Róisín Ingle: My unvaccinated relative arrives soon. It’s time for ostrich therapy

There have been several articles written over the course of the last nearly two years about why it is not a very sensible idea to make like an ostrich and bury your head in the sand regarding the pandemic.

I have ignored all of them and at various points have tried to pretend the carry-on is not happening by burying myself elsewhere. So far I’ve successfully used food, music, alcohol, Succession and other diversion vehicles to escape the reality in which we continue to find ourselves. I call it ostrich therapy. It’s working quite well for me.

As part of my ostrich therapy, which takes things a step further than the distraction therapy I’ve written about previously, I’m currently preparing my Christmas party piece. It’s a ukulele rendition of the emotionally exhausting 10-minute version of Taylor Swift’s seminal break-up song All Too Well.

The plan is to be able to perform the whole thing word-perfect in front of admiring friends without recourse to the autoscrolling chords and lyrics on the app on my phone. (I understand your desire to extend thoughts and prayers to my family members at this time of intense rehearsal but there really is no need. It’s actually quite brilliant. Ostrich therapy, remember).

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Christmas parties

What do you mean there aren’t going to be any Christmas parties at which to perform party pieces? You are missing a fundamental part of ostrich therapy: your head is in the sand so you don’t know anything about bans on parties or household numbers, or inexplicably reduced theatre audiences or six to a table restaurant bookings or face masks on nine-year-olds. You are not aware that on top of everything else there is an actual storm brewing and rows breaking out between Nphet and the Government.

You are an ostrich, buried head first in Swiftian prose. You’ve swapped Morning Ireland for Marty in the Morning. And unfortunately I’ve also had to give the brilliant Sarah McInerney on Drivetime the heave-ho-ho-ho. The Christmas tree is outshining everything including the variant that nobody can pronounce properly. The house is bathed in the forgiving glow of fairy lights. All is calm and all is bright, in other words, and ding dong merrily on high.

The Beatles: Get Back documentary has also been extremely useful offering hours of escape into a magical world many of us fans never thought we’d get to see. The loving, admiring looks not to mention the crack between John and Paul. Yoko’s “singing”. The copious rounds of toast and marmalade. The microphone hidden in the flowerpot. Iconic songs materialising in front of your water-logged eyes.

I love my unvaccinated relative but the last thing I want over Christmas is to discuss Eric Clapton, the Nuremberg Code, shedding and sheeple

Thank you Peter Jackson for spending four years locked in a room to bring us this incredible pre-Christmas gift. The timing could not be better. And thank you Michael Lyndsay-Hogg, the son of Wicklow-born actor Geraldine Fitzgerald, for capturing it all in the first place. Another Beatles-related ostrich-therapy tactic is to wonder what John Lennon would be up to if he hadn’t been shot on this day 41 years ago in front the Dakota building in New York. He’d be 81 now. Imagine what John Lennon might be up to on Twitter in the middle of a pandemic. It’s easy if you try.

There is another reason for all of the advanced ostrich therapy. My unvaccinated relative arrives soon. As well as being unvaccinated they also hold quite strong views on how various aspects of the last two years have panned out. I love my unvaccinated relative but the last thing I want over Christmas is to discuss Eric Clapton, the Nuremberg Code, shedding and sheeple. So we’ve decided as a family that while we’ve got a house guest, the C-word and the P-word (not to mention the V-word) are completely banned.

‘Peace and love’

We even have safe words for when, inevitably, talk accidentally turns virusy. We’ve decided when someone slips up to say “peace and love” as a way to give people a chance to course-correct the conversation. I don’t really have a plan for what happens in the event of someone continuing to talk about the verboten subject even when the “peace and love” safe words have been offered. I will deal with that when or if it happens.

As I readied my little bubble for our ostrich-inspired experiment, I decided to research why it is that the clever ostrich community bury their heads in the sand. There is an American Ostrich Association so I thought that would be a good place to start. I was shocked to discover this ostrich business does not stand up.

It turns out that the widely-accepted notion of ostriches sticking their heads in the sand is a bit of an optical illusion. Apparently, ostriches do not actually bury their heads. The rumour got started because the largest living birds who also have relatively tiny heads are known to dig holes in the ground to bury their eggs.

At various points during the day, the matriarchal ostrich dips her head in the hole in the ground to turn her eggs. The phenomenon of her tiny head disappearing into the nest makes it appear, when viewed at a distance, as though she is burying her head in the sand. In fact, she’s merely ensuring the healthy survival of her brood. Which I suppose by switching from Morning Ireland to Marty in the Morning is essentially what this pandemic-addled ostrich is also trying to do.

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]