A MAJOR aviation milestone went almost unremarked earlier this week. It merits only a passing mention in the current edition of Cara, the Aer Lingus inflight magazine, which concentrates instead on the 50th anniversary of the first transatlantic flight out of Ireland. But there, deep in the text, is a quote from Joan Winston, an air hostess (as they were called then) on the inaugural journey, recalling how it was one of the busiest days of her career. “Everything was free,” she explained, “so you can imagine the newspaper men!”
Excuse me while I blush with pride here – but, yes, April 28th, 1958 also marked the first non-stop transatlantic free bar service in Irish aviation history. And “newspaper men” (as they were known then) were central to the achievement. Back in the 1920s, a few journalists had been crazy enough to dream that such a thing might one day be possible. So I imagine, anyway. But the intrepid press pack on that flight in 1958 were the pioneers – in the broader sense of the word, obviously – who turned that dream into a reality.
That newspaper men were men in those days was taken for granted. Writing for the press was still considered dangerous work then (partly, no doubt, because of the amount of drinking involved). Soon, a generation of journalistic Amelia Earharts would break through, some of whom could drink their male colleagues under the fold-away tabletops. But it was still a man’s world 50 years ago, and women were only metaphors.
Here’s an “Irish Times pressman” describing the moment, on the return journey in May, when he first spies the lights of Dublin: “Passengers sitting on the other side crane across the aisle to peep at the jumble of sparkling pearls that is Dublin at night. Faint wisps of cloud extinguish some of the lights, and then denser layers blot them out altogether as if a jealous woman had thrown a veil over her jewels to protect them from prying eyes.”
Champagne prose – in every sense of the term, probably. But much has changed in the past 50 years. Dublin by night has a lot more jewels now, for one thing, and is not nearly so jealous of them. In fact, that string of glittering pearls around her neck is probably a serious tailback on the M50. More to the point, sadly, the decadent glamour of flying in the 1950s is now just a faded memory. Clutching a plastic cup of coffee for which I had paid €2 on an Aer Lingus flight this week, it was almost impossible to imagine what Dublin must have looked like to those fearless souls who braved the first transatlantic free bar and survived.
NEWS THAT estate agents may have been exaggerating their sales results has, of course, shocked me to the core.
Of all professions to be found guilty of gilding the lily, I would never have suspected these upstanding men and women, whose searing honesty in the description of the properties they sell frequently borders on the Beckettian. It would be grossly unfair of anyone to suggest that the profession’s integrity is now in ruins. No. At worst, I suggest that the situation represents an exciting refurbishment opportunity.
That said, it seems to me that the problem over the sales results may have arisen from a character weakness that, while not unique to estate agents, does seem to afflict that group disproportionately. I refer to a notorious lack of spatial awareness. The condition expresses itself in a tendency to suggest that a given property is closer to other things – the Luas, Stephen’s Green, the seaside, etc – than conventional measurement would suggest. Aerial panoramas are often used to support this warped world view.
Curiously, the symptoms of the condition become completely reversed indoors – where, if anything, estate agents tend to overstate the distance between, say, one end of the living-room and another. Indeed, the term “deceptively spacious” features in many house brochures, even when it’s only the poor estate agent who seems to have been deceived.
But it’s the deceptively non-spacious nature of the area between a property and the nearest public amenities, as perceived by realtors, that concerns me. Because it may be the same condition that leads them to underestimate the distance between an asking price and the selling one. After all, the leafy environs of a €1 million price-tag and the gritty treeless suburb of a successful €750,000 bid can seem quite close together, when photographed from a plane.
This is why I suggest that, as an interim reform, realtors should stop quoting sale prices “in the region of” anything, and concentrate on “in the neighbourhood” prices instead. Regions are dangerously wide concepts, even for those with well-developed spatial awareness skills. But in the minds of poor old estate agents, who are so easily deceived in this matter, they must be very nebulous things altogether. A selling price “in the neighbourhood of a €1 million” might still not be a million, but we could be more confident that it was in the immediate area of that figure – perhaps just around the corner and three doors down from it.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie