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(#ulink_71f1a6b9-2ad5-57cd-9a12-67ffc52df1f4) that sickly sugary drink with the eerie nuclear fall-out orange glow.
Back on the road, I came off at a roundabout near Shrewsbury and took the first left turn. Standing at the side of the road was a hitcher. I was nearly asleep again and lolling backwards and forwards, half dreaming about rural Ireland, the sea, mountains and curly-haired Australian actresses. Picking up a hitcher is an instinctive decision. You don’t have time to analyse them or hand out a questionnaire. In an ideal world none of us would be in a hurry and we’d have time to interview a prospective hitcher over coffee in some transport café:
Driver: So, where do you see yourself in five hours’ time?
Hitcher: I think London is the place for me, all things considered.
Driver: What skills can you bring to a car drive?
Hitcher: I can put tapes into the cassette player and can make light conversation peppered with the occasional witty but shallow observation.
Driver: Well, thanks for spending time talking to me. I’ve a few more candidates to see and I’ll let you know in a few hours’ time.
Hitcher: Great, thanks very much. Bye.
Driver: Bye then.
An alternative would be to swipe a smart card into a hitcher checkpoint and an upcoming driver can check to see if you’re compatible.
Of course, the reality is SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEECHH quick get in mate. It’s only when it’s too late that you find you’ve picked up some crazy looking bloke with specs and wild hair like a crazed tinker in a blue waterproof jacket. Or, more commonly, an overweight, spotty type with a moustache. But I needed someone to keep me awake. I’ve fallen asleep at the wheel before and you get a bit of a shock when you suddenly realise you’ve either been driving for twenty minutes in a daze or you’ve driven off a cliff and you’re fifty feet underwater.
I cleared the shite – including the Singing Leprechaun – from the passenger seat onto the floor and told the hitcher to screeeeeech quick get in mate. He was an overweight, spotty type with a moustache and was up and running almost immediately.
‘I didn’t think I was going to be picked up. I’ve been waiting here for two hours. Loads of people went past, then you turned up.’
I did, it’s true. I told him I just needed someone to keep me awake.
‘Feel free to just jabber away,’ I said, carelessly.
He told me he was looking for work. At two in the morning outside Shrewsbury!? He’d hitched over from East Anglia, where he’d been working as a panel beater and putting up marquees and thought Wales might be the land of milk and honey. Zilch and no money more like, I suggested. I told him I was going to Ireland so could drop him off anywhere on the way. He had a sort of bristly squaddie tash with skin so ‘crazy’ he was an exact fifty-fifty cross between Nigel Mansell and Manuel Noriega – if Noriega had had the Jeff Goldblum role in The Fly and Mansell was Geena Davis and they’d both got caught in the ‘pod’ and merged.
(#ulink_68351c12-4bbd-53a1-a77f-d00d7f6669cd) It wasn’t just acne it was something … more sinister.
So, a panel beater eh? That means you get to give World Cup pundits a good kicking then? I asked.
‘No, it’s cars and that,’ he said. His accent was hard to place – maybe half Brummie, half Norfolk.
But it was the marquees thing that was great, he said. He put them up for car races and that, cash in hand. Now the work was gone and he’d had to give up his bedsit. I asked him where he was from. His parents were Irish. His mother still lived in Mayo. That’s where Oasis are from, I said. What? he asked. Mayo. Their mother is from Mayo. They used to go there on holiday. Hmm he said. Anyway, they moved over to Birmingham when he was a kid and he was small and got bullied because of his accent, so decided to lose it and become a Brummie. He’d hated being a kid, he said. Hmm, I said. His father had recently died of a heart attack. He was out of work. He’d got bad skin. It was heartbreaking stuff. I asked him to stick on another country tape. The first song was Patti Loveless’s ‘We Ain’t Done Nothin’ Wrong’.
‘This is a bit sad isn’t it? Have you got any happier stuff?’ No, I said, indignant that he had overstepped the mark with his lack of hitcher etiquette. He started talking about never being able to settle down, always on the move and I asked him if he’d read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. No, never heard of him. I’ve got a copy somewhere in my bag, I said. Want to borrow it? I was coming on all Henry Higginsish here. Nah, it’s OK, he said. I wouldn’t ever read it anyway. I started to nod off again as he droned on.
Hitcher: Life is so sad.
Me: Uh huh. Hmmm.
Hitcher: Marquees bluh bluuuh bluuuh bluuhhh marquees
bluuuh bluuuh bluuuuh.
Me: Car keys? Uh huhh! Hmmmmm!
I stopped at a garage somewhere in Wales and bought us both a sandwich (he didn’t have any money, he said). When we set off again I asked him when he’d last seen his mother in Ireland.
‘Oh a long while,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got cousins in Dublin who I saw a couple of years ago.’ I suggested to him that, since Wales seemed pretty quiet jobwise (although, admittedly, it was the middle of the night) and the Celtic Tiger
(#ulink_30d417df-b250-5fd2-b1b4-3c8d18a03b05) was still so rampant, he should go with me on the ferry and get off in Dublin. It wouldn’t cost him anything. He pursed his lips and thought about it. OK, he could go and see his mother. And his cousins would put him up for a while, until he got a job. But he still wasn’t happy. Think about it, I said. We agreed he’d go as far as Holyhead and then make his mind up.
How many are like him, I thought? Most of the Irish people of my age in London all came over ten years or so ago for the money because there wasn’t anything for them at home
(#ulink_9a82a5ef-75d4-5f66-be35-be0c305b0e58) (though now, of course, things are different). So many people around the world claim Irishness (seventy million apparently). They or their ancestors have all had to leave and the sentimental myths are built up. There’s often a dream of returning. But to what? Sometimes all that’s there is a memory of Irishness, a semi-fictional home, a country they carry in their hearts to salve the rootless detachment. I thought of the folk songs which must have been written by people missing home, like the ‘Fields of Athenry’, or ‘Spancel Hill’. I thought about asking the hitcher to press the Singing Leprechaun’s belly for me. His soulful rendition of ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ would have been the perfect soundtrack to my mind’s sleepy wanderings.
Being brought up in England in the early seventies meant that Ireland was a constant but not always apparent factor in my life. It began naturally with those crap jokes which always involved an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman – the Irishman naturally always being the fall guy. The Englishman was never anything but maddeningly sensible – you didn’t care what he said or did – the Scotsman sort of sat on the fence, unsure whether to be daft or boring, and the Irishman, the kind of fellow you’d probably get on with if you met him in a pub, would happily humiliate himself, shoot himself, jump out of an aeroplane without a parachute, or refuse to get off with Raquel Welch, in the interests of the narrative. For a while I had a theory that the Irishman in the Irish jokes was actually taking the piss out of the Englishman’s caution (the subvert-from-within philosophy). But I suppose that wasn’t what got the laughs on Saturday evening TV shows like The Comedians where blubber-necked walruses in dinner suits with big lollipop microphones and accents like gravy would entertain a nation (or rather pander to our prejudices), a nation moreover still stuck somewhere in the late 1950s (apart from those few lucky fuckers who actually had a shag and an acid tab in 1967).
(#ulink_31c2c492-21c3-51d7-aaa0-00ae69baa502)
And then, of course, there were the bombs that I’d hear about on the news and not quite understand, bombs that were to do with Ireland. Why England was at war with Ireland (and ‘Ulster’) I could never work out (I knew it was war because the British army were always there in the TV pictures – I read all the war comics so knew the score). In many people’s consciousness bombs and Ireland thus became synonymous. Years later, at the end of the eighties, a paranoid mad distant relation tried to stop me going on a weekend jaunt to Dublin with my mates saying, pleadingly, ‘Them Paddies’ll bomb yer if yer don’t watch out!’
At Holyhead, in the cold flinty early morning light, we were one of the first cars in the queue. We both stared out at a shard of fading orange in the clouds. Go and see your family, I said, seemingly on some kind of repatriation mission. We got out of the car and went to check the ferry times. It would cost him a tenner to come back over. He waddled over to the phone to call his sister, who lived down in the southwest, to see if she would wire him twenty pounds to a bank somewhere in Dublin. It all sounded a bit elaborate to me. But the sister wasn’t there, only the husband, and he didn’t want to do anything until the sister came back. I didn’t understand. Someone in your family asks you for twenty quid – is it that big a decision? (Mad Relation: ‘Yeah but Tim, what if the IRA got their hands on the money, they’d be using it to buy missiles from Libya and that.’) I walked around Duty Free while he sat in the car trying to think what he should do. I got back in and handed over twenty quid, obviously expecting never to see it again. He must have read my mind.
‘You think you’ll never see this money again don’t you, but I promise you as soon as I get in touch with my sister I’ll get her to wire me some money and I’ll send you it straight back – Yeah, I’ll send you it in a couple of weeks, if you give me your address.’ I scribbled it on the back of an envelope and gave it to him.
On the ferry we went down to the front. It was like a big shopping centre with huge cathedral-like windows and an American-style cocktail bar with a Budweiser neon sign. Whatever happened to boats that actually looked like boats, I thought. In the gift shop were some of the Singing Leprechaun’s captive brothers and sisters. I pressed the belly of one of them and a sweet tune rang out. It seemed somehow familiar – where had I heard it before? Then it came to me – it was the famous old ballad, ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’. The Hitcher wandered off and I tried to get some kip, thinking of garages, Irishwomen and Terry (I hoped he was regretful but guessed not – not his style, he’d be tucked up in bed sound asleep with a bellyful of good beer and a head full of crosswords).
About an hour later the Hitcher came back, I bought him a coffee and we discussed his plans. He hoped he’d never go back to England now. He was feeling positive. We stopped in Dún Laoghaire and he phoned his cousins in Tallaght to tell them he was coming. I then drove to Dundrum in south Dublin and stopped outside the big 60s-style shopping centre where busy consumers were going about their business. What are you going to do now? he asked. I’m going to have breakfast with my friends. He asked me about them. Oh they’re just a family of crazy and beautiful single women who live near the foot of the mountains and talk a lot, I laughed, sadistically. He looked at me pleadingly but I said he’d better go. Get a bus or something, I said. No, I’ll save my money he said, it can’t be more than five miles or so. I pointed him in the direction of Tallaght and waved goodbye. I knew I’d never see him again. Normally in these circumstances you feel some sort of sorrow after the bond that’s been forged. OK, there was a bit of that but I was also rather glad to see the back of the miserable bugger. Not much like Kerouac in On the Road, is it? I’d like to know how he got on, though. I hope he did stay in Ireland, maybe working in a pub in Mayo or even earning a bit of dosh on the back of the Dublin boom. Chances are, though, that he was lured back to England by the promise of a chilly bedsit and semi-regular employment, and the possibility of forgetting his dreams and just surviving on his own.
1 (#ulink_dfc50ad3-57c8-50c5-9681-af2c3863e0b6) o2/a (m) = a x f/m – m = me, f = fuckup quotient, a = amount of things to be fucked up, o = other people.
2 (#ulink_86240411-aae5-5ef8-88bf-4818bc69ec15) Does this make me sound like some romantic delta blues guitarist or Gram Parsons figure who rejected his family’s wishes for him to become respectable?
3 (#ulink_9f077aae-af54-5cf2-92e9-310e8dd1dac6) And there goes the lucrative Brummie market.
4 (#ulink_9f077aae-af54-5cf2-92e9-310e8dd1dac6) Product placement cash might offset the costs of reproducing song lyrics.
5 (#ulink_8634ca81-1fb4-5f66-892d-f151d619b669) Actually it was as a fly that Goldblum became one with not Geena Davis. Thinking about it, Nigel Mansell would have made an interesting dictator and Noriega a great racing driver – Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti had similar skin conditions. They also might have made a great double act – Morecambe and Wise, Abbott and Costello, Mansell and Noriega. The ‘I Love Nigel’ show: Noriega: Let’s have some cocaine! Mansell: Mmm – that’s interesting. (Cue laughter and curtain call)
6 (#ulink_4ccb470b-d553-5d95-b4ca-bba03fc89b64) !
7 (#ulink_53d681b2-fbea-5f87-b6fd-3a2228d6998e) Imagine if all these Irish-born people who’ve left Ireland could vote, like British expats can. The political landscape would be turned on its head.
8 (#ulink_b2206fc0-430a-5c66-9352-ade103ceccce) Like Mick Jagger and the people who thought up The Magic Roundabout TV show.
Notes on a Cultural Tour of Dublin Dundrum to Temple Bar (#ulink_352238a8-8086-5725-ac81-3a099346152b)
After arriving in Dublin the plan was to have a quick wash and a bite to eat with my friends, the Macs, then start going through the Yellow Pages looking for Opel (the Irish brand of Vauxhall) dealers. I already had a few leads to check up on, people I’d spoken to in London before I left. Then Sarah Mac looked me in the eye and said, ‘Do you really want to spend all afternoon driving around Dublin trying to sell that car?’
(Of course I did. That was why I was here.)
‘Nah, not really. What I’d like to do is a cultural tour, and maybe work out a plan of action for the car later on.’
I took the bus with Sarah from where they lived in Dundrum into the centre of Dublin. During the journey we worked out the best way to do a cultural tour and give ourselves time to discuss the car. We decided we would go round a few pubs and have a pint in each one. Every pint we drank would represent a different aspect of Irish culture. I told her about one of my previous visits to the city when along with friends I had trawled around looking at the Book of Kells.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’ll start there then.’
‘What a great idea,’ I said.
(The following tour is a mental and physical assault course of culture and Guinness. I moved around Dublin like a terrified blind man being led by a sadistic, hedonistic guide dog, hearing strange amplified urban voices, following the smell of cheap tourist perfume and beer-stained wooden floors, my fingers caressing the smoothly polished bar-tops and tables of grand pubs, my mouth bitter from the black stuff and the salty taste of laughter’s tears. I thought about writing some of it down, but instead relied on memory. With no particular plan in mind except to imagine I was no longer some East Midlands Kerouac-lite sad bastard but a latter day Dr Johnson-style cleverperson, sitting in pubs and watching people, learning this and that and writing things down then stuffing it all into my rucksack like some kind of demented memory snail. Some of the places we went to have simply disappeared forever. These are the ones that remain.)
The Book of Kells
This seemed like a logical choice for our first cultural stop-off point. The big pub with glass partitions, somewhere off Grafton Street, was quite austere and formal, perfect for viewing a thousand-year-old manuscript that had been illuminated by monks. As the first pint of the day, the Book of Kells was always going to be popular. There was a bit of a queue at the bar (bloody tourists) and we then had to wait to let the pints settle. It was worth the wait. The Book of Kells was just the right temperature and very smooth. You have to keep thousand-year-old manuscripts that have been illuminated by monks at the right temperature. We talked a bit about people we knew and I hoped the car would be all right.
The Martello Tower at Sandycove
This was an interesting pub, with two levels and lots of strange pictures on the wall.
Maud Gonne
This was a quiet old pub on a side street. It was Sarah’s idea to name it after the great Irish heroine, Yeats’ lost love. I’d first met Sarah out in the west of Ireland in the early nineties. In those days she was into karate and was a rumbustous hard-drinking wild woman with mad long hair. Now she had slimmed down to become a slinky hard-drinking wild woman with fashionable long hair, pierced bellybutton and celtic tattoo on the small of her back. She was a Gaelic footballer and also well-versed in ancient Irish history and modern Irish politics. Her grandmother’s family had been old republicans – the grandfather had been De Valera’s driver for a while and had also worked for John McBride, husband of Maud Gonne. I’d talked to her grandmother about all this just after Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins had been released. Being an old anti-Treatyist, Granny Mac wasn’t quite so rosy and sentimental about the likes of Boland and Collins as Jordan’s film. She had also met Maud Gonne. I won’t tell you exactly what she said, but you won’t read about it in the history books.
Charlie Haughey
There was racing on the telly and I was dying for a piss.
The Divorce Referendum
A serious, dark pub. We got into a big talk about Irishness and what it means. From the point of view of someone living in London who goes to pubs a lot, Irishness could be a marketing man’s creation, the vision that is Heritage Ireland, the fake Irish pubs.
But there’s the cold-eyed heavily moral and religious Irishness, which has ruled more or less since the twenties. Some of that pious moralism must come from the impeccable double standards of the Victorian English, and has attached itself to a devout Catholicism. But, I’m reliably informed, the church and state thing is already well on the way out, or at least becoming just a part of the heady cultural mix. Travelling in the west a few years ago I found myself in a B&B which was stuffed full of religious icons, lifesize statues of Mary and Jesus scattered around, making the place seem as though it was full of people. In our room, along with a bleeding heart painting of Jesus and another giant statue of Our Lady, was a well-fingered German porn mag. You could have cut the juxtaposition with a knife.
And yet younger folk probably don’t give two craps about all the old-style stuff. Irishness is no longer Collins and Dev, Willie MacBride and Yeats, but Boyzone, Roy and Robbie Keane, Bono and Sinéad O’Connor. Behan and Kavanagh? Zig and Zag!
Bored with that one, we swapped coats, swigged down the last dregs of the Divorce Referendum, took a couple of pictures and headed off in search of more culture.
Gate Theatre
I tried to remember Jockser’s speech about the stars in Juno and the Paycock, but was already starting to lose it. We had to stand up because it was so popular. Sarah showed me her tongue stud and talked about Gaelic Football. From what I understand, having a tongue stud (and other piercings) is now the rule for anyone who wants to join the official Gaelic Athletic Association (the GAA) and I had this image of all these old lads with nipple studs and Prince Alberts, along with their broken noses and false teeth.
Sharon Shannon and Donal Lunny
Music pub. We start to get mystical and Sarah talks about her dad in the west. We wonder what it’s all about. None of the cosmologists currently writing today believe in the universe as a swirling bazaar governed by market forces. But if we see the universe as being like a business what were the conditions needed for it to exist? A gap, a need for a universe for a start. Until the idea of existence became real. But where did the funds come from? What bankrolled this fledgling business? Was it a loan? There was nothing. The question is, did it happen spontaneously like, say, the craze for rock ’n’ roll heart tattoos, or did it come from above, like Coke or Barbie?
The Peace Process
Noisy boozer. Drank very quickly and flirted with each other a little.
Ireland 1–Italy 0 World Cup ’94
A real dodgy backstreet boozer. Guys in football shirts and littles ’taches, red faces, little slit eyes. A tall old man at the bar looked different. In a suit. Heard us talking.
‘Where are you from?’
‘I was born in Louth.’ I think I’m so clever. It’s true and makes some people think I might be Irish.
‘I presume that’s Louth in Lincolnshire.’
A smart one. It turned out he had been stationed in Lincolnshire in the RAF. He started asking me questions and knew more about Lincolnshire than I did. I went to the bog. A fat bloke in a Man United second strip (the blue and white one – by the time this comes out that will probably be ten second strips ago) came in and said I’m lovely and would I like his limited edition plate then he says I’m not really lovely I’m a daft bastard. Back out in the pub he confronted the RAF lad in a mock fight and they put on English accents.
My head was going, but me and the RAF lad (who by now could hardly stand) then got into a mad conversation which went something like this:
RAF lad: Ah, you English fucker.
Me: I’m not surprised by your reaction. Any conversation I have with certain friends in pubs about Irishness and Englishness eventually leads someone to expressing their distaste at eight hundred years of English rule in Ireland. In some ways it’s a tricky conversation for me, because I still haven’t really got a handle on what it means to be English. I mean, who are the English? What do they stand for? Some would say that’s obvious. The English are the British.
RAF lad: You daft bastard.
Me: Right – the English may have created the idea of Britishness for their own ends. After all, it suits the English power base if an Ulsterman, a Welshman and a Scot all claim allegiance to the British crown. This doesn’t mean that the English don’t exist, but they are perhaps more likely to admit to being British than anyone else in the ‘British’ Isles.
RAF lad: British? Ha!
Me: And there’s another thing. It really pisses off some of my friends when people say the ‘British’ Isles. Ireland isn’t in the British Isles. It’s a geographical term which has become a geopolitical term. And an outdated one at that. I read somewhere a suggestion that they be called the Celtic Isles. After all, as well as Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Cornwall, a large proportion of the people in England must be descended in some way from the Celts, or even further back is more likely.
RAF lad: Ah you.
Me: Yes, although I look like a mangy German or Scandinavian, my mother’s family are all short, dark-haired and sallow-skinned. Anyway, the culture of the so-called British countries is obviously non-Anglo-Saxon. But all this stuff about ancient races. What on earth is ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture? In the context and history of Ireland, Anglo-Saxon culture represents a centralised blanding out of traditional folk culture as a way of damping down Celtic nationalism. Exactly the same thing happened in England. Over the centuries we seem to have lost so many of the things which make a culture rich – like music, dress, language, food. Much of the local traditions have been lost because of centralisation. In Ireland, Anglo-Saxon culture has generally meant Protestant culture. It wasn’t always like that. When Henry II invaded Ireland he wasn’t introducing Protestantism. But he wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon, he was a Norman.
RAF lad (to Manchester United bloke): Hear this fellah.
Me: So when did the Anglo-Saxons take over in Ireland? I mean, they invaded England in about the fifth and sixth centuries. Can it be true that it wasn’t until a thousand years later that Anglo-Saxon culture came to the fore. I’ve always felt that this Anglo-Saxon thing is a bit of a problem. The English are as much to blame as anyone because we like to see ourselves as Anglo-Saxon. But in reality when people talk about the Anglo-Saxon race they are referring to a total mix of Anglo-Saxon, Jute, Norman, Dane, Norwegian and Celtic, plus ‘Wessex’ Culture and the Beaker People. And now add some Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Turkish, Jewish. Englishness must always have threatened to take on multifarious forms. But up until now, Englishness has been confined to what the ruling elite choose to portray it as. Is there a general malaise afflicting people in their thirties? Maybe we are the new lost generation like Kerouac and his mates, not knowing what the hell our core values are or where we want to go (for instance, like the two-headed god Janus we straddle the cultural divide of punk and dance music, but we sit in neither camp, with our balls being tickled by the new romantics). Politically we are the last of the passionate left wingers, left high and dry by the New Labour experiment, left to thrash about in a muddy sea of irony.
I’d describe myself as English, but not in some pastoral, village-green sort of way. There are many forms of Englishness. You can take your pick. Mine is an expressive, multi-racial socialist humanist hedonism. Manifested by something like Glastonbury, Ken Livingstone, William Morris, John Cooper-Clarke. I’m a fucking hippy do-gooder.
RAF lad: Well, yer a cunt at any rate.
Dana
Couldn’t fit any more Guinness into my belly if I tried. Sarah was still going strong and laughing at my pathetic attempts to keep up. Music playing. Started to sway. This one was Dana – had to finish it.
‘James Joyce and we’ll be half-way there.’
‘No, we’ve already done the Martello Tower,’ she smiled.
I started going on about the car, how I had to get back and start driving it around. That’s the last I remember for a while. We apparently got a cab home. Later, Sarah showed me some Gaelic football moves.
… Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh and then I woke up …
This seemed like a logical choice for our first cultural stop-off point. The big pub with glass partitions, somewhere off Grafton Street, was quite austere and formal, perfect for viewing a thousand year old manuscript that had been illuminated by monks. This was an interesting pub, with two levels and lots of strange pictures on the wall, his was a quiet old pub on a side street. It was Sarah’s idea to name it after the great Irish heroine. I’d first met Sarah out in the west of Ireland in the early nineties. There was racing on the telly and I was dying for a piss. A serious, dark pub. We got into a big talk about Irishness and what it means. From the point of view of someone living in London who goes to pubs a lot. Irishness lose it. We had to stand up because it was so popular. Music pub. We start to get mystical and Sarah talks about her dad in the west. We wonder what it’s all about. Noisy boozer. Drank very quickly and flirted with each other a little. A real dodgy backstreet boozer. Guys in football shirt and little tashes, red faces, little slit eyes. Couldn’t fit any more Guinness into my belly
The Informal Urchin-gurrier Choir of Hill 16 Gaelic Sports (#ulink_2884102b-155c-515d-b6f9-7144cfc79beb)
