The Boiler, the Cockpit, and the Country That Wasn’t on the List
On finite time, the cost of saying no, and what a boiler can take from you without ever sending an invoice.
A few weeks ago, my daughter — the pilot one — invited my wife and me to come with her on a trip to Tbilisi.
Georgia. The country, not the state. A place that, until that invitation, existed for us as somewhere that was definitely on the planet, probably with many fine qualities, but somewhere neither of us had ever thought about going.
It was a wonderful offer. Our daughter, flying. Us, along for the ride. The kind of thing that doesn’t come up often and is worth rearranging a fair amount of life around.
I did not rearrange a fair amount of life around it.
The boiler
The boiler engineer came round to do the annual service, had a look inside, and made the sound. You know the sound. A long, considering intake of breath through the teeth, that warns you, without actually preparing you, that the next few minutes are going to sound rather expensive.
The boiler was on its last legs. Best to replace it now, while the weather was warm and there was no particular urgency, rather than wait for it to fail in the middle of winter — when there would, indeed, be considerable urgency and considerably less leeway in negotiations on price and timings.
And Christmas.
This was, obviously, sound advice. The kind of advice only a fool would ignore. We replaced the boiler.
And then, because — like buses — disasters arrive in threes, a couple of other things around the house decided this was also their moment. Nothing dramatic. Just the kind of fortnight where everything seems to need a phone call, a tradesman, or both.
By the time my daughter mentioned Tbilisi, the house had a certain amount going on. And going to Georgia felt, at that particular time, like exactly the wrong kind of thing to add to the list.
My wife went. I stayed home with Otis and our cat for company.
This was, at the time, clearly the correct decision. It seemed obviously the sensible call.
The holiday experience
My wife came back from Georgia having had, by every account, the best time.
She talked about it for over an hour as soon as she walked in through the front door. The bakery, a traditional place, still baking the old way in a clay oven, the loaves coming out shaped like little boats. She described the whole process, with the delight of someone who has discovered something wonderful and wants to share the full measure by describing every detail. It worked.
Then there was the wine — apparently extraordinary, different, and very much intertwined with the culture. Apparently wine tasting in Georgian vineyards involves far more glugging than in other countries we have been to. A nunnery on a hillside with incredible views, beautiful grounds and two stunning churches woven into Georgian and Russian history. The old city walls, complete with battlements and, again, amazing views of the surrounding countryside. And the prices — a full meal for two, with wine, for somewhere around twelve pounds, which by Hampshire standards would only be possible due to a clerical error.
But running through all of it — more than the bread, the wine, or the ancient wall — was how much fun she’d had doing it all with our daughter, in a city neither of them had thought about a month earlier.
My wife and our daughter share a laugh. Not similar — identical in cadence, volume and style, right down to the same inevitable sigh at the end of it, the kind that usually means they’ve set each other off again and are about to go round for another lap. I’m told this happened repeatedly in Georgia.
My daughter sent a photo to the family WhatsApp group — the two of them mid-laugh, caught at exactly that sigh. Nobody needed it explained. We’ve all heard that laugh often enough to recognise it from a still image. The laugh riding on that photo, across the internet, to our screens.
Georgia hadn’t been on our radar at all. Not even a “maybe one day.” It made the decision for me to forego the trip easier. It simply hadn’t occurred to either of us as a place that existed in our future, right up until the moment my daughter mentioned it. But now it occupies a very specific and very warm place in my wife’s memory, and an entirely different, more complicated place in mine.
“We have to go back,” she said. “Both of us. You’d love it.”
I’m sure I would. We will go. That trip is entirely achievable. Georgia isn’t going anywhere. Flights to Tbilisi will continue to exist. At some point, reasonably soon, I expect we’ll book them.
While all this was happening, I was having a perfectly pleasant few days at home. I got some writing done. A couple of articles for this blog, more or less finished. A few others nudged along. All told, a productive and contented stretch of time.
It’s only now, looking back at it, that the exchange rate becomes apparent. A nunnery on a hillside, a wall that offers stunning views, and an hour at a bakery watching bread get shaped into boats, all for the price of a round of drinks at home — set against two blog posts and a tidy desk.
I rather suspect I got the worse end of that particular trade.
I spent my time writing a blog about living well, instead of going on a special trip and actually living well. I know — ironic.
The arithmetic
So — whilst being glad that the two of them had an amazing time, having confidence that my decision to stay was logical and sensible, and also waiting for a considerable amount of envy to pass — I started to do some arithmetic. Not so much about the finite number of active years we may have remaining: how many places can I visit before I’m no longer able to — or want to.
Instead it was something closer to what economists call opportunity cost — not what something costs, but what you give up by choosing something else. And the arithmetic went like this: Georgia is not scarce. I can go to Georgia more or less whenever I like, for the rest of my life, with sensible planning and a moderately priced flight. The destination is, for all practical purposes, infinitely available.
What was not infinitely available — what was, in fact, available exactly once, on that particular trip — was being there when my wife saw it for the first time, and, on that same occasion, being driven there and back by our daughter.
That’s gone now. Not in any way that ruins anything. But it’s gone in the way that first impressions are always gone the moment they’ve happened. When we go back together, I’ll be discovering Georgia. My wife will be showing me Georgia. Those are different experiences, and only one of them was available on that particular trip, and I wasn’t on it.
The second part of that, though — and it’s the one I notice more, if I’m honest — is that my daughter doesn’t often get to fly her parents anywhere. It’s happened perhaps once or twice so far in her career. For thirty years, I was the one at the front of the aircraft, taking people to the start of their adventures, occasionally including my wife and daughters. The seating arrangement, on that flight to Tbilisi, would have been reversed. I would have been in the back, for once, being taken somewhere by her.
I don’t know how many more chances like that there will be. Not zero, I hope. But not a large number either. It’s the kind of thing that happens occasionally, unpredictably, and not always when life is free of boilers.
The roster used to do this
None of this is entirely new.
For thirty years, my roster said no to things on my behalf, and I was rarely consulted. Birthdays. Christmases. Evenings that friends still laugh about — fondly, often, in the easy shorthand of people who were all sharing the same experience and building closer bonds. I know those stories only second hand.
It’s part of the job, and when you consider that job, it would be utterly ungracious to feel aggrieved about it. After enough years the gaps in your own social history stop feeling like gaps. They’re just things other people did. Stories with a hole in them, often bandaged by the words “we missed you, mate.”
What I hadn’t quite expected was that retiring wouldn’t automatically fix this. I’d assumed, without ever quite thinking about it, that once the roster stopped deciding things for me, I would simply start saying yes to everything it used to say no to.
Instead, a boiler said no. And I said yes to the boiler.
The roster, it appears, has retired. It left a substitute.
The bit that applies to everyone
I suspect very few people reading this have recently turned down a flight to Georgia piloted by their daughter. So let me widen this out, because the arithmetic isn’t really about Tbilisi.
It’s about the invitation to a gathering where you don’t know many people, and the quiet, entirely reasonable voice that points out you’re tired, and it’s been a long week, and you wouldn’t really know anyone there, and it’s probably going to be a bit awkward, and there’ll be other things.
It’s about walking past a restaurant on your own, thinking it looks rather good, and then not going in — because eating alone still feels like it requires either a Kindle to hide behind, though posh restaurants tend not to approve of that, or some fairly impressive bravado and confidence, neither of which you currently have to hand, and there’ll be other restaurants.
In both cases, the voice saying no is not exactly wrong. The gathering probably will be a bit awkward. Eating alone probably will feel strange for the first ten minutes. These are accurate predictions. The reasoning is sound.
What the reasoning doesn’t account for is everything on the other side of it. The conversation you’d have had with that interesting person at that gathering. Possibly after you have fortified yourself with a glass of wine. The waiter who turns out to be from the town you went to university in. The Georgia you didn’t know was on the list, until somebody mentioned it, and it turned out to be one of the best trips of someone’s life.
It’s impossible to do the arithmetic on what you don’t say yes to, because you never find out what was on the other side. The boiler doesn’t send you a grateful follow-up. Georgia doesn’t write to tell you what you missed. It just quietly happened — to someone else — who came back from holiday raving about the wine.
What I’m doing with this
Not turning into someone who says yes to everything. That would be its own kind of nonsense, exhausting, and Otis would still need walking regardless.
But I think it would be a good idea to notice the moment when the reasonable voice arrives with its perfectly reasonable objections. And then maybe ask a few questions before agreeing with it: is this actually about the boiler, or does it just sound like the boiler today? And is this me deciding — or is this just the roster, still finding ways to say no on my behalf?
Sometimes it genuinely is the boiler. Boilers are real, and so are dogs, and so is being tired. Those reasons are not excuses. They’re just reasons, and sometimes they’re the right ones.
But sometimes, maybe even often, the boiler is doing a lot of work that isn’t really its to do. And on those occasions maybe it’s worth trying to go anyway. To the gathering. Into the restaurant. Onto the flight, when the flight is offered again.
The cost of saying no doesn’t arrive with the decision. It arrives later, usually over a glass of wine, in a sentence that starts with “you’d have loved it.”
We are going back to Georgia. I’m rather looking forward to it — even though it won’t be quite the same as being there for the first time.
What I’m really watching for now is the next Tbilisi. The one that hasn’t been invited yet. The one that, if the boiler has its way, I’ll only hear about afterwards, over a glass of wine I should apparently have been drinking for years.
Do you have a Tbilisi? The thing you said no to for entirely sensible reasons and still think about now. I’d love to hear your story. If you’re happy to share it, tell me in the comments.
