On the twenty-fourth of March 1968, an Aer Lingus flight from Cork to London came down at Tuskar Rock, off the Wexford coast of Ireland. Sixty-one people were on board. Sixty-one people died. My father, my dad, was one of them.

Most people today don’t even know that Aer Lingus ever crashed. I find that strange. It was a long time ago, mind you, and the country has had a great deal to be getting on with since.

I was thirteen.

What I want to set down here is not the crash. It is the thirty years afterwards, because that’s the part I actually know something about. Maybe?

For thirty years I assumed it hadn’t affected me. “I got over it”, I always said; I believed myself completely.

Slowly I began to realise that maybe it had affected me, after all. Then, some years after that, I could see that it had affected me a great deal. And later still, that it didn’t just affect me; it defined me.

I live my life in a hurry. That’s the shape of it. I move fast so nothing can catch me; so it won’t hurt; so I won’t feel that again. I only know that know, closer to the end than the beginning. Even my signature starts slowly and finishes at a gallop.

Very shortly after the accident, I was sent away to boarding school in Gormanston. I felt surplus to requirements. No longer needed. Nineteen sixty-eight did wasn’t a great year.

I’m still facing my Waterloo, in my seventies. I haven’t figured it out yet, or if I have, I don’t know what to do about it. Or if I do, I don’t know how!

It’s still causing disruption in my life, and rather than resolving anything, I go ’round in ever-tightening mental circles.  That’s not what all the books promised.

Swirling! When will it stop?