1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge (11 page)

‘Look Tony, you mad eejit, I’ll ring you later—but this is how well leave it for now. My intention is to get someone to drive you to wherever the mobile unit are going to be on Friday and then drive you back to wherever you would have got to if you’d spent that day doing an ordinary day’s hitch-hiking.’

Apparently it made sense to her.

The local press were next—
The Deny People, The Donegal Democrat
and the national gaelic newspaper
Foinse
, which I assumed meant ‘easily excitable’, because they were planning on putting me and my fridge on its front page. Donohoe, who was freelancing for them, was my third and final photographer on this, my afternoon of relaxation. He was an affable and erudite man who had initially assumed that the job to go and photograph a man who was travelling around Ireland with a fridge, had been colleagues winding him up. He approached the photoshoot with considerably more artistic integrity than the previous two photographers, who were happy enough with a handful of snaps and the correct spelling of Hawks. Donohoe was interested in me, what I was doing, and where he could get the most imaginative photos of me and my fridge.

‘We’ve just
got
to get one of you and your fridge walking past the wreck.’

‘What’s the wreck?’

§

The wreck was the well preserved shell of a wooden boat which was seeing out its days on the expansive sandy shores of the bay I had so convincingly failed to photograph the day before. We headed up there and spent an engaging hour in this most beautiful of spots, creating arty fridge shots and discussing the history of the gaelic language. I learned the interesting piece of trivia that England and Portugal are the only two countries in the European Union which don’t have minority languages. (Unless you count Cornish as a language instead of a type of ice cream.) With some satisfaction I logged this information away in the recesses of my brain, knowing that if I divulged it at the right moment to the right person, I could make an enormous impression. I continued to ply Donohoe with highbrow questions.

‘What’s the gaelic for ‘my fridge’?’ I asked, smiling for his camera, with one foot on the fridge and an arm resting on the wreck.

‘Mo Chuisneoir,’ came the reply.

‘Mo Kushnar?’

‘That’s right, Mo Chuisneoir.’

‘I think I should put ‘Mo Kushnar’ on the front of the fridge in veneration of the gaelic language.’

‘Good idea. If we go up my office we can print it out on the computer and you can stick it on.’

And so it was that when I arrived back at Bunbeg House, the fridge was admirably adorned with the words:

MO CHUISNEOIR

‘What’s that mean?’ said Andy.

‘It means ‘Always explore the simple option’.’

‘Eh?’

I explained whilst waiting for a cup of tea which never materialised.

The Poorest King On Earth

T
he next morning I woke and made exactly the same mistake with the curtains as I’d made the previous morning, revealing myself once again as ‘nude at window’ to the painting fisherman. It appeared that a day’s experience had hardened him and he took it all in his stride, or rather his brushstroke, even managing the semblance of a good morning nod.

The previous night had been a quiet one by my standards so far. I had met Elizabeth and Lois for a meal, avoiding the overwhelming hospitality of Hudi-Beags in the interests of self preservation. (I’d come up with my own nickname for Hudi-Beags which was ‘Houdini’s’, because you had to be an escapologist to get out of it) So this morning I felt pretty good.

Before breakfast I did what I should have done the previous morning and strolled down to the pier to find out if anyone was going out to Tory Island later. I called out to a fisherman who was squatting knee deep in nets with his back to me.

‘Excuse me—’

He turned and looked startled. It was the fisherman who had twice seen my genitalia. Neither of us had the social skills to deal with this situation.

‘Oh hi,’ I continued, feeling it somehow necessary to acknowledge that we knew each other. ‘You don’t happen to know if there are any fishermen going out to Tory Island today?’

He just looked at me and froze. I don’t think his life’s experiences had required him to converse with anyone he’d seen naked before, and I elected to move on before he needed to call on the attentions of the Bunbeg cardio-vascular unit. (Presumably a postman who had the apparatus in his front room.)

The other fishermen on the quay, who hadn’t seen me with my clothes off, were more forthcoming. I was told that Rory McClafferty had said he was leaving to deliver another load of bricks out to Tory Island at eleven o’clock this morning, and that he would be happy to take me out there. This was good news indeed and there was a spring in my step as I returned to base.

Nine miles of water known as Tory Sound separates Tory Island from the shore, the last few miles of which are notoriously treacherous, being exposed to strong winds and dangerous currents. In the winter months the island can be isolated from the mainland for up to a month at a time, and it’s quite common for no boats to be able to get in or out of it for three consecutive days. There was a fair breeze today but thankfully it was blowing off the land and the infamous swells would be considerably smaller than if we had been cursed with a Northwesterly. According to Donohoe, the island had been inhabited since prehistoric times and was desolate, rocky and barren, with now a population of around a hundred and thirty living off the fishing, and a few had sidelines as artists, painting landscapes with a naivety which had won them acclaim. I hadn’t seen any of their work but doubted very much whether it fitted into larger debates about the privileging of abstraction and its viability for a world in conflict. I decided I wasn’t going to bother raising this though, unless conversations were floundering very badly.

‘Phonecall for you, Tone,’ said a patient Andy, who at times was in danger of turning into my secretary.

It was Antoinette from
Live At Three
, and on this occasion she was far less tolerant of my abiding indecisiveness, making it clear that they had a programme to make the following day and they could do without ditherers like me.

‘Look, don’t you commit to anything in your life?’ she said, her words a chilling echo of accusations fired at me by at least two past girlfriends.

Thrown off balance by the resonance of this last remark I thoughtlessly agreed to do the show, not realising that by so doing I had put in jeopardy the romantic ideal of spending at least one night on an isolated island. The plans to which I had agreed involved a bloke called Gary picking me up at 10.30 the following morning and driving me to wherever the mobile unit was going to be. And so the new and very important question was—how and when was I going to get
back
from Tory Island? And would I be able to get back in time?

There was nothing for it but to call a King.

‘Hello, is that Patsy Dan?’

‘It is.’

‘Good morning, my name is Tony, I spoke to you the day before yesterday, I don’t know whether you remember—’

‘I do.’

‘Well, I’ve found a boat to bring me out to your island this morning, but I need to get back by ten or so tomorrow morning—do you know of any boats that might be leaving first thing from your end?’

‘That I do. We have had some Americans staying on the island and Patrick Robinson will be taking them back at around eight o’clock.’

‘Will there be room for me?’

‘They will make room.’

Perfect. After a day or two of things not going exactly to plan, I was back in falling on my feet’ mode!

‘I hope I get the chance to meet you—I’ve never met a King before, a Prince yes, but we didn’t really hit it off.’

‘I’m sure well meet, the island isn’t too large, and I shall be happy to tell you all about Tory.’

‘Will accommodation be a problem? I read there are no hotels on the island.’

‘No, we have one now. And it will not be full at this time of the year. Will you be bringing your fridge?’

‘Of course.’

‘In that case we will make you both most welcome.’

As Kings go, he seemed to be a good one. I wondered if there was an opportunity of marrying into royalty.

‘You don’t happen to have ah unmarried daughter do you?’

‘As a matter of fact I do. Her name is Brida.’

‘How old is she?’

‘She is twenty years old.’

‘Hmmmm. I shall look forward to meeting you both.’

§

The round trip to the local shop had taken forty minutes and had been quite tiring. Still, at least it had been productive. At breakfast, Rolf couldn’t resist asking, ‘Towny, vot iss the borkay off flars for?’

‘I beg your pardon.’

Cait stepped in. ‘What’s the bouquet of flowers for?’

‘Oh right, sorry Rolf—well it’s for the King of Tory’s daughter, Fm planning on marrying into royalty.’

This caused much more amusement than I thought it merited, Andy suggesting that I wasn’t good enough for her, Cait proclaiming that romance wasn’t dead, and Rolf rounding things off with, ‘Iff she likes yer fridge then she iss yourss.’

I hoped he was right—I’d already committed forty minutes of free time into this courtship project and I was banking on that being enough to translate into results.

Soon the discussion had moved on to the maritime traditions of the local fisherfolk, aspects of which I found alarming. Many hundreds of years ago the fishing communities in these areas had settled on the quaint custom of
not saving anyonewho fell into the water
. This wasn’t based on an ungenerous ‘
You
fell in,
you
get yourself out’ policy, but on the superstitious belief that any encounter with the sea was preordained, and any act of rescue was an obstruction of fate’s natural course which would only bring tragedy upon yourself and your family. So, if some unlucky fisherman slipped overboard, instead of rushing to his aid, colleagues would run to the side of the boat shouting ‘Chuck us your watch’ or ‘Can I have your dining table?’

Adherence to these perilous conventions even involved embracing the tenet that
swimming
itself was meddling with the divine right of the sea to take your life and (according to Andy, Cait and Rolf anyway) the majority of the present day fishermen in this locality still couldn’t swim. Instead of being fascinated by an intriguing piece of folklore, I took all this to be overwhelming evidence of the unworthiness of these people to be my escorts across a treacherous stretch of water. I wanted sailors who could swim, and hadn’t been inculcated with a fanatical hatred of lifebuoys. Mine was a gentle adventure which was to involve at worst, a loss of dignity, the loss of life thing is for climbers and Antarctic explorers who do what they do because they can’t mix at parties. If I had wanted to take unnecessary risks travelling, I would have got Mark Thatcher to drive me there.

Rather chastened by these revelations I returned to my room and packed, gathering together what few things I would need, opening the fridge door and chucking them in, turning the fridge into an overnight bag. On the way down to the quayside I was stopped by an intrigued fisherman who had been watching my noisy advance with interest.

‘Is that a fridge?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘What are the flowers for?’

‘They’re for the King of Tory’s daughter.’

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. It was impossible to ascertain which of these two pieces of information had provoked his stunned visage. But I did have my fears.

§

Rory McClafferty and his boat left dead on eleven o’clock, the first time in over four hundred years that anyone in this part of the world had done anything at exactly the time when they said they were going to do it There was a small party seeing me off—Cait, Rolf, and Andy and Jean and their three small children who up to now, in a favourable twist on the adage ‘children should be seen and not heard’, I had heard but not seen. The fridge and flowers were loaded by a puzzled crew member to cheers from my wellwishers. Both precious items were dumped unceremoniously on top of a load of breeze blocks, and left there looking as out of place as I was feeling. We wasted no time in slipping our moorings and heading off, one of the benefits of the fishermen’s belief system being that there was no need for a delay whilst we were told where the life-jackets were stashed. There was tacit understanding of the emergency procedure: ‘In the event of the ship going down—drown.’

The route out of Bunbeg harbour involved negotiating a narrow but exceptionally pretty series of channels before we hit the open sea. The sun beat down in earnest for the first time and London seemed aeons away. As I looked down the boat and saw my fridge and my bouquet of flowers alongside it, I felt good about myself and what I was doing with my life. I knew it bore no close scrutiny, but there was no one around to do any close scrutiny bearing, so in that regard I was lucky, and was able to enjoy the fact that everything was grand, and that I was ‘getting away with if.

The first forty-five minutes of our voyage was spent wending our way past small islands dotted with derelict houses. Rory informed me that no one had inhabited them for twenty years and that ironically the demise of these island communities had been due to their proximity to the shore. Because of the accessibility of the mainland, islanders would row ashore for a night out in their primitive rowing boats or ‘currachs’, and attempt to make the return ‘journey completely inebriated. Now, a drunk has a considerable propensity for falling over even on terra firma, but add choppy waters, an inability to swim and a crew with a distinct lack of lifcsaving medals, and you end up with the ultimate and somewhat terminal hangover cure. The death toll became so high that the Irish government insisted that the islanders resettle on the mainland, but out on Tory, where their drunks tumbled into ditches with relative impunity, island life survived.

With caution I stood by the boat’s siderail and viewed the sea respectfully, a little confused by its jet black, inky colour and its refusal to reflect the blue sky above it. Perhaps it chose to present a hue more in keeping with its funereal past.