it I was – and my apologies for the emotional deflection masquerading as misogynistic toxic masculinity – crying like a bitch. I gave them hugs in the car-park, but called Christopher to me, and squatted down so I was eye-level with him. I placed my hands on his shoulders and regarded him with a twin-set of still-watery eyes.

“Thank you for saying that, Christopher. Daddy needed to hear that. Especially since all I seem to do is get on your cases about stuff.”

These last couple of years I feel like I’ve subordinated my own needs and those of the kids to other people’s, undoubtedly one person in particular, at high – in my case almost irreversible – cost to all of us. Instead of cherishing the precious bond I’ve always felt, nurtured, and worked hard to maintain with my kids I’ve been too preoccupied with filling the unfillable maw of longing, need for belonging, fear and self-doubt that’s always yawned in my soul by latching on to any unhealed, unsuitable or malevolent person that’s ever smiled or whispered promises in my direction. In my time I’ve been both villain and victim, but my kids will always be victims if I can’t make better choices. For an ostensibly smart guy, I’m thick as fuck when it comes to courting and recognising happiness.

I’ve made wrong choices, stupid choices, selfish choices. I’ve fallen and not known how to get up; I’ve not always been able to support the boys emotionally as well as I should or used to. Sometimes I do things out of fear, like book Titanic-themed day trips on a disorganised whim, in case I never have money again, or their mum takes them first and they love her more for it. It’s not some desire on my part to be the best or trounce the competition. It’s about not being the worst. And I know it’s bullshit as I think it, and even as I write it, but sometimes there’s a wide chasm between the mind and the heart.

Sometimes I don’t feel good enough for them; that I’m not always the best, in the moment, at showing them I understand their complex intellectual and emotional psi-scapes: especially important when they’re both clearly neurodivergent in some way. Jack, with his towering intellect; fast-connecting brain; dark sense of humour; tendency to withdraw, settle, and self-flagellate; and his large but fragile ego. Chris, with his sincere and loving but reactive and volatile personality; facial tics; immersive fantasy life; tendency to act as if driven by a motor; his inability to listen or hear even when you tell him the same thing many, many times, straight  to his face, and he just keeps doing it or saying it until you snap, and then he fixes you with a look that shows he’s genuinely as shocked as you are by the way things have turned out. These quirks, qualities and descriptions – combined and separately – could just as easily refer to their dad. I should understand them better, respond to them better, because they’re a part of me, and I’m a part of them.

I hugged Christopher tight, then hugged Jack again for good measure. We finished the day with a game of crazy golf, and a great deal of fun and laughter. On the way back to the airport the kids managed to snatch some short bursts of sleep. By the time I’d roused them, dropped off the hire car, and herded them through security, they were like extras from The Walking Dead. It was an hour and a half until our flight was due to depart, and it would be departing – I noted with a victorious smile – exactly on time. Fuck you, Universe. Fuck you, Edinburgh City Council!

We found a Costa where we were able to satisfy our diametrically opposed needs: I needed to stay awake; the kids needed to sleep. I found them spots among the clusters of waiting and sleeping people where they could kip comfortably until we were called to the gate. They were spread apart from each other, but close to me, and both within my direct line of sight.

Christopher eyed the lady who sat across from the chair he’d chosen as his sleeping chariot with suspicion. “What, you think she’s going to steal your hat as you’re sleeping?” I asked him with a smile. “Actually, I think she might.” He smiled at that, and so did the lady.  “I’ll be sitting just there, buddy,” I said, pointing to a stool about ten feet across from him. “You’re safe. Get some sleep.” I placed the hat over his eyes in the same manner as a budgie owner drapes a towel over its cage to simulate nightfall.

Jack fell asleep sprawled across a long stretch of seating in between a blonde lady and an Asian man, both of whom were strangers to him and to each other, but who nevertheless formed a temporary family with him at their centre, even catching him and re-orienting him when he shoogled off the edge of the seating on to the floor while he was sleeping.

I watched over them both as I glugged coffee and chatted with a fellow night-owl, a stranger who became a friend then a stranger again. When it was time to head for the flight I scooped up the kids in my arms. Jack was sufficiently awake to drape himself over my back, hanging on for dear life around my shoulders, while Christopher, still stubbornly refusing consciousness, dangled like a dead weight in my arms. A few minutes later – and approximately ninety seconds before my back snapped in half – they were awake (or a close approximation of it), and a-toddling and a-waddling at both sides of me, clutching a hand each.

When we reached Edinburgh, and after a brisk walk to the Park & Ride, we began the short final leg of our journey in the car that hadn’t been towed because, against all odds, everything had worked out alright. I smiled as I drove us home along the deserted motorway. Both kids were quickly asleep, and I thought again about the Titanic.

If the story of that ill-fated ship is an abject lesson in the greed, short-sightedness and callousness of our species then it’s also – just as much, if not more so – an inspiring story about the indomitability of the human spirit. Because there’s always hope – not to mention heroism, love and sacrifice – even in the darkest, most desperate moments of our lives.

I stopped smiling momentarily when I realised I was trivialising the deaths of thousands of people again. Then I caught glimpses of my beautiful children in their car-seats, sleeping deeply and peacefully, and I started smiling again. I realised – in that perfect little moment – that I didn’t give a fuck about the Titanic, myself, or any other living soul on this planet except them.