A lovely clip from an interview with Ardal O’Hanlon on the Late Late Show, where he reminisces with Patrick Kielty about his recently-deceased father.1 O’Hanlon’s father, the politician and GP Rory O’Hanlon, was not, in his words, the most present due to his tremendous commitments to community and state – but the younger O’Hanlon speaks particularly fondly of the times when, as a child, he was brought along for the house calls.
I have to admit, this resonates deeply with me. My own father, a vet, was similarly constantly on the go, but I have warm memories of climbing in the car and being taken to all sorts of places: when he was still in practice, sat at tables, drinking juice whilst small pets were examined; perched on the end of a cattle crush, watching the dehorning with increasing disgusted; wedged on top of the wall as a group of men ran the herd through the sheep dip.2 Later, when he worked at the meat plant or for the department, Saturday mornings often meant time wandering around the mart, or memorably once getting to go and literally see the sausages getting made.
It resonates now because I work in a role, in local church ministry, where you also spend a significant amount of time in people’s homes, and I too sometimes drag my children along. It is a reminder that, as they have already tried to say, they actually enjoy something of these times. I sometimes feel guilty for bringing them, as if they’ll be bored or uninterested, or as if they might need to be shielded from the realities of real life; but I suppose on reflection, there’s something magical about stepping into that grown-up world when you’re little, and there’s also something magical about being invited into it by your parent.
O’Hanlon connects these times with his own sense of relationship to people; Kielty goes as far to prompt him that he, too, engaged in a type of public service and that may be influenced by his childhood memories. It’s a reminder, too, that no artificial construction or so-called social platform can replace the magic of face-to-face time alongside those who mean the most to you; and that, without the need for extravagant, ‘memory-making’ experiences, there is little that replaces the mundane joy of simply being brought along for the ride.
- Around a decade ago or so, a bunch of us happened to see Ardal O’Hanlon doing an afternoon warmup gig for the Galway Comedy Festival – I think there might have been around thirty people squeezed into a tiny room upstairs in the bar, and maybe ten were us rowdies. O’Hanlon was trying out material, opening confessing the bits that didn’t quite work and, in a very meta way, also explaining how he would put the act together for that evening based on what we as an audience were responding to. In person, he seemed exactly as warm and affable as you would imagine, and to be fair to him, the embodiment of what he describes in the clip above. ↩︎
- When I was maybe five or six, I famously took a tumble and fell off a wall, rolled across a small bit of yard, and ended up immersed in the tank. I must have been guaranteed mite-free for at least six months afterwards. ↩︎