Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? Page 24
There were now new apartments down at the edge of the strand, for the busy professionals, a hard style, new iron railings, pink and white with grey roofs. Behind them was a mess – old fridges, plastic toys, mud-puddles. Resting dodgems lay in piles round the back of what had once been the Deluxe Hotel, alongside a faded asteroid wheel – like a tinker’s back garden. Other miscellaneous fairground parts were scattered around. A red-faced man with a wild white quiff halfway round the back of his head, green baggy sweater and Wellington boots, with two huge dogs, clomped past me, staring straight ahead at nothing. The Arcade looked as though it had been given an attempted eighties-style corporate makeover, turquoise and cream livery over the buildings and drapes hanging from lamp posts. The wind picked up. It seemed now that I was virtually alone in the town.
The main street winding back up the hill from the sea was silent, except for a radio blaring out of an empty JCB, Eamon Dunphy inviting callers to phone in to gab about something or other. Back up the street I passed a few gnarled old ladies, faces like leather, who stared at me from street corners with pursed lips. More JCBs lurked in the back streets. I walked past the Grand Hotel, where at Christmas in happier times a pianist would play a grand piano, and Annie would meet up with all her fellow emigrants for their once-a-year reunion.
I remembered an evening spent with Annie’s father on a reservoir near the town. Annie rowed us out to the middle – as she always used to do as a kid – and he would try to catch supper. He never caught a thing in all the times that Annie or her sister Elaine went out with him. He decided it was some kind of Irish women’s curse against fishermen, because whenever he went solo he’d come back with a whole fish shop worth of shiny fresh fish. Out in the middle, with the sun going down slowly, he cast away, while I made a quick sketch. ‘Where’s the shaggin’ fish?’ he’d curse, then we’d row around to the next spot. As ever, someone else had all the fish – a bloke in a boat about 150 yards away seemed to be doing well so we rowed towards him. But still nothing.
The ‘Irishwoman’s curse’ means a trip to the fishmongers
In the minicab office opposite the Hibernian Hotel, the day before, a young woman complains to me about the town. ‘I used to live here but I’ve been in Wales for years. Don’t know why I came back – it’s just dead in winter. Nothing ever happens.’
I tell her I prefer it off-season, a little sad, as though it’s seen better days – like a tree which sheds its brightness in autumn. She sighs. ‘Oh why did I come back?’ I take her taxi to Waterford and wander around the glass factory and showroom. It’s all most people ever seem to know about Waterford. I watch the blowers at their hypnotic and ancient work in teams, engravers bowed and bent over their pieces. It’s fascinating, but I hate glassware, unless it’s for wine or whiskey. A visit to the factory showroom brings to the surface my long-dormant desire, mixed with my current mood, to create mayhem when surrounded by delicate glass of this sort. Glass objects. Objets. Chameleons. Bing Crosby. Celtic crosses. Christmas trees. Angels. Golf balls. Footballs. Fishes. Tennis racquets. A large glass bear. I want to smash them all, but particularly the large glass bear. I picture myself going over to it, caressing it, whacking it, kicking its stupid glass head across the room. I take some deep breaths to calm myself down a bit.
An English woman in front of me complains to her husband about the discount. He smiles but he’s somewhere else, perhaps playing golf with Bing Crosby. The staff are Stepford Wives dressed like air hostesses, scarves and grey jackets and skirts, smiling and polite. I feel like I’m in a dream.
There’s something terrifying about so much glass. My grandmother used to collect little coloured glass animals. I always wanted to smash them as well. My desire to knock over all the stands and shelves is so strong that soon, I fear, someone will have to help me out of the door. My head is buzzing. I walk right up to the glass bear. Standing next to it I feel intoxicated, or is it like vertigo? I can hear the sound of it breaking into a million pieces. Nearby is some glass ‘art’ by four of the world’s leading glass artists, household names like Hirohi Ramoro and Richard Marquis. ‘From East to West’, ‘Fish on the Earth of Celtic Spirit’, ‘Angel in Aftermath’, ‘Waterford Dog Piece’, all for ridiculous amounts of money. I see the avenging hammer in my hand. I go to the desk and order a taxi. There hanging up is an absurd picture of a tired and confused-looking man holding a large Waterford Crystal jug to an engraving wheel as if working on it. It is laughably pathetic. I take my picture down from the shelf and pay the five pounds fee to the woman behind the desk. She orders me a taxi. I get out just in time.
I walked back through Tramore, past the faded paint and silent hum of bygone revelries. The mood was infectiously desolate. Feeling very cold and quiet I listlessly hung around the library, reading some William Trevor short stories from a volume well thumbed by insomniac middle-aged women, stories of loss, betrayal and remorse. The place was scattered with old people and kids and me. Then I was outside again and suddenly in tears. It must have been the wind.
Once Annie and I had sat in Powers, a little bar in a Tramore backstreet run by an old lady, one of the last of a dying breed. We’d sat together quietly as the woman told us stories about her family and the people who came in. I didn’t really take any of it in. Gradually the place filled up until there were four old men seated at the bar and us, looking out at them. I thought back to when I was in Ireland with her for the first time, when we’d driven about eight hundred miles in a week, getting lost, drinking loads, sitting on mountaintops holding pieces of quartz and planning so many great adventures, listening to music and me all the time being wide-eyed with wonder at her beautiful country.
If you’re never going to use a car very much, I’ve always said, there’s no point in having one. I have always been so much into community activities, craic, drinking, going out and enjoying day-to-day existence that I’m never usually sober enough to drive a car in the evenings anyway. It’s great for long journeys, granted, but even then I’ve always felt much more free on a bus or train, when I can jump off at any point like they do in old western movies, with just a bag on my back and a bottle of whiskey in my hand, and search for adventure at the local saloon or public library. Back at the house I made one last, vain attempt to prise six thousand pounds out of Annie’s mum (‘Come on love, where’s your purse?’), then picked up the phone to call a local garage. Even before anyone answered, I’d put the receiver down again. I’d been defeated. I was a failure. London was calling, as Joe Strummer once said. Actually, Joe Strummer said Laarrghlurrrghzz Caaargghghlgghhhh. Whatever, it was time to start thinking of home.
* * *
1 People in Spain and Portugal managed to build for themselves sturdy and, in that context, aesthetically pleasing dwellings, but it should be remembered that what is attractive in old Spanish and Portuguese cities isn’t necessarily good looking in Ireland.
Born to be Wild (Now and Again, if I’m in the Mood)
Irishness to Englishness
Going home from Ireland is always an anti-climax, yet it goes past so quickly. It was in some kind of knackered trance that I drove that cute-but-powerful-with-lots-of-legroom woman’s car through Waterford and Wexford and onto the ferry at Rosslare to do the journey that Viking warriors had done a thousand years earlier in reverse. I sat slumped at one of the restaurant’s Formica tables and force-fed myself with greasy cod and chips, alternating between staring at forlorn fellow passengers and the sick grey sea. (If you were ever writing a book about Ireland, this would be a good place for a launch, I thought to myself.) I went to sit in the bar and nursed an orange juice amidst the thick sweet coat of cigarette smoke, as people shouted at each other, desperate, so very desperate to be heard above the din of people shouting at each other. In the gift shop I saw more of the singing leprechaun’s captive family and thought about setting them free, like some crazed Singing Leprechaun Liberation Front activist. But where would they go? How would they live? I knew they’d never mak
e it on their own so opted instead for an a capella chorus of ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, pressing their little bellies one by one.
One minute I was in West Wales, chugging along behind a line of slothful lorries, the next I was zipping past everyone on the M4 heading into London, that time obviously spent in quicksilver daydream of Nicole-Kidman-lookalikes-petrol-Guinness-mountains-hitchers-and-freedom. The golden rooftops of West London shone like magic eyes as the sun slanted down in the soft evening light. Those roofs sang their beauty, to the city and to me. Back to good old civilisation and shit, tube trains and John B. Keane. I looked down at the bedraggled singing leprechaun and pressed its tummy. Nothing. The battery had gone. It didn’t matter. I was feeling great and decided I’d go and get a passport photo of the two of us looking like a pair of great beat generation hobo poets, me stern and moody, him grinning inanely (it’s the only expression he’s got). As Hammersmith Broadway welcomed me with its carbon monoxide, concrete and tarmac embrace I started to plan a new trip over to Ireland and vowed to spend more time moving from place to place, at a slower pace, to dig a little deeper into the cultural underbelly1 and maybe sell the car to some madman totally bonkers Celtic druid car dealer over in the West. Man.
Ah but I’m all talk, even to myself. Three days later I sold the car to the smart garage in Chiswick where it had been bought four years earlier, for four and a half grand. I bet that’s just what Kerouac would have done too, the big mummy’s boy.
A few years ago an English friend of mine once went out briefly with a surly Irish guy. He was good looking but had a chip on his shoulder about something. The first time they slept together he went completely wild, shouting agitprop slogans with every pelvic thrust, in a Gerry Adams accent – that’s for eight hundred years of repression (ugh ugh ugh ugh), that’s for the Protestant plantations (ugh ugh ugh ugh), that’s for brutally suppressing the 1916 Uprising (ugh ugh ugh ugh), that’s for Bloody Sunday (ugh ugh ugh ugh), that’s for, erm, rugby (ugh ugh ugh ugh), that’s for Maggie Thatcher (My God ooooooohhh yeeeesssssssss aahhhhhh). She was, she said, shocked. There were obviously a few of his slogans she was unsure about because very soon she – apparently – wanted to do it all again.
Another close friend, this time an Irish guy, went for years only being able to get sexually aroused by the well-brought-up daughters of former members of the British armed forces. I asked him if he’d ever thought about therapy for his problem but he didn’t see it as a problem. ‘Just another form of guerrilla warfare,’ he mused.
There are probably statistics showing the percentages of people who think about colonialism and oppression while having sex. But this isn’t that sort of publication. I’m not into statistics at all. You can get hundreds of textbooks from your local library if you’re interested in that kind of thing. And it’s also time to let go of the stereotypes that have dogged Anglo-Irish relations for so long – Irish people are just like English people in that their shit smells and they like drinking and shagging and listening to music and fighting and eating and getting a bit nationalistic and reading and walking and sometimes they pray and sometimes they don’t and loving and laughing and writing poetry (mmm, maybe not that last one for English people). The only difference is that 92.5% of Irish people’s bodies are made up of potatoes.
I’m not singing for the future
I’m not dreaming of the past
I’m not talking of the first time
I never think about the last
Now the song is nearly over
We may not find out what it means
Still there’s a light I hold before me
You’re the measure of my dreams,
The measure of my dreams.
SHANE MACGOWAN
‘A Rainy Night in Soho’
* * *
1 That’s ‘spend even more time in pubs talking shite’ for those who haven’t been paying attention.
If you enjoyed Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?, check out this other great Tim Bradford title.
A flight of imagination back to a time when London was green meadows and rolling hills, dotted with babbling brooks. Join Tim Bradford as he explores the lost rivers of London.
Over the last hundred and fifty years, most of the tributaries of the Thames have been buried under concrete and brick. Now Tim Bradford takes us on a series of walks along the routes of these forgotten rivers and shows us the oddities and delights that can be found along the way.
He finds the chi in the Ching, explores the links between London’s football ground and freemasons, rediscovers the unbearable shiteness of being (in South London), enjoys the punk heritage of the Westbourne, and, of course, learns how to special-brew dowse. Here, then, is all of London life, but from a very different point of view.
With a cast that includes the Viking superhero Hammer Smith, a jellied-eel fixated William Morris, a coprophiliac Samuel Johnson, Deep Purple and the Glaswegian deer of Richmond Park, and hundreds of cartoons, drawings and maps, The Groundwater Diaries is a vastly entertaining (and sometimes frankly odd) tour through not-so-familiar terrain.
Buy the ebook here
Appendix
IRISH PUB GUIDE
Just so this book can offer a tiny bit of practical advice, here’s a handy guide to Irish pubs around London which you can cut out and stick in a shoebox and leave under the stairs.
Hardened Irish pubgoers will no doubt have cottoned on to the fact that most of these pubs are in a very small area of North London. They are actually locals that are within walking distance of my new high-tech underground writing laboratory in the middle of Finsbury Park. If you’ve got a favourite London Irish pub you want me to check out for a later edition, email tim@dottwo.com.
Thanks to Sarah, Terry, Martyn, Spizz, Tony and Phil for research.
Key
Over the top Irishness
Guinness too cold
Marketing man’s idea
Music pub
Old men drink here
Urban trendies drink here
Hard drinking Irish singer alert!
Good Guinness
Huge pub
Football on TV
Gaelic sport on TV
‘European’ barstaff
Threat of violence
They should knock it down
Maudlin
Irish colleen barstaff
Loud city boys
The Arsenal Tavern
Mountgrove Road/Blackstock Road N4
An idiosyncratically rambling old men’s play pen or a dark and fist-fight-friendly cavern? Depends on your attitude. It is a shambles though with a few wine-bar style high tables tacked on at some point in the mid 80s to give it style. I like it. Best place to watch Irish sports if you don’t want to walk all the way into Finsbury Park. Name allegedly changed in the 30s by Arsenal boss Herbert Chapman when he did for Gillespie Road tube.
The Auld Shillelagh
Stoke Newington Church Street, N16
The dimensions of a canal narrow boat. Fabulous Guinness and a real heavy-duty lock-in. Last time I was here I got so plastered I didn’t know who I was so went for a walk at midnight to get some fresh air. They still let me back in afterwards. That’s as good a recommendation as you can get for a pub.
The Bank of Friendship
Highbury Park N5
They have a theme tune which is sort of Bryan Adamsish and goes
‘It’s the Bank of Friendship,
The one for me and you.
The Bank of Friendship,
We can drink there too.’
Actually, no – that’s a complete lie. It is a nice, usually quiet, local, its under-the-counter Irishness only obvious when you spot the Ireland football shirt and picture of Pat Jennings on the wall. There’s a crowd of Dubs who sit by the door of one bar who’ll probably know you if you went to school in Dublin between 1946 and 1960.
Biddy Mulligan’s (the Pride of the Coombe)
Kilburn High Road
&nbs
p; Lots of daft slot machines and tacky ballad music. Even stooped to harps on the carpet. Biddy’s don’t serve normal Guinness, only the extra cold stuff that freezes your insides on its way down. Not the sort of pub to attract a real Irish crowd, you’d think. But you’d be wrong. If you ever get violent urges to sing ‘Molly Malone’ in public this would be the place to do it.
The Blackstock
Blackstock Road, Finsbury Park
Subtle Irish drinking den. It’s only the small well-placed leprechauns that give it away. Guinness good and cheap. Kitchen looks not to have been used since the sixties. Circular bar so you can keep running if someone is trying to kill you. Recently done-up (i.e. painted). When I went to the bog, flies suddenly appeared buzzing round my genitals. It was like a scene from One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The Blarney Stone
Lordship Lane, Manor House
Sprawling Irish superpub tucked into a quiet little spot just north of the reservoirs. Clever use of green in the livery. Best place for an Irish-style knees up in the N16 area.
The Boston Arms
Dartmouth Park Hill, Tufnell Park
Mammoth and shabby Irish boozer that seems more like it’s in inner-city Dublin than most modern inner-city Dublin pubs. Average age of clientele about sixty-two on a good day – lots of big old blokes with very red faces. Takes ten minutes to walk from one side of pub to the other. More when pub is full. Often traditional music in the side room, which has a separate bar and a stage. Irish football or English Premiership on a big screen. If you’re looking for long-lost Irish relatives this is a good place to start.