When I was a kid, my dad knew this guy called Ronan O'Connor. His mother was an Austrian woman called Maria, and my dad used to work on their vehicles. They lived in a huge house with loads of land, right on a flood plain. When it flooded Ronan had a kayak he would take from his front door to his front gate so that he could do things like leaving his home.

Once I was a precocious ~ten-year-old; if you can believe that. I forget the exact content of this conversation, but one day Ronan was trying to tell me something. He had a left-hand-drive VW Scirocco, and he'd obviously seen a lot of the world. I distinctly remember being blasé and obstructive. I already knew what he was trying to tell me, and so the conversation ended before it began.

Later, I asked my dad what Ronan had been trying to tell me. He didn't know. I was so busy trying to impress Ronan that I'd missed out on something cool he could've taught me.

I learned three things that day:

1. Always keep your ears and mind open
2. Your parents don't know everything
3. Get your damn COVID vaccination. I don't care about your half-baked research. This isn't about you.

Real Life