Back in the UK for the weekend with some help from Ryanair provokes a few memories

You voice breaks; the policeman addressing you looks as if he is barely out of school; you imagine you saw a grey hair on your head but dismiss it as a trick of the light only to discover that you are being optimistic.

Then there is the first grandchild and the realization you are sleeping with a grandmother.

On Saturday the second of our five girls celebrates her 40th birthday. I have a daughter who is 40! It seems hard to take in.

Mind you there are enough reminders every day. Wrestling with Ryanair's deliberately obtuse website to download our on-line boarding card, you find the drop-down box for your year of birth, seems to run and run. The years flash before you, each fleeting appearance containing a memory until you are back in the 50s before the cursor finally comes to rest in the early 1940s.

Seventy-odd years speed before you and then you move to the next question.

What is my nationality, Ryanair wants to know?

It used to be a simple question but another drop down box proves baffling. I cannot find the word ‘British’ and then I remember. My nationality appears to be United Kingdom.

When did that happen?

Eventually I emerge with our boarding cards having resisted what appear to be traps set to try and ensnare me into buying their travel insurance. I am feeling old by the end of the exercise.

We had a couple of old friends to stay for five days and they too wrestled with that website and confessed to shaking by the time they had been through the ordeal. Ryanair are so unforgiving of mistakes.

When faced with another Ryanair trip, they opted to secure the help of their local travel agents rather than go through the minefield of that website. Yet when they arrived at the airport, Ryanair told them they had booked two items going out and none coming back. They proffered the email confirmation from the agents but this was dismissed. “You will have to buy the luggage slot for your return and claim it back later.”

No frills airline, they boast. Scant customer consideration either.

When you are dealing with people like that, and there is little or no alternative on occasions, your fingers do tend to shake on the keyboard when making a booking, and you do not have to be 70 or so to suffer such anxiety. People much younger confess it is an ordeal on that website.

Despite their travails, our friends arrived. It was good to reminisce with a truly close friend down here in France. We were on the old West Herts Post together and sat next to each other in Watford FC's press box for 40 years. There were a lot of memories to have flowed under the bridge and, aided by some liberal doses of Rioja, we managed to recall a few.

What would we have done had we not gone into local journalism? We could not imagine now, being capable of doing any other job. The irony is that we are both Taureans who took the advice proffered at the time and left school and joined insurance companies.

We had met in 1959 but did not know each other so it was a surprise subsequently to meet up at the old Post newspaper offices and discover we had arrived by similar routes via different insurance companies.

In those days, a young person could try this and that job, without fear of unemployment. You could take two or three years or more seeking something that suited you.

We both made a career out of journalism and we are extremely grateful for that because, given independent means, happily we would have done the job unpaid. We enjoyed it so much.

Looking round the world today, we feel for our grandchildren and the relative lack of choice before them. To be fully employed all their working life will be a great achievement, but to be able to say, in 40 years time, they followed their instincts with a choice of career and enjoyed every minute of it, will be extremely unlikely. Gladly young people would settle for a job: liking it would be an unexpected bonus.

So once again I am grateful that I was born when I was and, if it takes me a time to steer the cursor back to 1941 on the drop-down menu, I can see the years flash by and smile fondly at the memories evoked by the dates.

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