A few weeks ago, Daughter Number Two did it. After searching for more than eight months, she and her partner finally found an apartment for themselves.
They know that, relatively speaking, they’ve hit the mother lode. An eight-month search – relatively speaking – isn’t that long. The place is roomy, pretty close to Dublin city centre and the rent is astoundingly reasonable. Relatively speaking.
People keep asking them what the secret is: but, of course, there isn’t one. They got it through relentless effort and no small amount of luck. They are thrilled beyond words.
It being the sort of thing dads do, I was enlisted to help them move, stuffing my car to bulging and driving across town. More like edging. It was one of those evenings when the city becomes partially paralysed due to a major event: in this instance one of the Coldplay concerts. The pavements were thronged with people in their best gig-going outfits: 300,000 of them over four nights. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of them were dedicated fans of the band, or if it was more about the adventure: braving the vagaries of Ticketmaster, trying to find a non-exorbitant hotel room. Even if they had never bought a Coldplay song in their lives, enough of Coldplay’s music has been in the ether to be recognisable: to sing along to with thousands of others.
‘When the cinema lights came up, we all hugged, and I wondered why, on this day, the magic worked for me too’
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So, while Croke Park boomed with familiar tunes, we moved in quietly and efficiently, trudging up and down stairs with mirrors and endless black plastic bags. And as I left them, I felt a little envious. There is something sweetly unique about the first night in a new home, when you’re too tired to put everything away. Instead, you get a takeaway and look around: everything brimming with potential. They’ll remember that forever.
The following morning, Herself was up unexpectedly early, to take part in the great online queue for Oasis tickets: an event that has already taken on the same mythic proportions as the death of Elvis or the same-sex marriage referendum. Everyone has a story as to where they were when it happened.
I’m not a fan and wasn’t planning to go, but I became invested as her place clicked down from 150,000 all the way to 47 – when she was bumped off due to “suspicious activity”.
While Googling “Can you sue Ticketmaster for defamation?” I noticed that Herself was gutted. Which was odd because, in a household where we both play a lot of music, never once has Oasis featured. She admitted that part of her desire to go came from FOMO (fear of missing out), but also because Oasis hark back to the Ireland of 30 years ago. Like Coldplay in the first decade of this century, Oasis were just there: playing in the background during the Celtic Tiger. When people would queue for physical tickets, when radio airplay was still important, when there were no mobiles phones, no online poison, when people the age of Daughter Number Two had a reasonable shot at getting a place to live pretty quickly. Turns out that the 1990s weren’t that bad.
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Meanwhile, Daughter Number Two was out of bed and ripping open bags, putting clothes away and discussing what should go where. In 30 years’ time, she will, hopefully, retain all this as a golden memory. Yet I wonder if that memory will come with any soundtrack.
Three decades hence, bands that can mobilise hundreds of thousands of people to come and see them may not exist any more. There will be bands – probably – but the music business is already so fractured that it’s highly unlikely that there will be one to evoke a mass collective memory. Taylor Swift will still be in her 60s, so she might give it a go. Or it might be something more fitting for this generation: get 80,000 people to go to Croker, and look at their phones.