He deserves every bit of it!

Weekly readers of my column may have reached this conclusion long ago, but today you’ll hear it from the horse’s mouth: I am a clown of a man.

No, please, before you give into any urge you might have to tell me I should not be so hard on myself, listen to what I have to say.

For the defaming declaration I make against myself today is not an attempt to win your favour by putting myself down, nor is it intended as self-deprecating hyperbole for comedic effect.

Rather, I pronounce my own foolishness as a statement of objective fact.

Like the zoologist looks at the stripy horse and calls it a zebra, I now look in the mirror and brand the specimen looking back an imbecile.

Allow me tell you about the incident that undergirds my rock-bottom opinion of myself.

Recently, while approaching a ‘closing’ departure gate at Belfast International Airport, my panic levels steadily rose… as each pocket I plunged into failed to furnish me with my passport.

After surreptitiously diving into the last vestige of hope, the old back left, my private unravelling became a public humiliation when I eventually announced – in language most foul – that my all-important travel document was not present on my person.

Everybody stopped and watched as I threw my bag off my back and, with the urgency of somebody that realises the receipt they just binned was actually a 20 pound note, began rifling through my rucksack.

“Check your pockets again,” said one sibling.

“Of course this is happening, ” said another.

Bent over the contents of my pockets and bag that now lay strewn upon the carpeted floor, I looked up from face
to face, hoping that a cruel prankster would produce the burgundy booklet from behind their back.

They looked at me with a mix of pity and accusation, until somebody eventually said, “Well you’d wanna start running.”

I took off sprinting through the airport, swerving the strong, trampling the weak, until I eventually got to the pub where we had drank ONE PINT about half an hour before.

After a quick sweep of the table – which was still covered in nacho shrapnel and crumpled napkins – I made my way up to the till.

“Anybody found a passport,” I asked, trying not to roar.

“Uhm, I’ll go and have a look for you now mate,” said some young cub, sauntering away.

‘I’m doomed,’ I thought.

A few minutes later, Dopey landed back, his countenance the same as that I-definitely-could-have-tried-harder expression that shoe shop attendants wear when they emerge from the stockroom and tell you there are none in your size, and delivered the bad news.

Haunted by the thought of being called Kevin McCallister for the rest of my life, I forgot to give your man a goodbye, or a mouthful of abuse, and bolted towards security.

“Lad, passport, gone, here?” I said with incoherent breathlessness to the security guard that had checked my bags for drugs earlier.

He lifted his finger and pointed to a kiosk, where a few other weary, worried-looking travellers anxiously stood.

After performing some crisis mathematics, I calculated that, at that moment, my problems were a much bigger deal to me than theirs, which permitted me to push through them, obstinately ignoring their groans and remonstrations, before giving the uniformed official my name.

“Here you are Emmet,” he said, reuniting me with my wee brown book.

When I got back to everyone, they were the last couple of people at the gate.

Naturally, embarrassed that I almost missed the holiday (I would say spoiled, but might be presumptuous), I tried to share the responsibility for the temporary passport misplacement episode, effectively blaming other people for having somehow aided in the bringing about of this utterly idiotic incident.

“Oh aye, and what about the time ye thought your flight to India was a day later than it actually was, and you only got to the airport with about two minutes to spare?”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I am a clown.