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12 Superquinn Sausages
13 English butter bad, Irish butter good
14 VIKING TOWN
15 Tim’s Short- and Long-Term Memory Tank System
16 Terry’s Short-Term Memory System
17 Electropop
18 The Great Lincolnshire Graphic Novel
19 Various: comedian, armoured car, mad relation
20 Holyhead
21 Cultural Tour Icons: Book of Kells, Martello Tower, Maud Gonne, Charlie Haughey, The Divorce Referendum, Gate Theatre, Sharon Shannon and Donal Lunny, The Peace Process, Ireland 1 Italy 0, Dana
22 Football Types
23 O’Shea’s
24 Mad Eyes
25 Scary Viking
26 Leprechaun, Firbolg
27 Jockey
28 ORANGE COUNTY
29 Barney the Cocktail Maker
30 Red-faced Beardy
31 Various: angry short speccy guy, ticket inspector (dead-ringer for a German U-boat commander), two Clare girls, old man
32 Hurling
33 Sean McCabe the barber
34 Yellow Steeple, Trim
35 Tara
36 The Celts were tough
37 Faery Footballer
38 Jack Charlton
39 Sean the Dublin Bay Prawn of Neutrality
40 Kevin the Carp of Storytelling
41 SHANEWORLD
42 Tractor/pheasant connection
43 Fungie the Dolphin
44 Rex and Shaggy
45 Doolin
46 ‘Mars!’
47 The Great Fiddle Mystery
48 Gort
49 Can Man
50 Spanish Conceptual Art
51 Various: Lorcan Murray, little-girl-next-door bird, anorexic English-looking blonde, shy sales assistant
52 Benbulben
53 Posing on some swanky ski resort with Steve Podborski, Bryan Adams and, er, William Shatner
54 Bus driving away
55 A Sligo pub: Pete the accordion-player, the Fiddler, ‘Dolores’ the Bodhran Player
56 Daniel’s House, his Fans and his Jumper
57 Daniel’s Family Tree
58 Celtic Mike 238 59 Brain-Emptied TV
60 Four-Part Harmony
61 Tweed Cap
62 MARYLAND
63 God?
64 A Moving Statue
65 Connor/Kinky
66 Potato
67 Alloy Wheel
68 Upside-Down car
69 Fish
70 Irish Pub Guide
71 Irish Crossword
72 Distribution of Tourists in Holiday Season
73 Distribution of Rainfall
74 Distribution of Conversational topics
Preface (#ulink_d688f364-26f1-5179-9120-a0dec328124c)
This book is based on journeys I made to Ireland in 1998, and on various forays back to previous visits, or (in one or two cases) into an alternative reality. It’s divided into a series of ancient mythical areas, which I’ve made up. Some names have been changed, some have stayed the same. I’d like to think that you can start at whatever point you want in the book. Think of it as a rambling pub conversation about all kinds of trivia such as What is Irishness? What is Englishness? What is nationality? Who are we? Who are you? Are you staring at my leprechaun? Ah, so many questions and so little drinking time …
Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? Camden Tube to Camden Lock (#ulink_afd85a02-1d7b-50cc-b755-c549c76d2943)
I came out of Camden Town tube, badly in need of a piss, and crossed the road to Barclays bank. There was just enough in there to get me through the evening – I was thankful that I’d kept the account at the little village in Suffolk where I’d worked for a while years ago. They knew I was a hopeless case but, because of that, they always made sure I could somehow get hold of money – perhaps they liked the fact that they had an impoverished London-based slob on their books rather then the usual farmers, shopkeepers, salesmen and village idiots. No, not very likely at all, it was probably just a computer error that kept giving me access to cash.
I was going to an Evan Parker gig at Dingwalls. Not my usual midweek fare, atonal improvised alto saxophone (is it anybody’s?), but I was meeting my old schoolfriend, Plendy, and Martin, a mad Welsh mate of his who worked at the BBC World Service Monitoring Centre in Reading, and who was the kind of bloke who’d make witty one-liners that referred to Anglo-Saxon poetry and Russian revolutionary film makers. You had to be on your toes with Martin all the time.
I started walking quickly in the direction of Chalk Farm, then saw a figure heading towards me at about 0.5 mph. I instinctively slowed down to get a good look at him. He was wearing a baggy, dishevelled black suit with an open-necked shirt and he looked as though just keeping upright was taking up all his energy. At one point he staggered into the road and kicked a half-full black dustbin bag, then zigzagged back onto the pavement. I tried to catch his eye as he passed me, but he was staring straight ahead, at some point in the pavement or the future which might keep him going. I turned and watched him disappear into the night, then carried on to the club.
‘Guess what?’ I said to the lads a few minutes later, as Evan Parker went ‘eeeeeaaooooo a bleedeblee doooOOOWWaaapooopopopo’.
‘What?’
‘Shane MacGowan is still alive.’
And before Martin had time to make a witty connection between ‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’ and Beowulf, I went to the bog.
IRISH MYTHS & LEGENDS 1 How to be Irish (#ulink_f753def0-56b5-5216-a9f4-efe88cafbee0)
1 Why you Need to be Irish
Gone are the days when being English opened doors for people around the world. Now Irish is where it’s at culturally, economically, sexually and politically. The Brits have been jealous of the Irish for centuries because of their ability to drink, their nice singing voices, their straight-armed dancing style (which is so much sexier than Morris dancing) and their ginger hair.
2 Positive Affirmations
You can be Irish. You can leave behind the English world of semi-detached houses, garden gnomes and Freemasonry. It’s simple. Just repeat one or more of these simple phrases every day after getting home from the pub and in no time at all you’ll find yourself on the fringes of the Irish football squad for the next World Cup.
Every day, in every way
I’m becoming Irishyer and Irishyer
Feck me
I am Irish
England 0–Ireland 1, Euro ’88
3 Diet
The way to a man’s nationality is through his stomach. The Englishman needs two vital foodstuffs to keep him going – roast beef and baked beans – while the Irishman can survive on just one, the simple potato. It is the most versatile form of nourishment on the planet and only Guinness has more vitamins and minerals and less calories.
4 Exercise
Football and darts are the national sports in England, and everyone in the country knocks a ball around in the road after work then goes down the pub, sinks fifteen pints of lager and throws little arrows at a board. It’s fun, but this regime is not great for total all-round fitness. However, there are many traditional Irish pastimes which increase strength and cardiovascular fitness, such as pub brawling, hurling, throwing the potato and that dancing where you keep your arms straight and move your feet really fast.
5 Making Friends
Irish people and English people are very similar except for slight variations in social etiquette. Without generalising too much, whereas the English are repressed, tightarsed cold fish with people they don’t know (such as their parents) Irish people will slap a stranger on the back, shout ‘How are ye?’ at the top of their voices, buy them a drink then take them home and give them a damn good seeing to.
6 Sex
Sex sells. Everyone knows this. That’s why I’ve included it in this book. The publisher will probably make sure that ‘sex’ is written on the cover somewhere in an eye-catching font, and then copies of the book will be put in the sex manuals’ section of the big shops. And those sections are always full of eager people with bulging wallets.
Sex with English people is all messy and complicated what with condoms, Femidoms, spermicidal gel, multiple orgasms (for both partners), prenuptial agreements, and the dreaded threat of kiss ’n’ tell tabloid revelations. In Ireland all these things (including multiple orgasms) are rationed by their owners, Catholic Church International Holdings plc, so people have to make their own fun.
7 Release the Leprechaun Within
English people have an inner child that has temper tantrums, plays video games and downloads pictures of famous actresses in swimwear from the internet. Irish people, in contrast, have an inner leprechaun that has a great laugh and lives in those clear plastic domes that you have to shake to make the snow fall.
8 Dye Your Hair Ginger
FINNEGANIALondon (#ulink_3be5388f-6675-5fbb-9714-9127087f65e9)
On a Clear Day You Can See Fulham Football Ground Hammersmith to Ireland (in my head) (#ulink_b6c9b779-33cb-5eb1-8054-91d0808cfaa6)
Hammersmith was fucking cold. Ice had travelled over from Scandinavia, passed across the North Sea like a self-satisfied speed skater
(#ulink_e87a90fb-b38e-5c48-bc7d-a45385e5e15d) and taken the short journey along the quiet, silver river to W6, where it had formed an unhealthy union with heavy metal particles, those noxious clumps of cancer dust that float around the major capitals of the world, but particularly the Fulham Palace Road. Most people would have cheerily admitted that it was no worse than normal. If I’d talked to anyone. But I went through phrases of not talking to anyone, particularly Londoners over fifty, who would, naturally, start to bang on about ‘pea soupers’ and the 1950s and rationing and how the Kray twins were ‘lovely fellas’ really and football teams were much better in those days. They weren’t, I wanted to say, actually. Better. The football teams. I knew this and had already made up an argument for the time when I would be confronted in a dark alleyway by a gang of preposterously nostalgic and assertive football-mad cockneys. Players in the forties and fifties were just a load of unfit brickies with smoking-related breathing problems who hoofed the ball from one end of the pitch to the other.
But despite the pollution, this part of Hammersmith is a beautiful place, full of life and noise and crap buskers and spilling-over pubs and real newspaper stalls (with more Irish papers than you can get anywhere in Ireland) and half-crazed hawkers selling six lighters for a pound (‘Laydeeezz. Lighters, laydeez?’), with Charing Cross Hospital looming over everything in much the same way that St Paul’s Cathedral must have dominated the old city in the late seventeenth century. Though Charing Cross Hospital isn’t quite as attractive. The upside of this is that there are no Japanese and American tourists taking videos of themselves or asking you for the way to the ‘Tower of London, buddy’, which has to be a good thing. People – well, estate agents and puff-piece hacks in the Evening Standard – are always talking about Fulham Palace Road ‘coming up’, getting smartened out and sorted. But all that ever seems to change are the pubs, which are the only things that don’t need changing.
There is nowhere in Hammersmith, to my knowledge, that you can get away from the sound of cars. Sometimes I’ll lie in the bath with the windows of the flat open. I don’t mind the cold. I want the noise. I listen to the traffic. It reminds me of the sea. The noise, the roaring, coughing eternal circle of Hammersmith Broadway, picking up speed towards the A4 and M4. It never stops.
