by Tim Bradford
Eventually I decided that it must be the fact that they couldn’t see my eyes properly, couldn’t trust me – trust is such an important thing when you’re hitching. I realised I must look like a mad tinker, so I smoothed down my wild hair, though I couldn’t do anything about the five days’ beard.
I tried to smile again. Tried to look ‘nice’, the pleasant son-in-law look (which I’m not very good at). When you try and look nice and happy but you’re not really feeling it, you’re going to end up looking sad and confused or (in this case) just plain evil. Then I sort of went into a trance where I could hear the cars going past but all I was thinking was, ‘Bastards. Fucking bastards the lot of you. Bastards bastards bastards!!’ Finally, after about two hundred cars had gone past, the kids had all gone home and it was starting to get a little dark, I called it a day and chose to walk. Fuck them, I said again. A hundred thousand fucking welcomes my arse! As I walked I started to sing ‘Carrickfergus’ and ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ and ‘Forty Shades of Green’. I’m crap at remembering lyrics so had to sing mostly dumms and derrs. People in their gardens looked out but I didn’t care – if they were worried about a Lincolnshire nasal whine ruining some of their most famous folk songs they should have sorted out some kind of consistent policy on hitching, the fuckers. After a while the singing away to myself made me feel ecstatically happy, and I started reciting spontaneous love poetry6 in my best Richard Burton voice – if only there’d been someone to hear it. Or write it down.
I eventually got back to real civilisation (defined as ‘an area adjacent to working telephone boxes’) and rang the landlady, just to let her know I was OK and hadn’t been eaten by a mad rabbit up the mountain.
(Phone rings.)
Moira (the landlady): Hello.
Me: Hi, it’s Tim. Just ringing to let you know that I’m OK and will be back late.
Moira: Oh Tim, you’re wonderful. Oh you really are. Oh thank you.
It was really lovely to hear her voice. I had this warm vision of a roaring fire and a skipload of fig rolls. After the fifteen-mile round trip I was shagged out, so after facing another Abrakebabra (‘Incredible – you’ve finished yet your stomach feels empty. It’s magic!’) I decided go and bag a couple of artists and writers to stuff and hang on my living room wall. A few years ago I read an article in the Irish Independent about all the writers and artists in Sligo. At the time there were probably only about six or seven, and all were friends or acquaintances of the journalist, I expect. But as soon as other writers and artists see a piece like that they think, I must live in Sligo, that’s where all the writers and artists are.7 And soon it is.
Back in the town, I went straight to a pub, where there was a session on. I started drawing some of the musicians. A woman who bore a striking resemblance to the singer Dolores Keane came up to me and asked what I was doing. Drawing the old fiddle player with the big nose, I said. She says, that’s Peter the old fiddle player with the big nose. They often get artists in painting him but they never ask and they make lots of money out of him. I said they should shoot artists who do that. I thought of asking Peter if he had a horse and cart and whether he’d been up near Benbulben earlier on in the day. Or had a twin brother with a fetish for German expressionist cinema. I chatted with her for a while then she introduced me to her friends – writers and artists. One bloke called William claimed he wanted to be the new Beckett and Joyce rolled into one. He spent his time putting on plays for kids in the area, he said – for which he received grants – but wanted to write his own serious plays. I told him about a Lebanese cab driver I met in New Orleans who was obsessed with Beckett.8 Maybe you can turn that into a play, I said. He looked at me as if to say that it was a really crap idea. It was past closing time. Then the landlord of the pub, a little sandy-haired fellow with specs, stomped over and said, straight to my face:
Landlord: Are you German? Or Australian?
Me: No, I’m English.
Landlord: Well, fuck off out of my pub then.
Me: What?
Landlord: Go on, fuck off.
Soon after leaving the pub I began to be followed by a strange-looking, thin white dog. Every time I looked back, the dog would slow down, then I would hear the little pitter patter of its feet as I carried on walking. It followed me all the way out of the town until I was about twenty yards from my B&B. Then it disappeared. The Sligo Dog Spirit Guardian of English People Who’ve Been Chucked Out of Pubs, I decided to call it.
According to the Dolores Keanish bodhrán player, all these artists and writers, when they can be arsed to get up from the pub and get out and about, sometimes drive to Drumcliffe where Yeats is buried and pay homage, alongside busloads of middlebrow poetry-loving Yanks and Italians who go to have their picture taken at the grave. It’s all very nostalgic. Is that all this landscape has to offer, something from a Yeats poem? People stop seeing its real beauty – they write chapters about it, calling it ‘Yeats’s Mountain’ when it is no such thing. There’s more to Sligo than gift shops stacked with volumes of a dead man’s poetry.
* * *
1 Though not the Paul Daniels kind.
2 These graves have never been opened so the mystery still exists. They have, however, found prehistoric sites in this area which are older than the pyramids. While in Sligo I was reading a book called Celtic Myths and Legends by an Edwardian writer, T. W. Rolleston, who believed that the indigenous population of Ireland (pre-Celtic) was related to the Egyptians.
3 SAFETY NOTE Stand well back when approaching potential moving statues. Their movements can be very quick and you might be hit by a religious figure as it accelerates out into the road.
4 ’Nein, you shall have no train tickets today! Ha ha ha and there’s nothing you can do about it Tommy!’
5 SAFETY NOTE
Don’t wear cast-off walking gear given to you by people who are about to emigrate. It’ll end in tears.
6 My first volume of love poetry will be titled Nymphomaniac Jazz Chicks.
7 A similar thing has happened in London. Pieces in the Evening Standard and Time Out about places like Hoxton and Clerkenwell have made everyone move there. Sligo is slightly more pleasant than Hoxton.
8 ’I love Ireland. (pause) Do you know Samuel Beckett? I am studying Beckett. (pause) He is my hero. I studied Beckett at university. Drama and literature. (pause) I did one of his plays. He understands the human condition, the condition of existence. (pause) He understood the emptiness of existence, like Kafka – another of my favourite writers (pause).
‘What time is your flight? Oh OK. (pause) Theatre of the absurd. Krapp’s Last Tape is one of my favourites. (pause) Tell me, you have been to Ireland? What is is like? Hmmm. Existence is absurd when you think about it … Can we ever know what is the point of things (pause). Hell, man, get in your lane what the hell are you doing? Trying to kill someone? Some people are mad in their cars (pause). Everyone should read Beckett. Especially Americans. Like Beckett said in Waiting for Godot. Jewish conspiracy. Hollywood. American culture. The world is being taken over by McDonalds and Coca Cola.
The Americans. (pause) Low in intelligence, shallow people. (pause) Joyce, the shallowness of American culture and the world Zionist conspiracy.’
He was writing a novel about being a Lebanese taxi driver in New Orleans. Aside from Beckett, George Bush was his other hero. I engaged him in pleasantly meaningless (Beckettian?) metaphysical banter for about twenty minutes until he turned and asked something that had been bothering him for some time.
‘Is it really true that Beckett married James Joyce’s daughter during his stay in Paris?’
W. B. Yeats v. Daniel Donnell – a Cultural Conflict
Around Sligo
People have had enough of the pretending, the prevarication and the pussyfooting around the subject. Enough is enough. They want the powers that be – the government, the Irish Times, the Late Late Show, Ian Paisley, whoever – to announce who Ireland’s greatest ever cultural hero is. William Butler
Yeats or Daniel O’Donnell?
The dead poet may seem to be the favourite in many people’s eyes. He’s dead for a start (always a good thing for a hero to be). He also begat a whole artistic movement – nay, a cultural repositioning, placing Celtic folklore once again at the forefront of Irish life. But O’Donnell, too, has his own followers, hordes of middle-aged women with lacquered hairdos who would swear that Daniel is the new Elvis and that they are part of some grander scheme. There are other similarities. Yeats had the haughty bearing and highly strung sensitivities of the Polexfens, his mother’s patrician family. O’Donnell, meanwhile, is widely known to be a ‘mammy’s boy’.
(Scene – B&B on the outskirts of Sligo. I am standing in the hall, being encouraged to go and visit Daniel O’Donnell’s hotel in Donegal by Moira. I am not keen, preferring to have a cup of tea and a bath, then head off down to a pub in Sligo Town. Moira puts herself between me and the tea, rests her head on one side, places her hands on her hips and continues talking in a singsong Mayo accent.)
Moira: Do you like Daniel, Tim? Do you?
Me: I, er, well …
Moira: I like Daniel. I like Daniel a lot. He’s a lovely, lovely voice. Do you like Daniel’s voice, Tim?
Me: Ermm …
Moira: Oh, it’s lovely. Wait till I tell yer, Tim, wait till I tell you. People say he’s a mammy’s boy. Do you think Daniel’s a mammy’s boy, Tim?
Me: Well …
Moira: (winking) But you know what they mean when they say he’s a mammy’s boy? Don’t you? Don’t you, Tim? They mean that he doesn’t like girls (nods exaggeratedly then winks again). It’s jealousy, Tim. That’s what it is. Jealousy. He’s got a lovely voice and a lovely hotel and he’s popular so they have to make up these stories about him. Like they say that his girlfriend is really his mother.
Me: Eh?…
Moira: Have you heard that one, Tim? Have you? Oh it’ll murder you, it will. They say he’s in love with his mother and is pretending to have a girlfriend so he can stay with his mother. No one has seen this girl, but I don’t believe it, Tim. Do you believe it?
Me: Gosh, it’s …
(A middle aged woman comes down the stairs.)
Moira: Oh, here’s Mo. Mo’s been to Daniel’s. Mo, tell Tim about Daniel.
Mo: Oh he’s lovely. I went to his hotel yesterday.
Moira: Was he there? Mo? Was he?
Mo: No, he wasn’t there. But we had a cup of tea and saw some pictures of him. I’m going to go again tomorrow. (A middle-aged man comes down the stairs. It is Mo’s husband.)
Moira: Tom. Mo says you’re going to see Daniel again tomorrow. (Mo winces.)
Tom: What? We only went yesterday.
Mo: Ah, but he wasn’t there, Tom, was he? He might be there tomorrow.
Tom: Ah, jaysus. And if he’s not we’ll have to go the next day. Then it’ll be Joe Dolan’s bar, then God knows who else’s place.
Me: Do they all have bars or hotels, these singers?
Moira: Oh no, Tim. There’s only Daniel who’s got a hotel and Joe Dolan’s got a bar in Mullingar.
Me: I’ve never heard of Joe Dolan.
Moira: (evidently not keen to talk about Joe Dolan) Anyway, it’s a nice hotel, isn’t it, Tom? Isn’t it?
Me: So do you like Daniel, Tom?
(Tom looks at me and rolls his eyes.)
Moira: (laughing) Tom thinks he’s a mammy’s boy, don’t you, Tom? Don’t you?
(Mo ruffles around in her handbag and takes out a sheaf of postcards.)
Mo: Look, I got these at Daniel’s. It’s a picture of the hotel.
Moira: Oh Mo. It’s beautiful. Tim, look at this. Isn’t it lovely?
Me: (looking at picture of very ugly-looking modern hotel)
Mmm, it’s er …
Mo: Would you like that picture, Tim?
Me: Er, I …
Moira: Oh, yes, Tim, that’s nice, isn’t it? That’s very nice of you, Mo. Isn’t it, Tim?
After my trip up the mountain, it was time to get some insider information on Yeats.
(Scene – B&B on the outskirts of Sligo. I am standing in the sitting room, searching through all the tourist guides and leaflets for something about Yeats. There’s a load of stuff about adventure holidays, fishing, trips on lakes, zoos and restaurants, but nothing about Ireland’s No. 1 – or perhaps No. 2 – cultural hero. Moira suddenly appears in the doorway.)
Moira: Oh Tim. How are you?
Me: Great. I was just looking through your stuff here.
Moira: Oh there’s some great things to do, Tim. Did you see the one about boat trips? Oh, wait till I tell you. They stop off at all these interesting places. And there’s a very nice restaurant in town. I had a nice leaflet but I gave it to that American couple who was in here last night, the ones here when I made your cup of tea and they were having a cup of tea too – do you remember, Tim? And so I gave it to them and they said they’d get me some more leaflets after their meal. Would you like me to get you one? Would you, Tim?
Me: Well, I was really looking for something about Yeats.
Moira: (frowning and obviously disappointed) Oh.
Me: Well, I thought I’d like to go to the Yeats museum now I’ve been up the mountain.
Moira: (looking puzzled and slightly concerned) Well, I’ve never been to either of those, but I’m told the museum is just a load of photographs. Not very interesting at all, Tim.
Me: What about Loch Gar and Innisfree?
Moira: Oh the loch’s just down the road. You can get a boat or go fishing. Oh, that’s lovely that is, Tim. Lovely.
Me: OK.
Moira: Do you like Yeats, Tim? Do you? I never actually read anything by him, Tim. I only really heard of him about ten years ago. All these French and Italian students started coming and visiting his gravestone. This lovely French girl came to stay once and said she thought Yeats was a lovely man, a beautiful man it was she said. He’s a poet, isn’t he?
A few days after these conversations the headline on the front page of the Irish Daily Mirror read Mammy’s Boy Pretends to Have Girlfriend (actually it was something like Daniel’s New Love). A picture of a simpering Daniel staring into the eyes of a not-bad-looking woman who looked like a nurse or primary school teacher. Daniel had taken her along to some awards night and it was big, big news. I went out and bought Thoughts of Home, a Daniel O’Donnell CD, to find out what all the fuss was about. If you’ve ever perused Daniel’s work in a record shop you’ll see that many of his releases are concept albums. Religion, Classic Songs, Irish Ballads and this one, Thoughts of Home, all about wistful sentimental songs based loosely around the idea of loss and alienation.
Track 1: ‘My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You’
Soft rock beat. Daniel does Roy Orbison, echoey vocal as if recorded in the gents at the Boston Arms in Tufnell Park. Am I right?
Track 2: ‘The Mountains of Morne’
Oirishy ballad. Violins. Vocal high in mix. Song about a bloke trying to make it in London town but pining for home back on the mountains of Morne. Mournful, Joy Division meets Joseph Locke.
Track 3: ‘London Leaves’
Jauntier arrangement which belies the sad sentiment. Daniel likens love to nature – death and rebirth. ‘Like the leaves you’ll soon be gone from me,’ sings Daniel, plaintively. Like to see Shane MacGowan and Jah Wobble on this one.
Track 4: ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’
Chas ’n’ Dave Daniel sings about love dying again. Needs to put a bit more pain into his vocals, but hits the note every time. Sounds like fifties’ crooner. Some slide guitar.
Track 5: ‘Old Days Remembered’
Waltz. Decay. Memories. What is time? Consciousness. Lots of grannies swaying from side to side with Daniel scarves chanting his name.
Track 6: ‘Send Me The Pillow You Dream On’
Heavy metal guitar and screaming vocals, Daniel sings about bringing down the state and instigating an anarchist’s template for a new society.
Did the CIA kill Kennedy? Yes, according to Daniel who in this song outlines their attempts to cover up the vast conspiracy. Barrel organ and tuba.
Track 8: ‘A Little Piece of Heaven’
Track 9: ‘Far, Far from Home’
Drum-and-bass remix of an old classic with Daniel in fine form.
Track 10: ‘The Isle of Innisfree’
Moany whiny vocals over meat and potatoes pub band. Fans of Yeats may want to compare Daniel’s version with their hero’s.
Plus six more great tracks …
Track 11: ‘My Heart Skips a Beat’
Track 12: ‘I Know One’
Track 13: ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’
Track 14: ‘Second Fiddle’
Track 15: ‘My Favourite Memory’
Track 16: ‘Forty Shades of Green’