You are never too old to travel .
We’re flying from Dublin to London to see the Abba avatar concert, Voyage, we being me, my mom and my sister, all lifelong fans.
I’m taking it slowly, gently herding these wobbly cats who haven’t been young and sweet and seventeen for a very long time.
It’s my second visit to the show and I’ll make any excuse to go back, to be smiling, to be having fun, to be feeling like a number one again.
Yes, it really is that good.
However, in the taxi to the air port the driver tells me about the apparent scourge of immigration in Ireland – I’m guessing I’m not his problem being a white, middle-aged female immigrant, not a dark-skinned young male immigrant – and that Ireland first needs to look after its own.
How I hate to see you like this, I hum.
“But say anything and you’re called a racist,” he declares.
There is no way you can deny it. I could point out to this Irish man that his own Ireland is a nation of emigrants and how the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself: current ly one million Irish-born people live overseas, representing a fifth of the population, and so it has been since the famine, when a quarter of the nation fled to foreign lands in the hopes of a better life, of prospects, of money, money, money because it’s a rich man’s world.
But I don’t want to talk about the things we’ve gone through – I’ve nothing more to say, no more aces to play. Instead, knowing this conversation all too well because I’ve had a version of it many times, knowing me, knowing him, I just say uh-huh.
Then we land at London City Airport and get into a taxi, and mamma mia, here we go again: the driver tells me about the scourge of immigration into England, except he’s Bangladeshi, heavily accented, an immigrant himself.
However, he arrived as a young man a number of years ago, and he’s married and has children in England.
He’s different, obviously. Whatever. Sing a new song, chiquitito. “Hold onto your handbags,” he warns me in parting.
Uh-huh, I say. I look up.
The sun is still in the sky and shining above you, I think. And I may look like I’m listening to you, but in my head I’m listening to Abba.
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