Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? Page 21
I tried to hold that thought, tried to feel earnest and concerned, the sensitive traveller searching for expressive and sympathetic phrases. Then the friendly waitress brought my fish pie.
‘Dyay wunt anothor Gunnuss?’ she asked as I stuffed my face greedily. I nodded and she scuttled off, my eyes fixed on the game show on the ceiling-mounted TV as the couple next to me started stroking each other’s hair and the lads at the table behind discussed which club they should go to that night. Like a goldfish my mind emptied of everything. Perhaps long-term memory is over-rated after all.
Next morning at breakfast I was first down and was tucking into my sausage and egg when I heard what sounded like the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party coming down the corridor. It was the old lads, the weapons experts, but dressed in cycling gear. They cut fine figures. They wolfed down their food and talked about their next journey. I, in my jeans and ever-expanding beer gut, felt slightly embarrassed as they filed out and headed for the open road. I was going back to the comfort and security of the Republic – on the way to the bus station I passed a sports shop full of Celtic paraphernalia and saw the reflection of a confused and uneasy man.
* * *
1 I’d got something like that the year before, on election night in England. I spent the entire evening projectile vomiting. I’d met some friends but after about twenty minutes I had to go home – walking down Tottenham Court Road spewing six feet in front of me. Puked twelve times before I got home. I sat up until six cheering and puking into a bucket. At the defining moment, when Portillo went down all along our street there were cheers and I cheered too then barfed again. My mother – who knows how sensitive I am – had a theory that it was cathartic: after eighteen years I was exorcising those foul Tory spirits.
2 Maybe this is an old-fashioned analysis. Working-class communities have nurtured the conflict just as much. Cockneys hate Geordies, Mancs hate Merseysiders. These rivalries and resentments will always be there but it doesn’t necessitate killing.
3 I really liked the Richard Harris film A Man Called Horse, about an Englishman who goes to live with native Americans in the eighteenth century, and thought of my ancestor in a sequel, A Person Called Horseperson.
Thinking in Four-part Harmony is a Scary Thing to Contemplate
Mullingar to Moate
I had decided to go to Mullingar because of something I read in the Rough Guide about a former mad inhabitant who believed he was a bee. That gives Mullingar a head start over most towns. But don’t get too excited about the story because I won’t be mentioning it again. Back in Doolin, when Ted had found out where I was going he got excited because, of course, he had a musician friend in Mullingar,1 a guy called Declan, and said he’d get in touch with him to say I was coming.
‘No that’s all right,’ I said.
Ted insisted.
‘Really,’ I said, Englishly, ‘I don’t want to be any trouble’. Ted wouldn’t have understood that attitude, but he wasn’t listening anyway, so went ahead and phoned him up. Declan said they wouldn’t be in Mullingar that night but were playing a gig in a town called Moate about twenty miles south west and I was welcome to come along. ‘His name’s Tim and he’s a tallish bloke with long messy blond hair. You can’t miss him,’ said Ted, pleased.
‘Thanks Ted,’ I said. Cheers mate.
Mullingar is a grey but prosperous country town where there didn’t seem to be that much to do during the day apart from eat toasted sandwiches in dark and empty pubs, stare at the screens in the Internet café, or attend a function at the main hotel full of posh dressed-up people blathering on about fox hunting and fine wine. I decided, after all my living it up, that I was too tired to look for Declan and his mates, so sat in a crappyish restaurant and ordered a meal.
‘I’ll just see if the chef is still there,’ said the pouty waiter.
He phoned the kitchen and said they had a customer. He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips as he got a rant from the other end.
‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘that’s not my problem, it’s your problem!’ Fantastic, this was dialogue straight from The Usual Suspects.
‘Don’t give me that,’ he almost shouted, then slammed the phone down. He was all smiles as he came over. ‘Are you ready to order?’
As I was finishing off my meal the moody chef (who obviously thought he was bloody Marco Pierre White) came and stood at the bar to make up with the waiter, and frowned at me. He was like a smaller Sean Penn with a thin black moustache. I wanted to say, ‘Your food is shite, you pretentious little git,’ but didn’t (too English, see, English don’t do that stuff), so just picked at the overcooked goo feeling sorry for myself. After paying up, at about 11.30 I was about to go into a blues session in one of the nearby pubs when suddenly a vision appeared in the sky, long reddish/yellow beard flowing. It was Ted.
‘And lo I say unto you, get ye to Moate, for ’tis written that I might need some backing singers at some time or other so I must need to keep them sweet. You can buy them a pint and say it’s from me.’ A great vision – I changed my mind and decided to go to Moate after all. As I strolled across to the taxi rank the vision appeared again, ‘Oh, and Tim, if they’re coming to Doolin again can you get them to bring some brochures about bass amplifiers. Ta. Oh, and some bottles of red lemonade. We’ve run out up here.’ Twenty pounds later I stood outside Into the West, a saloony looking joint in the centre of Moate, covered in light bulbs. I could already hear sweet singing. Was it angels? Lord, I’m a comin’.
As I entered and adjusted my eyes to the smoke and booze haze I saw a crowd of four young blokes in a corner strumming acoustic guitars and singing ‘Four Seasons in One Day’, surrounded by a large crowd of drinkers. I stood at the bar and ordered a pint. When the song was finished I went over to the musicians and said I was looking for a bloke called Declan.
‘Ah you must be Tim. Great. Sit yourself down! Have you got a drink?’ I was slightly confused. I’d imagined this mate of Ted’s to be a middle-aged, big-bearded guy in his fifties or sixties (yes, a sort of Ted clone) yet Declan, in his late twenties – early thirties, looked like a cross between Evan Dando and Barbra Streisand with long blond curly hair falling down to his shoulders. He and his mates did another Crowded House song, ‘Whenever I Fall at Your Feet’. Crowded House are a bit of a wussy band – nice harmonies and all that but the singing and the lyrics are wimpy, like some bloke whose heart just breaks every morning when he looks out the window at the little birdies. For sure, Declan and his mates sounded better than the original. I was introduced to the band – apart from Declan there was Little Declan – no relation – who looked like a gone-to-seed flyweight boxer; Albert Lee, who in a previous era would have been a New York cop and Deej, and who was the dead ringer for Jeff Tweedy from the country band Wilco. I sat and gabbed away with some of their mates while the band sang for an hour or so. It was strange for me to hear four friends with such amazing voices who could sing in harmony like that. One amongst any particular group is usually rare enough.2
And then the beers really started to flow – and a beer in a lock-in is a beautiful thing indeed. Someone foolishly got me a big whiskey and I was on maee wai, chatting too the landlords dorter about all kynds of rubbish and she rote her a dress annumber down yahaay and invited me to stai with her in Dublin then my head started to loll a bitt lollll all kinez ov rubbish she invited me to Dublin you knowm she did what’s that a gitar was thrust into my hanz grinning faces all around big grins go on Tim youuu plaaay somethin’ you you yoooou, so I concraitid very hard and remembered G major strummm strumm strummitti strummm I like yu C major thingy waiyoorspaklin G major thingy earings C laayy Gagenst yor C skin sooo D major browwwn strummma strumm strumm strrumm etc. yoouuu knoww I wohnlet yoouuu doowwwwn strumm strummm … Aficionados will recognise a reedy whiny Lincolnshire version of ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ by the Eagles, thank God that’s finished, polite applause you luvlipeepl, and then a bull of a man with glasses called Enda began singin
g a Tom Waits sing thing in a voyss soooo loooow my bowels startid to rumble and it woke me up a bit where’s the bloke who thought he was a bee then I suddenly lose it and find it again and we’re on a coach heading back to Mullingar and I’m sitting with Little Declan holding a can of some kind of pisswater and we’re all singing in close-part harmonies and it’s scary because I’m singing too aarrgh they have infected me then head lolls sleep I need sleep then awake again, stone-cold sober, on the early-in-the morning streets of Mullingar, and we’re buying thirty-two beers from a nice bloke with glasses who runs a pub.
‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ I say, jauntily, and begin to prance off towards my hotel with my best Pretending To Be Mr Sober grin, but these are strange music sprites who have a spell on me and I am dragged off to Declan’s ex-girlfriend’s house while she is away (note to editor – maybe change Declan’s name so he won’t get done for this) and we sit around and drink drunk drink the beer and wine too and as if by further magic two pretty girls arrive – daaa daaahhh – at the door: one a little Irish redhead, one tall blonde and French and it’s more singing and I am now even thinking in four-part harmony and that is a scary thing to contemplate:
Thinking in four-part harmony is a scary thing to contemplate Thinking in four-part harmony is a scary thing to contemplate Thinking in four-part harmony is a scary thing to contemplate Thinking in four-part harmony is a scary thing to contemplate Thinking in four-part harmony is a scary thing to contemplate Thinking in four-part harmony is a scary thing to contemplate
And Declan has taken some kind of powerful pheromone spray because one girl is on his knee and the other hanging around sitting at his feet so I chat with Arthur Lee about country music and Ted in Doolin who they love very much apparently then I can feel my head lolling loll I am goin agin goin sleep muss sleep piisst as fart pisst its five in th’ mornin no don’t go they say musss go muss sleep go help help muss escape from evil music sprites evil evil and sleep where you stayin tell hotel you mad expense stay here madman I go bye bye evil music people …
* * *
1 Some people have a girl in every port. Ted has a backing musician in every prosperous market town.
2 It had never been like that when I tried to sing with my friends – I was in various bands as a kid with friends like Plendy, Scotty and my brother Toby (the letter y is very popular in Lincolnshire – something to do with the Vikings apparently) but none of us could really hit a note.
IRISH MYTHS & LEGENDS 5
Heritage Ireland
The arts centre, or craft shop, is the beating heart of Heritage Ireland, that fictional country that lies somewhere between the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. These shops contain all the best luxury items that Ireland’s pottery, tweed, linen, porcelain and musical-leprechaun craftspeople can throw at you – taking you back to a time before the invention of cars and electricity, when the populace lived on Irish toffee and green Guinness.
Leprechauns in snow domes
Plastic, liquid-filled domes with white flakes and a seated leprechaun, waiting to be shaken up. All over the USA people will have them on their TVs or stuck to their gun cabinets. The legend of the leprechaun in the snow is an ancient one – he went through the back of a drinks cabinet in a little bar in Kilkenny and ended up in Narnia. That’s the official version, anyway. He’s holding a shamrock, though it looks more like broccoli. It’s not snowing. Pick up the dome and shake it around. Now it’s snowing! Hey!!
Plasticy Celtic swirly pendants
These pendants, tied to a piece of mouldy bootlace, are based on ancient Newgrange designs that are supposed to represent deep ‘stuff’. They’re made of some kind of plastic and look like squiggles designed by monkeys let loose on an old spirograph, carved into pieces of the finest kiln-fired dogshit.
Amusing Guinness T-shirts
Badly drawn cartoons of what happens after four pints of Guinness screen-printed onto a black cotton T-shirt. People will pass you in the street, point at you and go ‘Ha Ha!’ Will give their new owners (rictus-grinning fat-arsed tourists) pleasure for years and years.
Tweed flat caps
Transform yourself into a bookie or former manager of the Irish football team with these classic, timeless hats. Woven from a mixture of Irish grass, cabbage and wood shavings.
‘Our Lady’ figurines
Ireland’s No. 1 female star moulded into a fine statuette by some of the country’s leading sculptors.
MARYLAND
South
Smelly Stuff, God, Moving Statues and Space Jockeys
Ballinspittle, Co. Cork
Back in 1996 I’d met a poet in a pub at the bottom of Shandon Hill in Cork who told me that his life had meaning because he had decided that God was a fish. You could go snorkelling in the Caribbean and think, wow, one of these fish right in front of me might be God, he said. But which one? You could spend hours looking through the shoal for the God-fish and all the time God would be sucking on a sea anemone about fifty yards away on the ocean floor. Anyway, I said to the poet, what sort of fish? Tuna? Parrot fish? Stickleback? That strange prehistoric fish they found in the Indian Ocean around the end of the 1970s? The poet had no more answers.
How about, I suggested, if God was a beer. Granted, it’s not a very original thought. Red-eyed alcos throughout the world must stare at their bevvies and wonder if the Almighty is about to slide down their throat. But if God was a beer, he’d be a pint of Guinness. Ah, said the poet, but there’s Guinness and there’s Guinness. Any particular pint of Guinness you’re talking about here?
‘How about that pint in McGann’s, a lively little pub on the north side of Doolin, Co. Clare.’
‘Fair enough. When though?’
‘OK, the first pint I had on the 29th of December 1993, at about half-past nine at night. I looked at Him for a couple of seconds, then downed God in one. I’d just met up with some friends and there was a music session going on.’
‘Mmm. Can’t you be a bit more specific than that?’
When I heard that the statues were on the move again in various places in Ireland I arranged to meet up with Theresa and Molly again and drive down to Ballinspittle. It was here, back in 1984, that Our Lady (the Virgin Mary) had appeared to a group of schoolchildren and told them that there should be world peace, that contraception was bad and everyone should vote for Fianna Fáil. The children’s father probably had a hotel chain in the area. So they built the grotto to commemorate this amazing phenomenon. Then a short while afterwards a few local adults said they’d seen the statue move. She raised her arm or something like that, as if waving to someone. Then it all went crazy and the grotto became internationally famous, like the one at Medjugorje in Yugoslavia. I spoke to a couple of people who claimed they had seen ‘something’ at the grotto. I decided to investigate, in my usual methodical style.
‘Why are we going to look at a statue?’ asked Molly, with the good sense and intelligence of a child.
‘Tim thinks it might move,’ said her mother. Molly looked at me crossly. She was used to chiding me for being silly, so only had to purse her lips and shake her head for me to get the message.
‘It’ll be great,’ I said, sticking both thumbs in the air and smiling stupidly like a lobotomised kids’ TV presenter.
The grotto is at the side of a main road about ten miles outside of Kinsale. We sat down on a wet white bench and began to stare at the statue of Our Lady. It was built in realistic colours, lifesize, in a little leafy cave. The hilled garden around it was very well manicured, with flowers and other fancy stuff. At the bottom left of the garden was a smaller, less well-crafted statue, of a woman praying.
After a few minutes, Molly had had enough. ‘This is boring,’ she huffed, ‘the statue isn’t going to move.’ I smiled and said, ‘Sshhhhhh.’ Theresa laughed and told me that when she was twelve or thirteen she would have sat and stared as a proper passionate Catholic, all Hail Mary’s, fear and belief.
The leaves behind the st
atue rustled and gave the impression of movement. Then I thought I saw something. It seemed to me that Our Lady was sneering at me. The muscles around her mouth seemed very fluid and she looked at me contemptuously.
‘I think she’s having a go at me,’ I said.
‘Nothing’s going to move,’ said Molly, also looking at me contemptuously. ‘Statues don’t move.’
We sat for about ten minutes more, Theresa and I still and patient, Molly swinging her little legs and humming to herself. Then it happened. The miracle.
An old man, who had been standing further along the parking area from us with his little 100cc motorbike, chain-smoking while staring at the statue, began to have a coughing fit. As he doubled up and spat phlegm and spume onto the tarmac, he carried on smoking, sucking hard on the tobacco. It was incredible. We sat and watched this in awe then turned to each other and smiled, knowing that we had seen something truly remarkable.
Molly was strangely unaffected by this and decided she wanted something to drink. We got to the wall where there was information about the statue and a little cup with holy water. I lifted Molly up and she dipped her fingers in, then made the sign of the cross on her forehead and chest. ‘She’s started getting into this at school,’ said Theresa. ‘She came home on the second day praying and blessing herself. I’ve a feeling it’s just a phase she’s going through.’ I dabbed some water on me but Molly frowned. I hadn’t done it properly so she dipped her little hand in again and made the sign of the cross on me.