Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

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Gaelic football is very much like rugby except the players’ bodies are smaller, their legs are bigger and their hair curlier. Until these travels, my only experience of the sport had been from fading posters in pubs showing hard-looking blokes with big squashed noses and heavy shoulders staring at the camera in the way they would if someone was eyeing up their wife or their tractor. All I could tell about the tactics was that one of the big lads would get hold of the football, belt it upfield, a crowd of big lads would chase after it and jump up in the air trying to catch it. The biggest lad would achieve this, to a great roar from the crowd, then boot it between the posts for a point.

Actually, the tactics and various styles of Gaelic football are far too numerous to mention here – sometimes, for instance, they will hand tap the ball to a teammate who then kicks it upfield to the big lad, roar from crowd, boot, point etc. Like Americans at baseball and gridiron, the Irish are world champions at all Gaelic sports. No-one else can touch them because no-one plays the stuff. So the All-Ireland champs could call themselves the World champs but, unlike their American cousins, the Irish are naturally more modest. In the last few years, however, this Gaelic monopoly has been challenged by a sleek, fast, tight-trousered new opponent in the shape of Australia. The method? The Gaelic Football-Australian Rules hybrid called Compromise Rules.

The games started up in 1984 (and a mini series is played regularly now) as a means of addressing the obvious similarities between Gaelic Football and Australian Rules. The latter, a late-eighteenth-century invention, takes many of its elements from Gaelic Football. In GF you get three points for a goal – i.e. in the net – and one for kicking the ball between the posts – like a combination of football and rugby. Hand passing is allowed but the mainstay is kicking a round ball. No tackles are allowed but you can block. In AR it’s three between the main posts, one for the outer sticks. Tackles are allowed. Marks (free kicks) are made when you catch the ball cleanly. It’s an oval ball. Compromise Rules seems to be 80–90 per cent Gaelic Football.

Sarah once took me to one of these compromise games at Croke Park, the cathedral of Gaelic sports. We walked from O’Connell Street then down Parnell Street in the north side, past flats and small seen-better-days terraced houses, kids sitting on steps with skinny dogs, little inflatable plastic footballs by their side. People were staggering around in the streets, shitfaced drunk and with huge grins on their faces. Most of the crowd I was following got in as students, although they looked as if they hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom for at least ten years. Inside I marvelled at the faces – thick-set, dark-browed, big noses, broken noses or wiry and ginger. Dublin shirts were prominent but there were also Galway, Clare, Ofally, Kilkenny and Waterford fans there too. It was a blustery afternoon and I was near the back left corner of Hill 16, the most celebrated terrace in Ireland.

Gaelic footballers dress in normal sports gear. Aussie Rules players wear underpants and tight fitting disco vests. ‘It’s so no-one can grab them and pull them over,’ said an Australian doctor I talked to.

‘No, it’s so they can show off their muscles to the crowd, isn’t it?’

‘No, no, no, you’re wrong, it’s a very practical outfit for contact sports.’

‘Like picking up dockers in backstreet gay bars?’

‘Hey, don’t knock it.’

Disappointingly for the crowd, the Aussie players weren’t wearing their trademark swimming trunks and skin-tight T-shirts but were in regular gear. The Irish players all had little bodies and big red legs – the Australians were all shapes and sizes, some stringbean, some squat, some normal, some athletic, some brawny – with a few surfer haircuts around.

The game started at a madly fast pace. Everyone agreed it was exciting to watch. Ireland dominated and, when they went twenty points up, the feeling was that it was going to be a bit of an embarrassing final scoreline. Behind the canal end, which at the time of writing has been knocked down, I could see rows and rows of terraced houses and behind that the Dublin mountains. It was a beautiful urban scene. Many big sports stadiums are now being moved to out-of-town sites, but their constituency will always be the heart of the city.

As the wind blew in our faces, the sounds of Irish voices came drifting down from the back of Hill 16. An informal Gurrier Choir, an ensemble made up of local grubby-faced urchins and midget wiseguys (though some of them might have been out-of-work jockeys) had perched itself high at the back of the stand and was responding to any Australian resistance in that part of the ground like a highly effective and ruthless military unit. Two portly Australian fans just a few rows further down had been spotted.

‘Skippeeeeee, skippeeeeeeeee Skippeeeee the bush kangaroo. Skippeeeeee, skippeeeeeeeee Skippeeeee my friend and yours too.’

One of the Aussies shouted ‘Come on Australia!’ Quick as a flash an urchin shouted out in a mangled Neighbours-style accent, ‘Cam on Awwstayyylyah … h aha ha ya fat Aussie bastard!’ As the Irish Tourist Board might say, one hundred, thousand welcomes.

Ireland were thrashing them. I’ll admit I started to get quite excited. All I can recall about Australian sportsmen over the last few years is them pummelling English rugby and cricket teams into the ground. Now they were getting pummelled. I thought about the losses at sport and the stereotypes of national characteristics. The English are Anglo-Saxon, slow-moving, cautious but well organised and focused. (If sport is, as some commentators suggest, a metaphor for warfare, is that how the Angles and Saxons fought their battles?) The Irish are ferocious and gung-ho. The Scots fast, skilful and angry. The Welsh pessimistic but mercurially skilled. The Australians ultra-competitive and athletic. And I suppose, if we’re going to really follow this through logically, the French are seductive and the songs they sing in the showers after the match don’t scan properly.

After the end of the second quarter, the refs made love. They must have done – and the gestation period for a young ref

(#ulink_84625d6e-c81a-5e6c-8ef2-e3c913d53987) must be about fifteen minutes – because by the third quarter there were four refs on the pitch. Either they rubbed up against one another and went for it big time or maybe they are like those one-celled organisms which simply split in two to carry out the reproductive process. If the game had gone into fifth and sixth quarters the number of refs would no doubt have increased exponentially. This is the reason why these games have to stop after the fourth quarter. Also, refs do go on reproducing. This means that at the end of every game there has to be a ref cull. Refs are given a lethal injection in the dressing room. The danger for Irish society is if these refs escape into the wild and start to over-run the hillsides, bogs and plains.

Word before the game was that there would be a huge scrap at some point. Apparently this is par for the course in Aussie Rules. The Aussie lads had been sticking the boot in or putting in late tackles for a while, niggling the Irish. Then it all kicked off – some innocuous little challenge near the Canal End and two players started lashing into each other. I got the feeling it must have been staged. Within a second or two, half the players had joined in and after three or four more seconds it was a total free-for-all. All the trainers and subs came chasing out onto the pitch like when you’re at school and someone shouts ‘scrap!’ with one eye on the staffroom, waiting for the teacher to come along and pull you apart, cuff you and take you to the headmaster while the onlookers will sit in the lessons for the rest of the day with stupidly large grins on their faces. It was handbags at three paces – hardly a punch seemed to connect, they were sort of waffing thin air with their eyes closed – you could imagine them rolling around on the floor pulling each other’s hair and scratching.

Meanwhile the crowd were going completely mental – grown men were jumping up and down like kids and clapping their hands with glee. Then I realised I was doing it too – jumping up and down from foot to foot, clapping my hands together and shouting ‘Whhhooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!’ at the top of my voice. When the fight finally petered out it was the end of the third quarter and the crowd gave both teams a standing ovation – the Irish walked off the pitch in a tight little huddle and I could imagine them shouting ‘Join on the gang’ or ‘Does anybody want to play aaarrmmmyyy? No girls – only boys.’ Whatever else happened in the game, this was guaranteed to put bums on seats for the next encounter a week later. Very clever.

The Irish have a reputation for fighting. They even go on about it themselves. In America too, they’re called the ‘fighting Irish’. But they certainly don’t seem to fight any more than the English. In fact, blokes out and about drinking in the centre of towns seem a lot less aggressive. Whatever, the Australians would treat them with respect now, said the bloke standing next to me. They perhaps see the Irish as a sort of madder version of themselves, the pure source of the idiosyncratic Aussie spark, and they’d be united in their hatred of whingeing Pommie bastards. But it seemed to me that the fight was not a sign of mutual respect but a deliberate tactic to throw the Irish out of rhythm. They may have won the scrap but would they win the match?

In the fourth quarter a man in luminous lime green overalls ran onto the pitch at various intervals. At first I wasn’t sure if everyone else could see him. Could it be the drink? I discussed it with a few other fans and we decided he was the team gossip because he kept running over to players and chatting to them. He fancies your wife. Did you see Eastenders? Your investment portfolio is doing well, etc. An on-pitch information service, perhaps?

The urchin gurrier choir, quiet for a while, opened up in full voice once more, with an old battle ballad.

‘Aussie Aussie bastards,’ they sang. ‘Aussie Aussie bastards.’ Then the Kylie Minogue song, ‘I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, I should be so lucky in love.’

A bit of Rolf Harris: ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport, tie me kangaroo down.’

‘Come on Australia,’ said the bravest of the two Antipodeans nearby.

‘Stick it up your arse, you fat Aussie bastard!’ sang the choirboys. ‘You fat bastard, you fat bastard! Youse is all a load of women!’

There was a big countdown by the crowd, then the hooter went for the end of the game. The final score was 62–61 to Australia. The winners were delighted, leaping around and hugging each other. It had been a terrific, hard-fought match, sporting heaven for those who like blood, guts and a lot of skill.

Then one of the little Hill 16ers began a solo refrain – ‘You’ll never beat the Irish, You’ll never beat the Irish – except,’ he went on, deadpan, ‘maybe at soccer, rugby, snooker, cricket, darts, Compromise Rules …’ His mates fell about laughing.

1 (#ulink_e94e5b52-4678-531a-92d8-0e6446a2345e) Called ‘Reflings’.

Dublin, Fair City of Vikings, Buskers and Soaring House Prices (and the Celtic Tiger is rather unimaginatively mentioned too) Twenty-four quietish hours in Dublin (#ulink_ea32a602-5162-5b9c-899b-a4fa9fc986b1)

2 am

I’m trying to get to sleep in O’Shea’s Hotel, between O’Connell Street and the railway station, while downstairs in the ‘24-hour bar’ a dreadful singer/accordion player is murdering a few classic tunes and I’m praying that he’ll shut up soon. No such luck – ‘Rivahhhssss roon freeeeeeeeehhhhhhrrr’, ‘Dirrdi ooooooohl taaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhn’, ‘Fffffeeeeeeellllzzzzz ovathenraaaiiiiiiiiiiiiii’ etc., etc., come piling one on top of the other. I’d popped in earlier for a quick half.

(#litres_trial_promo) There were a mixture of local people with cold, pinched faces and skint and harassed looking tourists sitting around fondling their itchsome facial hair, their tongues lolling into fizzy yellow pints of lager. Next to me were some lively ‘Europeans’, who seemed to know all the words to all the songs. Their leader, a Eurotourist archetype, was a big-boned man with non-designer stubble, in a Luftwaffe-issue lumberjack shirt and a post-post-post punk hairdo – bald at the front, brown and greasy at the back. He seemed extremely upset by the plight of most of the protagonists of the songs – his face was one of absolute concentration and conviction as he listened to the music. I decided he was called Klaus, even if Greek. The Erinese, the brandy-buttered maudlin sentimentality of it all was too much for me after half an hour or so. It reminded me of a Paddy’s Day in London a few years back, red-faced folk with tears in their eyes bawling out songs – this was Dublin for Christsakes, what had they got to be nostalgic about? I got up to leave and, after a few whispers and hand signals, one of the Eurogroup parked their big, denimed backside in my seat.

‘Noit?’ said the pretty dark-eyed receptionist, meaningfully, as I headed for the stairs.

Back up in my rooms I turned the light out and tried to get some sleep, but the singer seemed to have taken my disappearance as an affront and belted it out louder:

Singer: Let’s put the speakers up in the corridor outside the miserable git’s room, hey ladies and gentlemen?

Klaus the Possibly Greek Eurotourist: Ha ha, yesss, zat iss good johke! ‘Ze Vild Rover’, jah?

I flicked the TV on – the film When Saturday Comes,

(#litres_trial_promo) starring Sean Bean and Emily Lloyd, was showing. In many respects the singer downstairs was a lot more entertaining than this terrible piece of British cinema.

‘Begorrah Jimmy,’ said Emily Lloyd’s character in a really crap Dublin accent and I just burst out laughing, though they were nearly tears. I wished I was more drunk, then it might seem more entertaining. By the end I realised I am perhaps unique in the world, having now seen the film twice.

I don’t know what happened to Emily Lloyd. She seemed to sort of disappear after being superb as the young girl in Wish You Were Here. Sean Bean was eerily watchable, though. He’s like one of the sleazy blokes who’d stand on the back of dodgems when you were a kid, never smiling, catching girls’ eyes. Perhaps one of his family was a horse person. The balladeer downstairs seemed to have turned it up another notch with Wild Rover (annoyspentarlmaemoo-niaaaahhwehssskkeeeeeunbbbbbeeeeeeeehhhhhhrrr), with the audience joining in now.

Klaus: Und itz no nay never vill I plahh ze vild rover jah?

Finally, as the music fades and the punters wander off to their beds, I drift off to sleep, day-dreaming of the pretty dark-eyed receptionist wearing a bikini made out of an Irish flag, singing the ‘Fields of Athenry’ to me while doing the back stroke in a gigantic pint of yellow lager, while Klaus is chained to some rocks below the surface (‘Help achtung, Englander, I cannot breathe … arrrrggghhhh … blob-babubblblblblbbl’).

9 am

I wake up feeling good. I immediately try to plug my laptop into the phone lines. No chance. I don’t really want a newspaper but it seems like too much hard work not to get one. But what if something incredible has happened overnight, like God has proven that He exists, or there’s been a General Election on the quiet? I hate newspapers for the way they play on your emotions like this. Make you scared to miss out.

9.15 am

Outside it’s a typical summer’s day. Cold and windy with a promise of rain. Across the street an old man stands in a doorway, with an old black beret on, watching. He has a long nose and ears that drop down to his elbows. He’s got a proud look in his eye. I imagine that he’s been a ferocious Republican warrior in his life. I walk down the street and suck in the damp air. Saturday morning. The most perfect feeling. Kids in last season’s Man United shirts are playing with a half-inflated football in the street, bouncing the ball against the wall of a kebab shop. They never stop playing, even when someone walks past. Sometimes people get the ball blasted in their ears, and the lads are all apologetic. They stop occasionally, such as when a car turns into the street.

Further up, a small bald man tries to start his car, which sounds like an old asthmatic, or a faulty chainsaw. Or a car that won’t start. In the newsagents I ask the fat guy with the shaved head and ’tache behind the counter if there are any Guardians left. No, he says. It’s the Irish Times again. He’s got a few odds and ends of food, soup, mouldy fruit, packets of cereal. Like the old grocers I used to frequent, who stocked only a few tins of Oxtail soup, a couple of bread rolls, Quaker Oats (not Scotch Porridge Oats, only Quaker) and a Battenburg cake. Is that from the house of Battenburg, I wonder? Were they like the Hapsburgs? Perhaps that’s why the Hapsburgs declined, because they hadn’t got a fancy cake named after them.

10 am

I pop into an Internet café on O’Connell Street to pick up my e-mails and send some stuff back to Andy, Editor at When Saturday Comes. It’s run by a posse of young cybervixens (the cafe, not WSC – more’s the pity), equally adept at making espressos and using Internet Explorer. There’s a queue so I get a cappuccino and flick through the Irish Times. Five minutes later one of the girls shouts my name and I’m on. I have an Internet e-mail account with Hotmail – irishtim@hotmail.com. It means you can pick up messages on any machine wherever you are in the world. It’s busy, so I tap in a number that I remember saving. I get in. A dopey-looking guy with a goatee beard wearing shorts is sitting next to me, cursing. He looks over.

‘Hey meean, like how dja git inta hartmayerl?’

I tell him.

‘Coooooool!’

The place is full of young Americans, Spanish, Germans, Italians and Australians. I appear to be the oldest person there by at least five years. I think of Dublin changing, then I get an image in my head of the singer from last night appearing on one of the computer screens singing ‘Ring a ring a roses, on my ISDN line, I remember Dublin in the rare old times’. Really coooooooool!

10.45 am

The Dublin sky is a milky yellow grey. Drizzle dashes against my cheeks as I stand at a street corner near the Liffey, watching a gaggle of schoolgirls in bright blue uniforms next to the Pádraig ō Síoláin (Patrick Sheehan) monument as they chatter excitedly about ‘stuff’. As the rain comes down harder I stand near the window of the Virgin Megastore and listen to the ‘Real Ibiza’ trance house CD while staring out at the clouds and the water hitting the glass.

11 am

I wander, inevitably, towards Temple Bar. When I first came over to Dublin with my Lincolnshire mates Plendy, Dukey and Ruey (Mad Relation: ‘If you take them out first, they can’t hurt you, Tim. Through that window – SMASH – then buddabuddabuddabuddabudda. Arm round the neck, block the windpipe with the blade of the hand, push head forward. Snap. It’s the only way.’), we’d stumbled across Temple Bar, a ramshackle haunt full of scaffolding and secondhand clothes shops. We got caught up in a demo for the Birmingham Six. It was 1989 – they were heady days. The world seemed to be changing so quickly.

Things have changed, but not necessarily in the way we thought back then. Temple Bar has altered out of all recognition. Glitzy restaurants, themed superpubs, trendy clothes shops, designer tat emporiums. The Dublin Viking Experience Museum – a tourist attraction for the worst kind of heritage junky saddos – money changes everything, like love. Like those ecstatic lottery winners who share tales of house extensions and bright red sports cars, the jealousies of friends and ruined love lives and values gone haywire, Ireland has, since the mid-nineties, undergone an upheaval the like of which it’s never experienced before. A country transformed. Have we seen the last of the old Ireland, Dev’s Ireland? Ireland is letting go of the past, in the way that Britain did in the sixties and the US in the fifties.

In the little square, flocks of dark-haired Euroteentourists are sitting on the steps in their brightly coloured waterproof gear, staring down balefully at maps of the city. Short-haired trendy buggers loll around the tables outside trendy cafés, not caring a jot for anything except being trendy. Thick-armed bald boyos in corporate polo shirts stand guard outside the grand and glitzy looking superboozers which are the new temples, turning away non-believers and large English stag parties. Skinny, frowning girls wearing too much make-up rush about with carrier bags full of shopping.

I sit down next to a mapless Euroteentourist who, due to the absence of props, is simply staring balefully into the middle distance. I get out my notepad. Just at this moment a mad, hard-faced pensioner in black zip-up flying jacket, flared jeans and trainers hoves into view, spitting expletives. He sees me watching him and shouts across the cobbled street ‘Ye bollix!’ I avert my gaze, but he walks (no – not quite the right word – he lurches and sways) right up to me and shouts again ‘Ye bollix!’ I look up at him and say ‘Sorry?’

‘Bollix. Yer book is bollix!’ If this is meant to be some kind of sign it’s not a very auspicious one. He crawls off in the direction of the Viking museum.

When I first met Annie and her Irish friends ten or more years ago they said there was something typically English about me. No there isn’t, I said. What is it? Tell me, tell me. There was something placid about me, they said. You could see it in the eyes. Irish blokes, they said, have mad eyes. I can do mad, I said. I can have mad eyes. Look. Arrrgh. I’m mad, me. Grrrr. Yeaaah suuuuuuuuuure, they said. I took to practising in my shaving mirror, having mad eyes. (You have to make them a bit slanty as well as wide.) Arrrrrrrghhhhh … I’m maaaaaaaaad. I had always equated mad eyes with the actor Malcolm McDowell.

(#litres_trial_promo) You can easily do a Malcolm McDowell – just pull the corners of your eyes until you look like one of those crappy 1970s comedians doing a version of a Chinese person. Go on, it’s easy. One minute you’re you, the next, your nearest and dearest is screaming blue murder that Malcolm McDowell has got into bed with them. I had my floppy hair cut shorter and started wearing contact lenses which made me stare a lot without blinking. But keeping my eyes wide open like that was hard work. My eyes are sensitive and get dry very easily. This would make me blink a lot. This is a sort of mad look, the blinking thing, but it’s more Anthony Perkins in Psycho rather than the ‘sexy’ mad look I was aiming for.

Irish women’s eyes are not so much mad as soulful. I tried soulful but it’s much more difficult than mad. Soulful made me look like a soppy kids’ TV presenter, or sort of David Cassidyish. I decided to stick with mad. I carried this mad thing a bit far on my first meeting with some real Irish parents. They’re Irish, I thought, they’ll appreciate that I’m a madcap lad. At Sunday lunch I asked for the bone from a shoulder of lamb

(#litres_trial_promo) and started to gnaw away at it like a frenzied puppy, grunting quietly to myself and now and then looking up to check the admiring glances. This didn’t seem too outrageous an act of madness. I’d done it for years in my parents’ house, where the ability to eat like a dog, drink like a fish, piss like a horse and shit like a bull elephant was positively encouraged and seen as a sign of manliness in me and two brothers.

Father, in a put-on voice, said ‘You have the manners of a Viking.’ I acted mock hurt, but took it as a compliment. The Viking thing gave me a little niche, especially as the Parents lived near Waterford, an area of continuous Norse invasion in the ninth and tenth centuries. I saw myself as a one-man rape-and-pillage unit, though without the rape. A sort of sensitive Viking, who would only pillage after asking nicely first. And, being a nice English lad, I’d queue for it, of course.

11.30 am

The Dublin Viking Experience and Feast. Ah, well, I just couldn’t resist. Plus I was curious to see what the Flying-Jacketed Soothsayer thought of it – alas, he is nowhere to be seen. The entrance is via a gift shop. I go into a very dark lecture theatre. A film is showing about the Vikings, narrated by that deep-voiced bloke who did the public information films in the seventies. There are only two others there. Then a real-life Viking appears on the bow of a ship, and starts shouting at us, telling us to row. It starts to get windy and spray is flying about. Someone offstage has just thrown a bucket of water over me. The little Viking (because he is