Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?
TRAVELS IN IRISHRY

Tim Bradford

Copyright

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce material: Kinky Music and R&E Music for permission to quote from ‘Before All Hell Breaks Loose’ by Kinky Friedman and Panama Red and ‘When the Lord Closes the Door (He Opens a Little Window)’ by Kinky Friedman and Jeff Shelby; Warner/Chappell Music for permission to quote from ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ by Ian Dury; BMG Music for ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ words and music by Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman © BMG Music Publishing Ltd/Mike Stock Publishing Ltd/Sid’s Songs Ltd/All Boys Music Ltd (All rights reserved. Used by permission); Leeds United FC for permission to quote from The Leeds United Book of Football. Thanks to Pogue Music Ltd and Perfect Songs Ltd for permission to quote from ‘ A Rainy Night in Soho’ by Shane MacGowan.

Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders for all the extracts reproduced in this volume. The publishers apologise for any omissions and are happy to receive any emendations from copyright holders at the address below.

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperPress 2000

Copyright © Tim Bradford 2000

Tim Bradford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006551683

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007394685

Version: 2016-01-13

Dedication

To the Irish people who

have changed my life

Epigraph

But Leeds taught me something else – that

work and will to win are just as vital as any

instinctive skills you may possess.

JOHNNY GILES, Leeds United Book of Football

Today I decided not to think of you

But was betrayed by a lazy pub window.

I saw a slim tree whose delicate red leaves

Rose and fell in the Thames breeze –

A mixed-up drinker, at this time of year,

I can taste Yeats in the beer.

ROBERT GAINSBOROUGH, ‘Maude Gone Fishing’

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? Camden Town to Camden Lock

Irish Myths & Legends 1: How to be Irish

FINNEGANIA

On a Clear Day You Can See Fulham Football Ground Hammersmith

Irish Myths & Legends 2: Irish Food

VIKING TOWN

Visions of Beer and Loathing on the Road to Holyhead Hammersmith to Dublin

Notes on a Cultural Tour of Dublin

The Informal Urchin-gurrier Choir of Hill 16 Croke Park

Dublin, Fair City of Vikings, Buskers and Soaring House Prices Twenty-four quietish hours

Irish Myths & Legends 3: Leprechaun

ORANGE COUNTY

Hungover Adventures with the Sea-Urchin-Moustachioed Guard Kildare

A Cup of Tea, A Slice of Cake, I Love You Adare, County Limerick

Looking for an All-Encompassing Theory of the Universe in a Hurling Match Limerick to Thurles, County Tipperary

Why is there Orange in the Irish Flag? East to west Portarlington, County Laois

The Search for the Celts

Dunphy v. Charlton Football

Irish Myths & Legends 4: Some Ancient Sagas of Magical Creatures

SHANEWORLD

Lost Highway – County Cork

Fungie the Dolphin, Dingle, County Kerry

Is Irish Music Any Good? Doolin, County Clare

The Day the Earth Stood Still Limerick to Galway, County Clare

Conversations with the Future Foreign Correspondent of the Irish Times Galway City

Alone on Yeats’ Mountain Sligo to Benbulben round trip

W. B. Yeats v. Daniel O’Donnell Around Sligo

The Ian Paisley Impersonators Talk about Weapons Derry

Thinking in Four-part Harmony Mullingar to Moate

Irish Myths & Legends 5: Heritage Ireland

MARYLAND

Smelly Stuff, God, Moving Statues and Space Jockeys Ballinspittle, County Cork

The Art of the Storyteller Blarney,County Cork

Selling a Car in Potato Town Youghal, County Cork

The Beach Tramore, County Waterford

Born to be Wild (Now and Again, if I’m in the Mood) Ireland to Englishness

APPENDIX: London Irish pub guide

KEEP READING

IRISH CROSSWORD

HELPFUL IRISH MAPS

INDEX

SOLUTIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

List of Illustrations

1 Welcome to Ireland

2 ‘Ireland’

3 Atonal Improvised Alto Saxophone

4 Morris dancing v. Irish dancing

5 Leppy

6 FINNEGANIA

7 Various: potato, wine-man, half-crazed hawker

8 ‘Sure, so what’s this squiggly bit, then?’

9 My Great, Great Grandfather the Horseperson

10 Pseudo-Sean and his Joycean chat-up

11 A dancing ‘Gerry Adams’

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

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

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
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

On a Clear Day You Can See Fulham Football Ground Hammersmith to Ireland (in my head)

Hammersmith was fucking cold. Ice had travelled over from Scandinavia, passed across the North Sea like a self-satisfied speed skater¹ 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.

I decided to do my bit for reducing air pollution by selling the car. My girlfriend Annie had bought the Vauxhall Corsa back in 1994 when we’d lived off Portobello Road and she was working in Weybridge. Now she’d been promoted and had headed off to Houston, Texas. What did I want with a car? This was my task, the one thing she’d left in my capable hands. We’d spent a day, back in November, driving around various garages trying to get a decent price. Then I remembered a conversation I’d had with a garage mechanic in Limerick at the tail end of 1992. He’d fixed the breakpads on my brother’s rickety old Ford Fiesta for a fiver, and told us that if we wanted to sell the car we’d get £1,500 for it. We were incredulous. Bearing in mind that the pound and the punt were almost on a par, it seemed like a twenty per-cent markup at least. The thought entered my head that I could drive the Corsa over to Ireland, have a holiday, sell the car and make a good deal. I’m no businessman, but the glamour of this proposition had quite an appeal.

I don’t know much about cars. But I knew I needed an adventure. I had just turned 33. Thirty-three. The Lord of Lords, our Saviour Jesus Christ, had done the business by the time he was thirty-three – had a real relationship with a deity, tried to lead his people to freedom, had arguments with the leaders of an occupying army, been crucified on a big hill in front of crowds of people then reincarnated himself for his friends. I had done none of that (though there was the night of a sixth-form party in Lincoln in 1982 when, after puking most of my innards up, I recovered sufficiently inside Ritzy’s night club to the extent that some people thought it was a miracle. ‘Truly, that man is the son of God’, said some little Lincolnshire disco girl in a John Wayne accent as I forced half a pint of cider down my throat.).

I needed to get away for a while anyway because I was becoming too set in my ways. I’d even stopped my regular habit of giving money to the bedraggled figures in the subway at Hammersmith roundabout. Well, one of them. He spoke in a Yorkshire accent but he could have been Russian, rocking backwards and forwards staring at his palm. Sometimes I used to think, sorry mate I’m just too skint, but I’m not as skint as him no matter how much I’ve pissed away in a pub on Archway Road. I once had to break up a fight he was in – he was about to beat up a skinny frightened guy who was trying to steal his patch. Luckily, I had a microphone stand; I was on my way to a gig in the Tut ’n’ Shive on Upper Street – the British Country & Western revival we called it (‘Brit cunts’, said our friends), so I brandished the mike stand and told them to stop fucking about. Now I was mad at him (and really mad at myself). I was down there once with my dad and brother and was going to tell them about the incident but they were mesmerised by an appallingly drawn picture of Bob Marley that some bloke was trying to pass off as a poster to tourists on their way to see Sir Cliff in Heathcliff at the Hammersmith Apollo.

What really annoyed me was that I wished this bloke was a nice friendly beggar who conformed to genteel ideas of homelessness, like the old Irish fellow further up Fulham Palace Road who stands in a doorway near the shoe shop, and who never wants money, just things to stare at.

My flat is, believe it or not, at the epicentre of old-fashioned tramp activity in the South Hammersmith area. Tramps must be descended from some ancient race that are tuned into ley lines which converge on my flat, or are inexorably drawn here by electromagnetic forces that we house dwellers don’t yet understand. In my more fanciful moments I think to myself that I might be The King of the Tinkers and they have come to claim me as their own. For much of the time I certainly look like a trainee tramp. Hair virtually down to my shoulders, a week’s worth of blotchy, sandpaperish stubble. Crappy old clothes (I’ve only been shopping for clothes twice since 1989).

My aforementioned ‘favourite tramp’ – whose name is Brendan and who comes, originally, from Co. Tyrone – leans against an electrical meter next to the newsagents nearest Fernando’s café on Fulham Palace Road. He patrols from there down to the doorway next to Luigi’s pizza place about two hundreds yards further south.² I’ve only seen him away from this area twice. Once on King Street opposite the Living department store (London’s only Third-World shopping experience. They’ve got a couple of items and you never get served because the staff are always on the phone – Now gone as well. A curse!). Brendan forages locally and lives on what he can find – usually some form of superbrew extra-strong lager which, in accordance with the manufacturer’s specifications, turns immediately and magically into urine as soon as it is swallowed.

Once I happened to be sitting on an eastbound Hammersmith and City Line train at the Hammersmith terminus, reading a collection of John B. Keane’s essays and stories in an attempt to travel to Ireland for less than a tenner (I try to save money by applying for those cheap airline ticket offers but they seem to get booked up years in advance). I was reading a chapter entitled ‘My Personal Tramp’ when he – My Favourite Tramp – sat down opposite me. I wanted to say to him – I didn’t know his name then – ‘Well, do you know what? You, Mr Tramp, are my favourite tramp in all the world, and I’ve just found this story called ‘My Personal Tramp’. And here you are on the train with me. Incredible coincidence, is it not?’ I could tell from his worn-out, sad-eyed expression that he would not, in fact, find it incredible, he would simply think I was some ranting nutter and would probably get quietly off the train and move up a couple of carriages. So I didn’t say it.³ Some facts – tramps’ hair goes thick because the alcohol lowers their testosterone levels. They stand in overcoats staring off into nothingness. Many tramps are like angels and think other people can’t see them.

Then it happened. Ideas that had obviously been kicking around in my brain for a while decided to join forces. I thought about when I was seventeen, and obsessed with Jack Kerouac, when life seemed full of possibilities, when a car was a symbol of adventure and freedom.⁴ I was struck with the idea of heading off like Sal and Dean into the west, except I’d be doing it in this pretty little bright-red girl’s car, with a guitar and a crate of beer in the boot.

I had a feeling my mate Terry might fancy the trip. A knackered-looking handsome Irish raconteur, Terry looks vaguely like Sean Hughes, that knackered-looking handsome Irish raconteur. Which was ironic, as he had bumped into Sean Hughes several times at after-hours pubs and clubs and would invariably try and get into an argument with him. Usually because Terry was about to get off with a girl who thought he was Sean Hughes, then the real Sean Hughes would come along and spoil it. Like a Brian Rix farce, really. Or a Brian Rix farce co-written by James Joyce:

What the Finlan saw a Butler sore her Mother Mary.

(Scene – late nightshite midnight black jean bar under the chip smell tourist choking Tottenhemhem Caught Road. Finoola, Assumpta, Terry in chitchat inebriation)

Terry: Wear you froming to?

Assumpta: To? To? From? Live?

Terry: Chunky fleshy Finoola.

Finoola: The beer-stained sweat of old pine, belly stubble shaved.

Assumpta: Are you Sean Hughes?

Terry: Me funny Sean. Sunny, heavy-lidded sad Sean.

Sean: No me real deal feelme funny Sean. Who are you?

Terry: Doppelganger boy. Johnny Stalker. Johnny Walker.

Assumpta: Double Sean bedfun thrusting, eh Sean?

Anyway, I put it to Terry that the trip might be a good laugh. I said something like, ‘Let’s go off to Ireland for a week or so, try and sell the car, meet people who know the truth, get drunk, stand on mountain tops, go painting, sit in pubs listening to old men’s stories, laugh at and fall in love with mad Irishwomen, shout on the western edge of the world, sing folksongs, cry in the rain, puke in soft green fields, catch a moving statue and put it in our pocket.’

Terry took a sip of his pint and smiled at me. ‘Argh, yeah, why not?’

I regularly wander through Hammersmith and see Irish faces everywhere – heavy-set red-haired women, beautiful dark-haired girls, old guys with lined faces and sad eyes, tiny, grinning leprechauns made of felt who sing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ when you press their bellies. Hammersmith is an old Irish area. At present around eight per cent of the population of the Hammersmith postal district is Irish born – the figure for London as a whole is four per cent and one and a half per cent for Britain (from the 1991 census). It’s hard to know the figures for second- or third-generation Irish, the fresh-faced youngsters who choose to spend their evenings bashing away on bodhrans at the wonderful and lovely Hammersmith Irish Centre. This hive of Celticity is opposite St Paul’s church, round the back of Marks & Spencer with a good view of the flyover and its dark underbelly and of Coca Cola’s UK headquarters. It’s a yellowy brick building built in the mid-nineties. They run music, history, language and dance courses as well as occasional gigs and Irish music sessions and manages to appeal to the generation who came over after the War with stout and dance-hall music coursing through their veins as well as the kids brought up in the borough on hip hop and alcopops. It’s at the north-west end of what I regard as the Irish village of Finnegania⁶ – the spiritual centre of which is a discarded can of Guinness under the flyover which can be reached by crossing over the curve of the A4 and walking round the Apollo Theatre.

Inside the centre it’s very pale and high ceilinged, perhaps in an attempt to be like a church, although the atmosphere is more akin to an English village hall, the world of amateur dramatics and pantomimes, cake stalls and tombola, prized marrows and dollies made of wicker, the tables left over from university seminar rooms. Looking at the group of lads with their great faces and lost eyes, come to hear their grandchildren play the penny whistle or sing a ballad, I couldn’t help thinking that this scene should be a smoky low-slung pub in the forgotten back streets of a midlands Irish country town.

The workshop was a collection of musicians of all ages and talents. Whistle players, people on squeezebox, uillean pipes, banjos, guitars. The music sounded like Irish music yet didn’t really ever get going. The notes were right and the rhythm and speed were there but something was missing. A bloke who looked like Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Féin, was sat at a table surrounded by friends and family. When a jig came on, Gerry started dancing. Do you reckon that’s Gerry Adams? I said to my friends. No they said, it isn’t. Well it looks like him to me. I wonder what he’s doing here. Gerry Adams was dancing away with a baseball cap back to front on his head. Look at him. I’m not sure what the hard-liners of the IRA would think if they could see him now. That’s not Gerry Adams, Tim. You’d think, if he’s going to make a public appearance like this, that he’d have learned to dance properly. Still, I bet he can dance better than Ian Paisley. The music workshop group started to crank it up a bit. Ffaafnaaa nfffnaa twiddleidsleeeeeeeeee ggieee doo deeed didddle dee deee did diddd ddiiiidie dieeeeiieee … pipes and fiddle and accordion, more relaxed this time and my foot started to tap. Then a middle-aged guy took the microphone and introduced a couple of female singers. They did ballads, one in a high-pitched and haunting style about some tragedy or other, then a slightly younger girl did ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ followed by something about Johnny being the handsomest in the village (it’s always Johnny isn’t it, never Tim. How come it’s never ‘but Tim was the tallest and fairest and cleverest and funniest and most talented of them all’? – if there are Tims in Irish folk songs I’m pretty sure they’ll almost always be village idiots or something.)⁷

Finnegan’s Wake,⁸ just round the corner, is a pub that nobody should go to, some big brewer’s mangled attempt to reinvent the concept of Irish pub-going. It is a brand, a kind of corporate kit pub, except you pronounce the k as in sh. There are several of them dotted around London. I do know what I’m talking about here because I unfortunately am sucked into it from time to time by its possible promise of wild-haired colleens dancing on the tables. And the footy.

This Hammersmith version is like a west-of-Ireland theme park set in a grubby looking thirties building. Two towering slot machines guard the main entrance, like the giants Gog and Magog of the City of London, winking their multicoloured lights at each magical drinking warrior who enters the establishment. There are dark brown wooden floorboards, old newspapers and Irish posters all over the walls and ceilings. A violin case here. An accordion there. Near one of the several TV screens that pump out constant satellite sport is an old brown briefcase with the words MICHAEL O’MALLEY, LEGAL SECRETARY written on it in thick white paint (or possibly thin mashed potato). On the other side of the pub is a wooden shamrock (Is it, I wonder, the magic one ex-President Mary Robinson gave to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the former head of the UN, to ward off the evil machinations of Boutros Boutros-Ghali?). At various points there are pots and pans and stuff – basically all sorts of ill-thought-out cultural flotsam.

And the clientèle are just too perfect – perhaps they’re actors. A group of raucous red-haired women sit at a table in the middle, carousing and eyeing up the blokes. An old fellow with bulbous red nose and the look of a noble Gaelic poet nurses a pint of stout near the door. Young couples stare into each other’s eyes. A group of young Irish lads in leather jackets and real haircuts crack jokes and stare off into the distance at imaginary Nicole Kidman lookalikes running across a mountain top. The Irishness is suffocating, but it’s a joke, a shell, a thin layer of treacle. I can’t even remember what the pub was like before it was Finneganed, but probably just some nondescript and harmless local boozer.

When I first arrived in London in 1988, it was still bursting with authentic Irish pubs – ramshackle Victorian or Edwardian edifices which dominated the village high streets and side roads of the city – Muswell Hill, Walthamstow, Shepherd’s Bush, Hammersmith, Hoxton, Ladbroke Grove, Leyton. They may not have had the insignia of boozers back in Ireland – the name of the proprietor painted bright above the front window – but went by mostly prosaic English names, the Bells, Red Lions, White Harts or slightly more obscure monikers like Pelican or Green Man – but everybody knew what they were – and a high proportion of the drinkers within (or if not them, their parents) would have hailed from Ireland.

A creak of the flaky-painted door with its carved-pattern glass and you would enter into a main area of cigarette smoke, alcohol breath, crap aftershave (has anyone ever bettered Old Spice as a flowery counterpoint to the acid stink of maleness?), the crack of pool ball and blur of voices slightly rasping and off key like the trombone and baritone section of a school wind band. Decades of tobacco smoke were caked into the walls. The breathtakingly high, ornate ceilings made them seem like cathedrals of drinking, places of worship for those to whom the Sunday lunchtime pint was the spiritual high point of a week of grind. And the six other days of the week were quite good as well. The landords would either be big, farm-fed, red-faced, two- or three-chinned prop forwards, or red-haired whippet-like gone-to-seed lads with nervous darting eyes and a graceful way on the dancefloor at wedding receptions. Reddish carpet blotched with unidentifiable stains and, like the ageing clientèle, marinated in beer. Scuffed fittings, post-plush velveteen benches to the walls for the older hands to sit side by side, watch the world go by and say that they’d ‘seen it all before’.

The last four years have seen a big change – theme pubs, fun pubs, chain pubs – whatever you want to call them – have been springing up all over the place. Scruffy Murphys, Finnegan’s Wakes, O’Neills, Waxy O’Connors, Bodhran Barneys, Linus the Leprechaun’s Happy Shamrocks (OK, I made that one up). The Irish theme pub has not only arrived in London, it has taken over. What the marketing managers either fail to realise (or more probably don’t care about) is that this has created a shift in attitudes towards Irish culture. What used to be thought of as ancient, romantic and perhaps with a bit of ‘edge’ are now regarded as tacky eyesores, smart-fitted commercial machines with the ubiquity of international high street brands like McDonalds. Real drinkers now eschew a visit to the local Irish pub because it suggests frivolity where once it denoted authenticity, mindless fun where once there was both pleasure and pain, shallowness where once was an almost religious need to get shit-faced. Discord where once there was close harmony singing.

Some might argue that this is a positive aspect of what is jocularly known as the Celtic Tiger, the hard-driving Irish economy of the mid- to late-nineties, that it shows Ireland has become a real country at last and not some has-been backwater, a vessel for nostalgia freaks who dwell on the past, that it is creating new (and annoying) ideas of Irishness, reinventing itself for the new millennium. For those who frequent the places and like to get off on the nuances of culture, history and habit while fulfilling their alcoholic-unit quota, this is bullshit. These pubs are a fake validation of the ridiculous chirpy good-time Oirish vibe (the ones that Americans love so much). Every pint we have in these places is an encouragement for marketing men to rip off and parody a vibrant culture and steal its images. (Pause for breath, see Appendix.)

Down the cold, forgotten warehouse road that leads to the river – past the scrappy hedges and damp walls – lay the ghost of a car, a burned-out Ford Escort of early eighties’ vintage, a pagan sacrifice, a love rite to a favourite Spice Girl from some self-styled juvenile delinquent. Behind the poorly made wooden fence, idle bulldozers waited for the next morning’s shift when time will move nearer another new block of viciously ugly luxury apartments with river views. I inspected the car, thinking that it used to belong to somebody but now no-one, as a police helicopter waited overhead, then somewhere a siren, then a gunshot sounded, or was it a criminally faulty gas cooker perhaps taking the heads off some eager diners at a student lager and spag bol evening?

The light was going down, reflecting warmth against the scaffolding on the Harrod’s Depository. Or ‘Harrods Suppository’, as one of my friends used to call it in all innocence, the same friend who thought that West Ham played at Hammersmith. Which, when you think about it, isn’t so strange. Seeing the shell of a motor made me decide that I should check the battery on the little Corsa. I didn’t want it to go flat again. It would soon be going on a journey.

1 Eric Heiden, say. Not Wilf Thingy, the plucky English bloke.

2 In a more recent, deadline-challenging development, Fernando’s greasy spoon business has been bought out and is now another Italian restaurant.

3 A while later I was writing up the notes to this chapter on the same train and a modernist tramp sat down next to me, smelling of BO, roast kidney and special brew, and fags, his purple jeans darkened with recently squirted urine. Was I inadvertently attracting the tramps while writing about them?

4 In my mid teens I spent day after day reading my favourite authors, Jack Kerouac and George Orwell. I loved Down and Out in Paris and London but there was also something slightly warped about it, the sordid voyeuristic slumming of a middle-class bloke with too much time on his hands. Incidentally, how do you know if you’re a tramp? Is it genetic, mapped out generations before? One of my ancestors used to head off from his Buckinghamshire village home at regular periods to pubs and clubs in the Midlands to play the squeeze box and the spoons. My great grandmother’s family in Yorkshire were horse people, which was apparently a euphemism for gypsy stock. I’d seen a photo of her father, looking tall and strong with a big black Victorian moustache. I imagined him looking proud on horseback.

6 Historically speaking, the Irish village in Hammersmith, at least in the nineteenth century, was actually about half a mile to the north-west at Brook Green.

7 As well as the Irish centre there’s a thriving busker scene in west London, usually situated in the subway at the top of Fulham Palace Road. The best of them is known simply by his unofficial stage name Bloke with Organ in a Wheelchair. He’s a fat old fellow with grey hair and glasses; a more recent addition to the scene. He rests his organ on a stand and plays Irish classics, usually with a tinny drum machine diddling away in the background. One of his better numbers is ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, which goes something like this: Bum bh bum phh daao daaaoooo daooo daoaooo daooo daoo daooo Bum bh bum phh daao daaaoooo daooo daoaooo daooo daoo daooo Bum bh bum phh daao daaaoooodaooo daoaooo daooo daoo daooo. tinkle dee dee deeeeeeeeeee’. I once saw him stand up and pack all his stuff away and for a second I was outraged that I’d given him money not because of the music but because of his disability but then I thought it serves me right, transport is a big problem in London when you’re getting to gigs.

8 Finnegans Wake is the James Joyce book that nobody has read. Ulysses is also the James Joyce book that nobody has read, but everyone claims they have (that’s why it is now the Citizen Kane of novels, up there at the number one spot in recent lists of the best novels of the century). Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s last book, his mangled and messianic attempt to reinvent the language and structure of the novel and piss people off at the same time (he was probably much more successful at the latter). Of course, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, not having read it.

IRISH MYTHS & LEGENDS 2 Hey, Mister, Got any Tayto?

Most Irish pubs worth their salt and vinegar will serve Tayto, the Irish potato crisps. To the untrained palate (i.e. mine) they taste exactly the same as any other kind of crisp. But to the rootless Irish person drifting round the world dreaming of home, they are a beautiful and rare foodstuff which transports the eater on a mystical journey back to Erin’s wild shores. People buy boxloads of the stuff saying they are addicted to them. They’re dry, slightly greasy and very cheese and oniony. But you don’t understand, says the fat person stuffing their face with crisps. Lots of Irish food is special like that, particularly if it’s hard to come by. Here’s a brief selection:

Superquinn Sausages

You’ve got to try some Superquinn sausages, I was told. I sat down to my fry-up with these little fried rabbit droppings at the side of the plate. Mmmm, these fried rabbit droppings look delicious. But where are the Superquinn sausages? Hey, those are the Superquinn sausages. Ah, stop messing.

Irish Butter

Irish people abroad will drive around a new city for days looking for Irish butter. I mean, butter is butter. It all tastes the same to me. But they like their traditional Irish butter – like Kerrygold. Kerrygold was actually created by Heinz magnate Tony O’Reilly for the Irish Dairy Board in the mid-sixties. But if you mention this to an Irish person, it’s as if you have criticised Michael Collins or the drummer out of u2. Kerrygold is simply a recent brand with an invented fictional heritage, like the crap beer you get in many new Irish pubs. Hey, managed to get a dig in at crap Irish pubs again there. The proofreader’s obviously not concentrating.

Ring Cheese

In the long-gone days when I played rugby, the concept of ‘ring cheese’ would have been enough to send me into paroxysms of mirth before collapsing on the floor in a soggy puddle of giggles (at least I hope that’s giggles and not the product of the ‘cream cracker game’ – oh, never mind). Ring is an Irish speaking area in Waterford. Cheese is a dairy product made from milk and – but you probably know that already.

Chocolate Kimberleys

Ordinary Kimberley biscuits are, apparently, disgusting and taste like cardboard. But you’ve got to taste Chocolate Kimberleys. They’re simply heaven. You’re supposed to leave them in the fridge for a while. Mmmmmm. It’ll be an experience you’ll never forget. It’s a biscuit thing with marshmallow in, a bit like Wagon Wheel but not as tasty or big.

Red Lemonade

Lemons are yellow but lemonade is red, at least in Ireland. White lemonade, or to be more precise, see-through, is for amateurs. Real drinkers take red lemonade with their tipple. Is it like Lucozade or Tizer? I asked in all innocence. Don’t be silly. It’s lemonade made with special red lemons. Right. But it’s not really red, it’s orange.

VIKING TOWNDublin

Visions of Beer and Loathing on the Road to Holyhead Hammersmith to Dublin

As usual I had left everything until the last minute. This was fine with me – in a way I was happier like that because it didn’t give me too much time to cock things up. When other people were involved, however, it became more of a problem.¹ I had only mentioned to Terry a couple of days earlier that I was definitely heading off at this time. He’s usually pretty spontaneous, but this was short notice even for him. I’d spoken to him earlier in the day and he said he’d call some time in the evening if he’d managed to get it all together. I smelled disaster already (it smells sweet and sickly like treacle pudding except it’s also as dry as chalk on a blackboard). Why couldn’t I organise anything properly? Terry would most likely be in a pub doing the crossword and thinking subconsciously about Ireland. That was something, I suppose. I sat in the little box room at the end of the flat and stared down at The Car, waiting for the phone to ring.

I had had strange fears that either mine or Terry’s short-term memory tanks would give out and one of us would forget about the trip. The thing was, Terry and I had one thing in common, a dramatically deficient short-term memory system. We could both recall events which took place in the sixties, news broadcasts, the colour of the sky on a spring morning, what the three-year-old girl next door wore at her birthday party, where we were when we first heard ‘Yellow Submarine’, the Radio Times with Philip Madoc as an Indian warrior in Last of the Mohicans on the cover, how we felt when we could count to ten, Thunderbirds, Captain Fantastic and Mrs Black, the metallic and salty taste of Knorr soup, the lavender-water smell of great grandparents’ houses, recurring dreams of flying and five-year-old girlfriends.

But ask us what we did yesterday or where we put that thing we were holding five minutes earlier, you know, the thing, and we were lost. We both had our theories about this. I felt that there was a little tank where the short-term memories were left to ferment for a while into long-term memories, after which they would progress to the much larger long-term memory tank. Our short-term memory tanks were just too small for the amount of sensory data we experienced in our frenzied lives, so it all got pushed into the long-term memory tank, which could not be accessed for at least eighteen months. The fantastic thing was that we’d be going on a trip together which neither of us would remember for a year and a half. The thing was, Terry and I had one thing in common, a dramatically deficient short-term memory system.

Tim’s short- and long-term memory-tank system

Terry’s theory (I think – my memory’s not great) was that we both drank far too much, and this destroyed the synapses responsible for short-term memory. The high of drinking mirrored the positivity of childhood. This similar mood allowed us to access memories that normal people might have forgotten.

Terry’s short-term memory system:

Terry is Neal Cassady and I am Jack Kerouac. He’s full of energy and madness and I sort of write it all down. Or maybe I am David Cassidy and Terry is Jackanory, always telling crazy stories and appearing every evening at about 5 o’clock. Actually, this On the Road analogy is a bit crap, because although Kerouac did all the writing, it was Cassady who did the driving. Kerouac never drove. Ever. He bummed lifts. Either in cars or on freight trains. Terry can’t drive either. Though he claims he has been able to since the age of six – he just doesn’t have a licence.

Me and Terry in the car would take over some little community in the west of Ireland and terrorise the locals – annoy ‘cops’ and flirt with chicks in roadside tourist gift shops, just like those lads in Easy Rider. We were bohemians, outlaws, outcasts, in the grand tradition of mad partnerships:

• Kerouac and Cassady

• Hunter S. Thompson and his lawyer

• Fonda and Hopper

• Boswell and Johnson

• Bob Hope and Bing Crosby

• Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis

• Abbott and Costello

• John Noakes and Peter Purves

• Sandy Gall and Reginald Bosanquet

• Pippin and Tog

• Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

Using telepathy and ‘special’ mind powers to make Terry ring:

Deep breaths, Tim. Get comfortable. Put your memory tanks onto ‘timer’ mode (Economy 7 will do).

Ring ring ring ring ring. Terry Terry Terry Terry Terry.

If Terry doesn’t ring

The leprechaun will sing

Ring ring ring Terry ring

I make a decision to take the singing leprechaun (that I’d bought on the Swansea – Cork ferry) with me if Terry doesn’t show:

If Terry didn’t show I had already had the thought that I might take my little green fabric friend with me. (He has the voice of a very squeaky Irish jockey and sings the hits of the day, particularly at Christmas. Well, no, actually, all he sings is ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’.) My singing leprechaun comments on the action now and then but can’t influence it. If I’m doing something wrong, or he wants to say ‘no’ he’ll sing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ (possibly recorded by the wheelchair synth player of Fulham Palace Road) when I press his belly. If he’s feeling happy and positive, the singing leprechaun stays quiet. I think. I can never be sure. The singing leprechaun would be Jack Kerouac and I would have to be Neal Cassady, which meant a hell of a lot more work for me. I went out to pack the car. I must have been out for no more than ten minutes but when I got back there was a message on the answer machine from Terry.

The message on my answer machine from Terry:

‘Hello hello. Yeah, er, hi Tim, it’s Terry. Er, I’m afraid I’m going to have to be really boring and middle-aged and blow you out this weekend. Yeah, er, I’m just feeling really knackered at the moment. Sorry mate. Speak to you when you get back. Erm, give us a bell sometime if you get a chance cheers bye.’

Terry had phoned from some pub in the centre of town. Which meant I couldn’t ring him back to try and get him to change his mind. The singing leprechaun looked up at me with searching eyes. I pressed his little tummy and he sang me a beautiful version of that old Irish song. I collected the rest of my stuff, turned off the heating and went out to the car.

One o’clock in the morning and it was just me, the car and the cold inky-orange streets of West London – incredibly, I’d managed to get to the top of Fulham Palace Road without running over a tramp or one of those pale but high-spirited late-night youngsters who sometimes hang around outside twenty-four-hour shops shouting at each other in cod-Jamaican accents and looking as though they’ve recently overdosed on casual sportswear.

Feeling just a little hypnotised by the enthusiastic purr of the Corsa’s 1.4L engine, I shifted up and down gears with all the grace of a bull elephant doing needlestitch, then coasted up through an almost deserted and ghostly Shepherd’s Bush to the roundabout, then up the A40. Hammersmith is a gateway in and out of London: big roads take you west, the tube and the A4 take you into town. It’s good for country boys like me who don’t know where the hell they want to be – in the city or out in the sticks. I paused for a moment to change down into second, then a manoeuvre so simple even a little kid in a pedal car could do it – get onto that motorway and head for Wales. But not me – God knows what I was playing at but I soon realised I was heading back into town towards the West End and the City. Wrong direction again. The Singing Leprechaun in the passenger seat said nothing as I came off at the next slip road at Royal Oak station, did a U-turn near some claustrophobic-looking Georgian townhouses then back out onto the road underneath the A40. Is it left or right? Left or fucking right? ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, sang the Singing Leprechaun, which I took to mean a left. I had another three hundred miles to go along the A40, M6 and loads of other Ms and As. I knew I was bound to get lost now and again and didn’t really care, but if I fucked up like this every three or four miles I wouldn’t make it to the ferry for at least another couple of days.

I’ve never liked driving much. Not in cities anyway. I’ve never really trusted myself with all that metal and glass. When I was seventeen my parents give me a choice of driving lessons or a record player for my birthday. To have a car was a passport to success in Lincolnshire, particularly with women. The more sought-after girls lived out in the back of beyond, the daughters of farmers or village schoolmasters. By choosing not to drive I was also choosing the town girls (or, in reality, choosing no sex), choosing fresh air, choosing two feet, choosing music.² While some of my friends got into wing mirrors, exhausts, turbo brum-brum camshaft wheelie gauges etc., I was into free jazz, new-wave pop, electro and Northern industrial music. In a way it was still an attempt at pulling – a girl would come round and I’d leave my Teardrop Explodes French import EP, Ornette Coleman Atlantic albums, or Cabaret Voltaire and Afrika Bambaata twelve-inch singles somewhere obvious for her to see (like on the front doorstep, or perched on the toilet bowl). A not very successful technique, naturally. Perhaps I should have hung them from the ceiling.

If there was a party somewhere out in the sticks you had to befriend a gang which had a designated driver. Gangs were like little tribes and were made up of different character types who had specific roles to play. You’d have the son of a respected teacher or lawyer who might know some of the local cops and sweet-talk them. You’d have a hard nut in case your gang was challenged by another gang (particularly from another town) – he was a sort of champion. You’d have a good-looking babe magnet who would lure the females or act as a frontman when the gang went hunting as a pack. You’d have a leader, the charismatic brains, a talker and ideas man who would say let’s go here, let’s go there. You’d have a hippy drop-out alternative culture kind of guy who would be the comedy character. And finally, and most importantly, you’d have a driver. The driver was a monklike figure who had eschewed the pleasures of alcohol in return for approval amongst a group who otherwise might not have given him the time of day. It was a social transaction. The driver got camaraderie and social acceptance. The gang got someone to ferry them from village pub to town pub to party to nightclub. There was a small group I knew who would occasionally let me hang around on the periphery and smile inanely at their antics, who had a driver known simply as ‘Driver’. We’d all be completely plastered and he’d just drive, with a big happy grin on his face. I never understood it. Never got inside his head. Perhaps I never really worked out the rural vibe. It exists in Ireland too, that need and importance to have a car (like horses would have been to my great grandmother’s people). If you’re out in the country and you don’t have a car you’re fucked. Or, in the case of trying to get off with the daughters of village schoolteachers, not fucked.

I adjusted the mirror, got into cruise mode, got comfortable. A straight run, give or take a few confusing motorway exits in the West Midlands. Undeterred by my dysfunctional directional sense, I put some lachrymose alternative country sounds onto the stereo and turned up the volume as much as I could without the dashboard vibrating out of its position and the car falling to pieces. First up, ‘Windfall’, by Son Volt, ‘Houses on the Hill’ by Whiskeytown, ‘Snow Don’t Fall’ by Townes Van Zandt, ‘Oh Sister’ by Dylan. I got a tingly feeling at the romanticism of it all, until I remembered I was still inside the M25. As the car rumbled out of west London towards Hanger Lane, then through the tunnel as though escaping from some concrete nightmare and out onto the motorway and freedom, the harmonies got richer (‘Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel, let the wind take your troubles away’).

Driving through England on motorways is not an exciting thing to do. Driving through England on motorways at night is incredibly boring. Like Phil Collins singing about watching paint dry on a continuous tape loop on the radio. I sometimes wonder what proportion of the countryside you can see from a motorway is actually attractive. Motorways were specially designed so the country would look shit and people would think the motorway is more attractive so they should build more of them. I accept that the country hasn’t been completely covered in motorway and concrete. After all, when you’re lost in the countryside you can drive around for days looking for a way out – you won’t even find a pub or shop or person who speaks with a recognisable accent, never mind a motorway. But when you are on the motorways it does seem as though that’s all there is. Especially around Birmingham. Everything is motorways and junctions, lights of the road, lights of cars, more junctions, road signs, concrete, cars, tarmac, more cars and more lights, that reach into the distance like a vicious, never-ending torch-carrying mob, a mob that wants to kill the monster but you want to protect him something in his eyes suggests a vulnerable tortured soul they’re getting nearer no stop aarrrghh … Anyway, after Birmingham I started to fall asleep at the wheel. As you do as soon as you get anywhere near Birmingham.³ I came off a slip road and stopped for petrol at a little garage. The lanky spotty floppyhaired nineteen-year-old creature behind the counter looked at me with the doomed sad eyes of one too used to sickly bright lights and the smell of petrol. I was feeling very tired so bought some Lucozade,⁴ 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.⁵ 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 Tiger⁶ 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 home⁷ (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).⁸

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 o2/a (m) = a x f/m – m = me, f = fuckup quotient, a = amount of things to be fucked up, o = other people.

2 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 And there goes the lucrative Brummie market.

4 Product placement cash might offset the costs of reproducing song lyrics.

5 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 !

7 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 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

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

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 ref¹ 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 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
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.¹ 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,² 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.³ 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 lamb⁴ 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

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