I’m heading north up the N17 to visit the Whispering Giant of Derry City. It feels good to be on the road, and even better to stop in Ballindine and wonder where I’m going to spend this extra night that I’ve allowed myself.
Dude, I’m all open-minded and free of spirit.
Well, as full of all that fallutin’ tootin’ hippy stuff as I can be, having planned this moment of ‘pure spontaneity’ several weeks ago.
A few minutes later I realise that I have never had a Breakfast Roll. All that I have ever had is something I though might be a Breakfast Roll, but was only in fact a roll crammed with sausages and rashers and sauces of many colours.
All the lads in front of me are asking for breakfast rolls, but they follow their orders with specifics that I cannot make out. I can just ask for a sausage and bacon roll, but as I’ve just explained, in my ignorance that was what I then believed a Breakfast Roll to be!
Ever eager to be one of the lads, I ask her for a Breakfast Roll, and then she asks if I want everything, and I say yes, please.
And then I stand back, silently impotent (oooerr) as she proceeds to overstuff my baguette with so many differing and unlikely items I wonder if this really is the famous/notorious Irish Breakfast Roll, or whether I am in fact on Candid Camera, or simply having the piss ripped out of me because she’s had a bad night and I look like I deserve it.
Sitting down to eat, I feel a rush of admiration for all the lads out there who live on these things, if this thing is truly their thing.
Impossible to eat as a sandwich, I pick out the mushrooms, onions, olives, Albanian Goatherd testicles and deep-fried cat nipples and basically proceed to shnarf a Full Irish breakfast in my fingers: bloody lovely, but lads, seriously, time to hit the Benecol.
The radio spouts dire warnings of a major weather system coming in off the Atlantic. Expect flooding and structural damage.
Yippee, think I! Quite apart from the Rory Gallagher connection, I’ve always wanted to go to Ballyshannon, and tonight the place will be whipped good and proper by that storm. Nothing like sitting in a cosy pub on a winter’s night with half the Atlantic ocean being thrown onto the roof. Lovely!
North of Sligo, opposite the imposing Ben Bulben, I swing into Yeat’s Pub for a break, cup of tea, hmm, nice.
Well, er no. Not nice. Bland grey glass steel and stone, modern and anonymous. As soon as I walk into the bar I wish I hadn’t. I desperately hope nobody sees me, but they do. Sad pale customers, a scattered few, helpless and forlorn, look over at me plaintiff, as if their souls have been sucked out and might only return if I rescue them from this antiseptic godforsaken place. The barperson looks over smiling, but it’s too late. I’m out of there before you can say ‘Waiting Room For Hell’.
Give me a wooden pub with a fire, three old fellas and a dog dribbling on the carpet: lovely. If you’re naming something after an Irish poet, then let it be a tiny bit lyrical and Irish. Otherwise just call it the Munich Bar or the Dallas Inn, and be done with it.
As it turns out, it’s just as well I don’t take a break, as the weather is really kicking in. Trees are bending horizontal, and I’m mighty pleased to pull into the hotel car park in Ballyshannon.
The three ladies in reception quote me a price which sounds pretty steep, but so tired am I and aware that this is my one night away on my own, that I accept and make conversation. As soon as they discover I live in Salthill, and so am no longer an English tourist, the price suddenly drops by 20 quid for the night.
Whoopee! Up the Irish! Up the English!
Right up.
My room is spacious, clean and lovely, but colder than a day-old polar bear peeper, so I call down and ask ever so politely what time the heating might be coming on, please?
The lady is gushingly apologetic, and acts immediately to counteract the storm that wants to share my room.
Fair enough, can’t do better. Except, perchance, heat two or three vacant rooms, on the off chance of customers?
Then off into the howling gale rain-lashed Ballyshannon night, where I find a tiny wooden bar with two fellas, a woman and no dog, but I am home. The gents are conversing about their days. Himself didn’t get up ‘til midday. De other fella woke up at 10, had a fag and a cup of tea, and took himself back to bed.
I grew up in England and will never cease to admire the brazen lack of work ethic in parts of Irish society. Back in Blighty these lads would have to sound either apologetic or extremely appreciative of their lie-ins, yet here it’s just seen as a way of getting through the winter, and ah sure feckit.
The next morning, going to breakfast early, i find the lights on in the restaurant but nobody home. I can hear a cook in the kitchen behind the door, but nobody knows I’m here.
After sitting like a sad solitary plonker for 15 minutes I knock on the kitchen door, whereupon the cook calls the waitress.
Far from apologising, she basically tells me off for not having walked past reception, to alert the woman there that I wanted breakfast.
“Oh, so are you that woman on reception?” I ask.
“I am!” she declares, walking into the kitchen to chat with the cook.
When I check out the same lass is back at the reception desk. I tell her that the room was lovely, save for the three big fat black pubes I found on my sheets as I turned down the bedcovers.
She covers her mouth with her hand and splutters
“Oh no! That’s disgusting!” through her splayed fingers.
But that’s all she says. There isn’t going to be an apology or, (dare one dream a little?) a discount.
Ballyshannon was great, but as ever good old Ireland is still the home of bad old Ireland!
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