Waking up in the morning is not simple process. My wife and I have a ritual which begins like a Mexican stand off between reality and our undying desire to be paid for staying in bed. Maybe if we could get on some bizarre clinical experiment for sleeping, could our ambition be fulfilled. Instead, every five minutes another one of about 20,000 alarm clocks strategically hidden around our bedroom goes off until our stubbornness caves in, and we end the beautiful dozing I seem to enjoy more than the actual sleeping. We get up, turn off the other 19,995 clocks and listen to serious radio news about the utter serious nature of seriousness. Eventually I get frantic at 8.10am, when it's clear neither of us wants to be late, but also, we haven't displayed the wherewithal to just leave. Mrs does her makeup, I invent little things that need to be settled, and become more frantic, until finally the collective fear of being late AND GETTING CAUGHT, cause me to grasp Mrs. Morgan's hand and jump off our balcony in the hope we'll land in our car. Given that we don't actually own a cabriolet, this is perhaps foolhardy, but unfortunately needs must.
The thing is, we live in a suburb in the Dublin mountains. Not to be confused with the Alps, it is not very high, and we aren't that far away from things. The problem is, that although the last fifteen years has seen our neighbourhood explode from being a hamlet, which is all it was, to being a regular, bog-standard expanse of suburban tundra. In turn, absolutely nothing has been done about the public transport servicing the area. The two or three busses that do go near us, the 63 and the 44, are so rare, you should do the lottery including those number when you do see one. It's actually easier to drive to the airport on the other side of Dublin, check in, face the humilation of the 'simon says' style of security favoured these days, and fly to London, than to get from our flat to Dublin city centre by public transport.
I'm not just bellyaching for the sake of it, despite appearances. Our daily rituals and panics were played out to the news today that none of the flagship infrastructure projects earmarked for completion this year have met their completion date. In one instance, a project has not even issued a revised completion date. Ministers barely shrug their shoulders, and look sheepish when the issue is brought up. It wouldn't be so bad, but the same newscast mentioned that the Irish economy is likely to lose out on international investment to countries like, Burundi or The Shire or Legoland, because of our pitiful transport infrastructure.
In the meantime, we'll continue our daily adventure to work, a daily homage to the frustration in 'The Great Escape', when Steve McQueen tried to jump barbed-wire on his motor bike to escape the Nazis.
