It’s so long ago that I started this blog that I no longer have one thin clue why I called it Self Distract — except that I like the title and I’m a sucker for what I think is a good name. Today, though, if you would indulge me, I want to distract myself.

I’m in an aircraft about to fly to Dublin. Now that’s a subject I can talk to you about with ease: where I’m ultimately going on this trip, there is an airport vastly closer and more convenient. It’s Knock Airport and that place as the most absorbing history: it’s the first airport you come to when you fly from the US to Europe. That used to mean everyone had to stop there, it was as if that was as far as planes could fly — because it was as far as planes could fly. Knock is the tiniest of places and yet it had the biggest and most crucial of airports.

Now, all it’s got is that history and a new reputation for being unreliable. That may not be fair, but however few times it may have cancelled flights on what seem to be economic rather than technical or safety grounds, it’s been too many. It’s alleged that you can’t risk booking a flight to Knock any more, not if it matters what day you arrive. And Knock airport staff or some Friends of Knock Airport fan club would and maybe could prove otherwise, but the reputation is such that around ten of us are flying to Dublin instead. It’s as un-green as you can get: at least three hire cars driving across Ireland and then back again.

Necessity is the mother of having to be un-green and I really would rather I hadn’t said the word mother there. I’m going — we’re going — to my mother’s funeral.

And on that note, the fasten seatbelts and shut up your iPads sign came on, and was followed by 45 minutes in which I slept to make up for how few hours I got last night, plus how many miles I was going to have to drive.

I’m now where I’m going, we’ve had one set of family gathering, and as I write this, the funeral is tomorrow. Today I learned that coffins are extraordinarily heavy. And also, related, that priests make pallbearers wait with it on their shoulders while a rather long prayer is read.

Today I’ve realised that I ascribe locations to people. So for example, over the last twenty years or more, every time I’ve gone to Stratford-on-Avon, I’ve felt like I was stepping on a particular friend’s turf. I’ve felt rude for not telling her I was coming, I’ve felt guilty for crossing into her land.

And I’ve got the same thing now. After all of the parts of the funeral are done, I’ve got an hour in which I’ll meet an old friend for the first time. Writer Ken Armstrong lives near the hotel I’m in so of course I’ve got to take this chance to meet him, but again, I feel I’m on his turf. Driving in, I was struck by how these unfamiliar roads must be so familiar to him.

The roads themselves have no meaning, but the people who use them imbue them with familiarity and unfamiliarity.

I just keep knowing that my mother would have adored all this meeting up with family. She’d have been in her element. I’m in an element, too, but it doesn’t feel like mine.