A Tale of Two Bars.

Driven by a simple desire for a quiet pint of Guinness I slip into the bar of the hotel round the corner.

The Snapper is waiting there, sitting on a barstool facing a dark middle-aged man, who stands with his elbow on the bar, his other arm waving as he talks at her.

She turns to look at me with a forlorn expression.

In the Pain In The Arse Premier League, this gobshite is Manchester United. He’s the New York Yankees making kissy-kissy with the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby team. Also, he’s fairly drunk, but I don’t think that makes any difference. He just knows everything. He knows Londoners better than this Londoner. He knows that I don’t know a good pint of Guinness from a bad pint of Guinness. He knows that he is always right and everyone else is always wrong.

Contrary to his opinion, my pint is glorious, going down smooth and creamy like a country pint. A rare find in the city. I turn to him.

“Must be a fantastic place to live.”
“What’s that then?”
“The Land of Always Being Right. Very safe, very lovely, knowing that whatever happens, you’re always right.”
“’Tis, ‘tis, ‘tis a great place. I like it ver’ much.”

As I drain my pint, move towards the bar and order another, yer man yells to the barmaid that he’s getting this one for me. I look her in the eyes and tell her I want to pay for it myself.

While the Guinness sits on top of the bar waiting for its 2nd fill, Captain Painhole carries on ranting, this time to the barmaid. Evidently she knows him and dislikes him as much as any decent person would. He’s been locked out by his wife but ‘showed her’ by staying in a 5 Star hotel. The barmaid is upset with him because he left his dog in the car for 2 days, but of course as he explains, she is the cruel one because she can’t even look after her cat.

My pint is ready and I offer her a fiver, but Captain Painhole yells again that he wants to pay. On the bar is a pile of his cash and a tab. I look her in the eyes and tell her I want to pay for my own pint. She holds my stare and slips some money off the pile on the bar, trying to tacitly say

“Just take the prick’s money.”

I’m certainly not going to argue with her, but as she hands over my pint I say calmly and gently

“Thanks, but you should have let me pay for it.”

In a misguided attempt to do me a favour she has now put me in a position where I must raise my glass to Captain Painhole and say thanks. Doesn’t matter who he is or what he’s like, if somebody buys me a drink I cannot completely free myself from debt until I thank him and buy him one back. Tonight I leave in debt to him, because we cannot stand his company for one second longer than it takes me to skull that Guinness, and because I know that he’ll never accept a drink from me.

For some reason this episode irks me. I just wish she’d let me pay for my own drink.

The week before I sat at the bar of another hotel, in the village of Cong. Despite having driven though the place a thousand times I’ve never stopped, because between the world-renowned Ashford Castle Hotel and the marauding hordes of Irish-American fans of the ‘Quiet Man’ movie, the wee place feels like a theme park for 8 months of the year.

But on a Monday night in February the village is lovely. The roads are empty, the cold night air scented by burning wood and turf. I’m sitting at the end of the bar, with a young wiry T-shirt and jeans American lad two stools down from me, and an older barrel-shaped local gent in a jacket, ironed shirt and tie at the far end.

We are all siting quietly, but I can feel excited energy pumping from the lad to my right. I suspect that he’s not used to being drunk.

Behind us, an older man leaves the pub with a much younger woman, and inexperienced in the ways of quiet Connemara bars, Wiry seems to deem it worthy of note. Unfortunately  his voice pierces the air like a discordant bow stroke on an out-of-tune violin.

“Wife or daughter? Wife or daughter?”

I refuse to engage, so he turns to BarrelShirt.

“Wife or daughter?”

Sitting silent and immobile, my mind wanders off to the scene in Bill Forsyth’s wonderful film, ‘Local Hero’, in which an American arrives in a tiny Scottish village. Seeing an infant surrounded by a crowd of local fishermen, he asks “Whose baby?”, to be greeted in response by seven silent staring faces.

Wiry is making me cringe for him, still adamant that he gets an answer, and finally BarrelShirt offers

“Girlfriend, as it happens.”

There follows an uneasy routine in which Wiry asks BarrelShirt a series of personal questions, to which BarrelShirt replies openly and honestly. Trouble is, because of the local accent, Wiry doesn’t understand a single word that BarrelShirt is saying.
 
As a compassionate man who has sat at the bars of many foreign countries (even though Ireland is my home, it’ll always be a foreign country to this Englishman!) I feel it’s only fair to offer Wiry a translation of the Connemara man’s responses. So we have a 3-way conversation, in which I feel a little like a United Nations interpreter. 

Once in a while I point out to Wiry that he already asked that question a few minutes earlier, to which he insists that he’s drunk so he doesn’t know. Gradually I grow to gently enjoy the dynamic, filtering the idiom of the local man into a wit which the New Yorker might appreciate. The conversation inevitably drifts towards Ireland’s current predicament: being bankrupt.

BarrelShirt raises his pint of Smiddicks and turns to us both. Speaking loudly and slowly, with self-confidence and assurance, he states

“A country, a whole country doesn't fail. A whole country cannot fail, because it has people, good people in it.”

On that admirably philosophical note he says good night and leaves.

Now that it’s down to Wiry and me, we talk easily and I discover to my delight that he is, like myself, an atheist Jew. He’s working in on a medical scholarship in Israel, because apparently the health system there is the best in the world.

I tell him that it’s rare to have a secular Jewish man at the bar beside me in the West of Ireland. He admits he was really hoping the pubs would have more life in them. I tell him, much to the barman’s amusement, that having 3 of us at the bar of a country pub on a Monday night in February was two more than I expected.

We buy each other several whiskies along the way, as is my pleasure. Even the most raucous of catgut strings can make sweet music when tuned well, and both of us is willing to listen to, learn from and enjoy the company of the other.

Captain Painhole must be very lonely.

Self-indulgent and bleedin' obvious.

The house is empty save for myself on the sofa. It’s Sunday afternoon and there’s Cup Final football live from Wembley on my tele and election results on the laptop. Whatever skewed confused cocktail it is that makes me up, this is about as good as it gets.

I pick up my phone and leave a reminder to myself to write about it; to write what this nerdy and essentially me moment felt like.

And then I stop and think and breathe a sigh of relief. 

One of my trite aspirations is to appreciate the good times as they happen. Bad times hit you over the head with a metal bar. There’s no missing them, but good times, be they moments or years, often pass without ever being consciously appreciated, only then to slip through the memory net so easily. That’s why you have to notice them, mentally snapshot them and of course, enjoy them as they happen. 

Yet with all the footie and political nonsense I could ever want at my fingertips, all I think about is writing. Through all the recent months of self doubt, it’s been there as it always is. I love the footie and I love the election count, but what I do is write. 

Sometimes it’s good just to be shown the bleedin’ obvious.

We need door handles like we need swine flu!

The Snapper lifted her beautiful backside from the loo seat and waved her hand past the wall sensor in Stansted Airport’s Ladies lav. It flushed. .

She held her hand under the stainless steel dispenser and was delivered a dollop of liquid soap, and then she waved her hands under the stainless steel taps and they produced water so that she could wash.

She walked over to the electric hand dryer, waved her hands and dried them under jets of hot air.

Then she had to grab the door handle to leave. Every manky germ left by lordonlyknowswho on her vulnerable digits and palm. 

What was the point of all that hygienic technology if the door still has a handle? 

Supermarkets, hotels and offices do the swishy door thing, so why don’t public loos in the brace of pathogen party zones that are airports and hospitals do it too?

What's the sound of a silent voice?

In the doctor's waiting room, two middle aged women sit opposite me.


One coughs and the other launches into a high speed spiel.


"D'you smoke? Is that cough from smoking. I've had a cough and cold since January and it won't go away! Just keeps coming back it does, think it's gone and then it's back gone back gone back gone all the time. Also I lose my voice, I do. Keep losing my voice all the time. Don't know what that's called though..."


It's called 'Talking too bloody much' I think to myself.  'Stop talking and your voice will come back before you know it.'

Do You Believe In SHC. - part 2.

(the concluding part of the story, as requested by Jeanne - the first part is on the post below.)

“Come the morn, and still he had no electricity. No power. Bernie shrugged, shivered by the embers of his fire, and groaned when he found no milk bottles delivered to his door. 

“Outside on the street you could have heard the flap of a lark’s wing. Of course Bernie noticed that there were no folks up and about, but why would that worry him? Wasn’t it good to walk the streets and do his work without all those staring eyes on him? All those sneering, staring eyes, always just a penstroke from shouting at him.

“So Bernie was not upset to have the world to himself. It took more than that to upset Bernie. So now, tell me what would it take to upset Bernie?”

Paul had been off, walking the imaginary empty streets of County Kildare. He wasn’t ready for tests of mental alacrity.

“Sorry? What would upset Bernie? Well, I, err, illegally parked cars?”

Padraig nodded slowly and deliberately, as if Paul’s answer should have revealed a deep hidden truth. Paul stuck his neck out, motioning Padraig to carry on, but Padraig merely continued his sagely nodding, his lips turning down into a sad pout as if to infer that 

Paul had let him down in some small but significant way.

“Ay, so all the cars were parked in just the same places they were the day before. So off went Bernie, giving out his tickets, slapping them onto the windscreens, over the ones he had given out previously.

“Not one soul had seen fit to move their car. Not one soul had spared a moment to 

ponder how their illegal parking might have caused inconvenience to others.

“Not one soul had taken Bernie’s tickets seriously.

“Back home that night Bernie sat in the dark, unable to see his wee brown world. Indeed, of course, he couldn’t watch his television, nor cook any food, so he sat there entertaining thoughts as dark as the air in his living room.

“That night he was barely able to sleep. Around and around poor Bernie’s head, illegally parked cars, imagined conversations he would have with all those folk on the morrow. Oh, he would tell them. Yes, how he would tell them what he thought of their selfish parking.

“Bernie set off at first trace of dawn, only to find every single car unmoved. 

“‘Surely,’ he thinks to himself, ‘surely there must be one, just one person who cares.’

“No more the leisurely amble for Bernie now. Oh no. He was a man a-fired, walking full pace around the whole town. And then around again, and again until his feet were sore, his soles burning hot on the pavement. Each and every time he passed a car he wrote another ticket and slapped it on top of the old one. And each and every time he did that, he felt a little more angry about it all.

“By lunchtime the sweat was pouring from his brow, his fingers were sore from the grip of his pen, and his shoes, well, he was sure that they had shrunk, hugging the skin on his swollen feet like that.

“ ‘Two more rounds, just two more rounds’ he told himself, ‘and then I can call it a day.’ 

“The quiet private voice of his soul started singing a song, a song of hope that he might find just one car that had moved, just so that he could feel like as how he really did h-exist, d’y’see?

“But, of course, he found all the cars just as he left them. Covered in tickets from top to bottom as they were.

“Exhausted, dejected and desolate, Bernie lay in the dark on his brown bed. As is so often the way, all his feelings melded together to form anger, and a particularly fearsome anger it was. Hadn’t he only been trying to do his job? So why was it that they were all out to stop him? 

That was it. They had all met together and decided to defy him. They had decided that life would be better without him.

“Had they stopped to consider what would become of their traffic flow once he was gone? What singular chaos might ensue once folk were parking wherever they felt like it, at whim, like? Had any of them just once asked themselves why he was needed? Had they thought about that? Had they? And what did he ask from them? Was it so much? Was it really so very much? No, it was nothing. Nothing at all. Not a thing. And what did he get in return? Disrespect. Yes, disrespect, and parking on double yellows, that’s what he got, ho yes.

“What stupid senseless people he served. And why should he serve them? Why should he be their Public Servant, these folk who didn’t deserve to be served. And now they had taken his lights away. Taken his television and his cooker away, and all the while not one had the decency to show their face. Pah! He would show them. He wasn’t one to be defeated so easily, not a bit of it, oh no. He would be back out there tomorrow, just as he was today, just as he always would be. If needs be he would cover every single car in tickets, if that was what it would take. He knew his duty, even if other folk knew nothing of theirs. Stupid selfish evil folk...

“Now, if there had been even just a trace of light in Bernie’s bedroom, he would have seen the smoke arising from his tummy button, his navel, d’y’see? But it was dark as coal in Bernie Collins’ brown house, and so he lay there, stoking the fire of his own demise.

“As he glowed with rage he braised his liver, grilled his guts and stewed the bile that had risen in his stomach. As the juices boiled inside of him, his thoughts became more terrifying, 

more tormented more tortured. Down in his bowel, his gases had expanded until they could expand no more.

“And so it was that in a flash of flame and fart, Bernie Collins exploded. The fire leaped from his ripped torso onto to his sheets, his room, his house, until there was not a trace of Bernie Collins left on the earth. His parking tickets were the only things that remained, as a testament.”

Padraig leant back in his chair, satisfied and slightly wearied by the effort of the telling.

Paul felt the onus on himself to offer a comment of some kind. The silence was pregnant with Padraig’s expectation.

“You tell a good tale, Padraig. I wonder, would you mind if I built the fire up? It’s getting just the slightest bit chilly in here.”

“And why wouldn’t you? Go ahead young man. But do me this. Build a good fire, or build a bad fire, but save, oh save me and spare me from a nice fire. The idea of it. Indeed.”