Lastsummer, Mark Zuckerberg launched Threads, Meta’s answer to a question Elon Musk’s X’s didn’t even ask. Gazillionaires and their power plays, eh? Little rascals.
A reported 10m users signed up in the first seven hours.
Luckily I’m always miles behind the zeitgeist so by the time I’m pulled onto Threads, there are billions of accounts to get sucked in to.
I presume I’m far too mature, busy, and clever to fall for something as mundane as a Meta algorithm... I am hopelessly hooked within 30 seconds. Just another Zucker sucker. Sigh.
As if I didn’t have enough monkeys on my back, what with the coffee, chocolate, and Four in a Bed repeats, here’s another addiction I have to factor into my day.
The app throws up a feed of brilliantly bonkers posts. People ask for advice, reveal in tantalising 500-word snippets how their partner cheated and occasionally ask random questions that help Irish journalists file a column.
One lady poses the question: What did you do on holiday that you now regret? I type, ‘your husband’ snigg*ring away, then hastily bashing the backspace button.
Obviously, I’d never actually post anything. I’m not CRAZY. But it gets me thinking about family holidays and the pressure to spend QUALITY TIME together and MAKE MEMORIES for our kids.
I tend to over-book, trying to smash every fun thing in on hols.
That time we went to Center Parcs, I had to remortgage the gaff because I booked the kids in for every activity going, when all they wanted to do was hang out in the pool, not zipline over it with forced grins on their faces, while I gallop along below them videoing it.
But by far the holiday activity I regret the most is that time we went cave diving in Lekeitio in Spain, aka, that time we all nearly perished of fear, except for dad, because he couldn’t even fit in the death trap in the first place.
The activity promises an initiation to speleology, ‘a two hour easy cave exploration for the whole family’. Not our family, amigos.
‘You must wear suitable footwear, preferably hiking shoes,’ advises the brochure. It neglects to tell us to bring spare underwear, in case we sh*t ourselves out of pure unfiltered terror.There’s not really a font for that.
Our guide is a jovial little Spaniard who meets us at the appointed place, a tiny grate in the side of a dusty mountain. I’m doubtful we’re in the right spot. Surely this can’t be it?
He gives us blue boiler suits, and white hard hats with a headtorch in the middle. We look like demented minions. As it’s a sun holiday, none of us have boots, so we flipflop into the miniscule cave mouth.
The guide goes first, shimmying in like a wiggly worm, the svelte little f*cker, then the three boys, then me, inch by terrifying inch, through the tiny opening, like a reverse birth.
My shoulder blades and my pubis bone are both touching rock. My ridiculous boobs are painfully squashed, like the world’s most primitive mammogram.
I feel a visceral swell of fear, wedged in that dank, dripping, dirty tomb, I actually can’t breathe, I start to panic, then I remember the kids are ahead of me so I focus on just moving the next millimetre, elbows, toes, elbows, until it opens up and I can finally half stand up.
Husband, not so much. He gets stuck immediately.
The guide is bemused. “Just keep coming!” “I really can’t,” says Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Husband as he backs out.
“If I don’t come back, avenge my death,” I call through the gap, towards the precious natural light, oxygen, and certain survival, “and never remarry.”
The guide points out the stalactites and stalagmites and blah blah blah, as we cling to each to other, slipping in the orange clay, inching on our bellies again through another tiny tunnel, I wonder how I will possibly survive two more minutes of this living hell, never mind two hours? So I ask if we can pause. Sure!
“I do something fun with the kids I usually bring,” he says.
“Kids?” I repeat. He admits it’s usually school tours of spry prepubescent students that do this, not buxom adult Celts. He invites us to turn off our torches and experience true darkness, for the laugh.
We count to 10, as the living black swallows us, space and time have no meaning, and we can’t tell if our eyelids or our souls exist anyway. My son whispers, tonelessly, “So this is what death feels like”.
I cave. This is madness. I tell the guide we’re going back. We emerge gasping from the maw of the mountain. I fall to my knees, rend my heart, gnash my teeth, and vow never to forsake the sky again.
I’m all for giving the kids colourful copy for the first day back to school essay, but not at the expense of exposure to the bleak existentially knowledge of the nothingness of necrosis.
This summer I’ll be at home munching Minstrels, watching four B&Bers find hairs on mattress protectors and leave the melodrama to Meta. No regrets.
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Esther McCarthy: He wasn't my biological father, but he was my dad
