Delayed Hard: With a Vengeance
Life moves slowly. Especially during a four-hour delay with two kids.
Coming at you live and direct from Bournemouth Airport: just me and the kids, having been informed that our flight home will be delayed by four and a half hours. We were so close—quite literally on the tarmac, waiting to climb the stairs and head home, before being turned around and told that, due to a mechanical fault, we’d have to wait for a new one.
Plane delays always hurt. Plane delays with children? You account for the travel time, you price in the agony, and then a delay feels like getting kicked when you’re down. I don’t know if there’s an exact formula, but I’d say travel time is four times harder with kids than without. This weekend I’m flying to San Francisco for work, and I already know that the 12-hour flight there will be easier than this 3-hour flight with my two. And they’re older now. I’m pretty sure a three-hour delay with two toddlers is one of Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell. I’m writing this from the bar, and they’re behaving, but I’m on the clock—and unable to exercise my god-given right to get pleasantly airport drunk—with a car parked at the other side and a one-hour drive ahead of me.
Thanks to EU Regulation 261, any passenger delayed more than three hours on a medium-haul flight—with a delay not caused by extraordinary circumstances / an act of God—is due €400 compensation. Each. There are three of us sitting around this sticky wooden table in The Evergreen Bar, which means we’re staring down the barrel of a €1200 payout. Not an ideal situation—in an alternate dimension, by the time I hit send on this newsletter, we’d almost be home—but it softens the blow somewhat.
In the next few hours, an email from Ryanair will hit my inbox, with their counteroffer—likely to consist of a few vouchers and a refund of what we’ve already paid for our flights. They will not inform passengers of their rights to €400 each, and ask them to “click and collect their compensation quickly,” thereby waiving their legal rights. They can, quite politely, go and get fucked. My role at the airport is to walk around and inform my fellow passengers not to click the link in their email: “Whatever it says, don’t accept it. As soon as you do, you’re signing away the real cash.”
In an attempt to placate the kids, I’ve told them about the compensation. They’re old enough to understand now. I haven’t told them they’re due €400 each—are you mad—but I've informed them that Ryanair owes us money, and when we get home, they’ve got €50 each that they can spend on whatever they want. My son’s eyes lit up immediately on this news, and I knew what was going through his mind: 50 euros equals fifty packets of football cards, or sobres as we call them here (the literal translation as envelopes, or “packets”). A packet of football cards, priced at one Euro, has immediately become a form of currency he can understand.
“You can buy anything you want. But not 50 sobres.”
His face dropped. (Huge “I could sure go for 100 tacos right now” vibes.) He’s looked up twice in the hour I’ve been writing this, whilst watching a series of Teen Titans episodes they downloaded for the flight. “It’s not fair—we have to be here for three more hours?” “Yes,” I reply, “But you’re getting paid €11 an hour to do it.”
His face smiles. Turning pain into profit: a good life lesson, and peak dad energy.
3 things to read this week
“Five UK writers try to parent like the Europeans” in The Guardian. Five parents try to do it like the Europeans. From feeding their kids at 7.30 pm (the norm here in Spain) to the German idea of not congratulating your children, this is a great piece on seeing how you raise your kids from another perspective.
“A Meditating Dad’s First Year” by Alex Olshonsky in Tricycle. As any new dad will know, trying to keep up with any regular practice—be it physical, mental or spiritual—is infinitely harder once you’ve had kids. Olshonsky, author of the newsletter Deep Fix, shares how becoming a new dad really put the idea of “practice” in action, and how having kids has turned what was once theory into reality. “Fatherhood has reorganized my ambitions. More accurately put, my ambitions have changed. I dare say they have grown.”
“The Dumbest Phone Is Parenting Genius” by Rheana Murray in The Atlantic. When everyone else zigs, you zag. Adored this write-up on Portland mother Caron Morse who—after relentless nagging from her daughter to buy her a smartphone—decided to put a landline in her house and convince other parents to do the same. Huge Clarissa Explains It All vibes, and now instead of being stuck looking at a screen and spending all her time on social media, her daughter is able to pick up the receiver, call her friends, and talk for hours. “Now about 15 to 20 families in their South Portland neighborhood have installed a landline. They’ve created a retro bubble in which their children can easily call their friends without bugging a parent to borrow their phone—and in which the parents, for now, can live blissfully free of anxieties about the downsides of smartphones.” More of this, please.
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A short missive, a brief distraction during the delay; two and a half hours down, two more to go. The airport WiFi has blocked X (solid move) so no Tweets this week. My editor finished the book manuscript yesterday and emailed to tell me, “I’m so thrilled with how it turned out, and I just think it’s so honest, vulnerable, and really action-oriented. I just love it.” Aaaaaaaaand exhale. Onward and upward, towards the skies we go.