1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge

by Tony Hawks; Prefers to remain anonymous

  Honestly of all the unnecessary questions! Isn’t it obvious? I’m speeding down the road in a Transit van on my way to the Ballyduff bachelor festival with two hardwood flooring guys, where do you think?

  ‘Oh hi Mandy, it’s a little difficult to explain exactly where I am. I’m in transit.’

  ‘But you’re in safe hands?’

  Huh.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Radio Four have phoned and asked if you can do I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue next Thursday. Will you be back in time?’

  ‘I don’t think so, and even if I am, I doubt my brain will be in any condition for the delivery of ready wit and repartee.’

  ‘What shall I tell them then?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue.’

  Brian and Joe called out ‘Hi Mandy! How ya doing?’ and the phone’s signal disappeared as we bumped our way round another bend some where in the heart of County Kerry. Poor Mandy, she must despair of me at times.

  §

  Career successfully on hold, it was time to get on with the more important business in hand.

  ‘So, what exactly will I have to do at this bachelor festival?’

  ‘Oh, a bit of an interview, maybe a party piece.’

  ‘And what happens if I win?’

  There I was deluding myself again.

  ‘You win a week at the Ballybunion bachelor festival.’

  And I suppose if you won that, they packed you off to another one somewhere else. No wonder they marry young in Ireland—purely to avoid this endless circuit of bachelor festivals.

  I’m not sure whether Ballyduff is a town which figures greatly on any tourist map, and there was unlikely to be a wide range of choice in the field of accommodation. In fact, a field might be the best it had to offer. I had no worries though because Brian’s wife and kids were up visiting relatives in Northern Ireland, and he said it wouldn’t be a problem to stay at his place.

  It was quite a plush residence built on one storey, which suggested to me that smearing glue over his clothes all day provided him with a very reasonable income.

  Perhaps it had been the conversation with Willy Daly about the history of the matchmaking festival which ted me to believe that mis also might be a time-honoured event, steeped in convention and revered by single women from miles around who came to peruse the eligible with a view to pouncing. (Unlike Lisdoonvarna, I reckoned that it probably didn’t have a reputation to attract Americans yet, so saw no reason to black out any teeth.)

  When we arrived at Low’s Bar at around nine, it was too early, and the only evidence that there was going to be a bachelor festival in the pub was a small sign saying ‘BACHELORFESTIVAL TONIGHT’. The pub itself wasn’t the old, traditional hostelry I was expecting, but a large newly refurbished establishment with TV screens everywhere, a dancefloor with a DJ, and staff in matching uniform. This pub belonged in the town centre of Swindon, not in a tiny rural outpost in the west of Ireland. It had another thing in common with a pub in the town centre of Swindon—it was virtually empty. We were told things wouldn’t get going till around midnight, and withdrew to the small pub over the road where the music wasn’t blaring and we could converse without doing lasting damage to our vocal chords.

  Several pints and an unstimulating game of darts later, we returned to find Low’s Bar heaving with young people. The DJ was announcing the imminent commencement of the bachelor festival. Festival? I looked around me and saw nothing to justify the use of the word festival. The atmosphere was exactly that of a nightclub where audience interest in the stage was fuelled by a desire to watch a few drunken friends and acquaintances humiliate themselves. The men outnumbered the women, which suggested that the women folk of Ballyduff were either already sorted or knew of better ways to go about getting so. The imbalance in the sexes certainly wasn’t the result of a huge entry for the bachelor festival.

  There were six of us.

  The DJ kicked off proceedings with a booming announcement through the PA in an Irish version of the mid-Atlantic accent all disc jockeys use. The first two young men he invited on stage were fat and drunk. They mumbled incomprehensibly into the microphone and sang like pining dogs. The audience shouted encouragement at them which sounded like general abuse.

  In one sense I was heartened—the competition so far wasn’t up to much, but on the down side, the audience weren’t the most sophisticated I had ever witnessed. I still had absolutely no idea what I was going to do when I was called up there. I turned to Joe who was stood alongside me like a supportive personal manager. ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘Oh, just tell a couple of jokes.’

  This, given my profession, ought to have been an area in which I could excel. I felt pretty confident that none of the other bachelors had the experience of a Royal Gala under their belt (unless the King of Tory held one), and I knew that this should give me the edge over them, but hard as I tried, I couldn’t recall any section of my act which I felt would satiate the baying rabble who made up the audience.

  A guy called John was before me. He was a considerable improvement on the previous two entrants. He wasn’t drunk and he sang rather well. For the first time I began to feel some nerves. Finally it was my turn, and the DJ began his intro.

  ‘And now we have a late entry, he’s a young man who is travelling round the country with a fridge. You may have heard him on The Gerry Ryan Show, ladies and gentlemen—Tony Hawks!’

  Cheers and whistles as I made my way to the stage. I still had absolutely no idea what I was going to do or say. The microphone was handed to me by an unusually slim assistant who fixed me with a demented smile.

  ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen,’ I began, cleverly drawing on all my experience, ‘I am delighted to be here, lama bachelor, not surprisingly I suppose, as a man who has chosen to travel around the country with a fridge, but I have always harboured a deep desire to marry a woman from Ballyduff.’

  So far so good. This remark was cheered by the females in the audience, one girl somewhere out in the darkness urgently shouting ‘COME ON!!’ almost as if I’d done enough already, and that we could both disappear off now to finalise the wedding details with the priest. A general hubbub continued for what seemed a very long time but was only a matter of seconds, with diverse views on the merits of my marrying a local girl being offered at volume by most in attendance. I stood there, temporarily mesmerised by the yells of a frenzied and expectant crowd. I almost had an out of body experience in which I hovered above myself, had a bit of a look, and said, ‘How the hell did you get yourself into that?’ A particularly piercing female voice brought me round to reality. Implausible reality.

  ‘HAS THE FRIDGE GOT A FREEZERCOMPARTMENT!?’ she demanded at the top of her voice.

  A sudden hush descended. It was almost as if she had touched on a point on which everyone needed clarification.

  ‘I’m not taking questions yet,’ I replied.

  I got a laugh. Thirty seconds in, I was going quite well.

  Tilings deteriorated from here. By a minute I was sweating and at a minute thirty I was in some trouble. Somehow I managed to come up with a section of my material which might save the day, and performed it with as much confidence as I could muster. It didn’t save the day. What it did, was win me a few more seconds struggling in front of a crowd who were now vaguely supportive but who were never going to fully appreciate the only things I was capable of doing for them.

  ‘I’m not sure what I should do now,’ I admitted to them honestly.

  ‘Do Tony Blair—things can only get better!’ shouted a male voice unhelpfully.

  ‘Do the Stutter Rap!’ called another, revealing a tragic past.

  Joe, who was stood behind me, whispered keenly, ‘Do some more of the jokes. More of the funny stuff.’

  I would have done if I could have remembered any of it The excesses of the past few weeks had temporarily erased it from my memory. Then I had an idea.

  ‘I know what I’ll do, I’ll
sing a song,’ I announced, to sceptical cheers. ‘I’ve learnt what you have to do over here—you close your eyes and sing from the heart. This isn’t an Irish song, because I don’t know any—but it’s a song I wrote myself a few years back. So here goes.’

  Already this had created as much hush as the enquiry about the freezer compartment had done. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and sang from the heart.

  If I had a dollar for each lonely night

  That I had spent longing for you

  I wouldn’t be drifting or travelling light

  For there have been more than a few

  Cos I’ve been a drifter, and whilst I’ve been drifting

  The real world has broken me in two

  And if I had a dollar for each lonely night,

  I’d be rich, blue and lonely

  Instead of just lonely and blue.

  Singing has a special place in the hearts of the Irish. The respectful quiet I was afforded for this performance and the rapturous applause it received proved that. I had won them over.

  ‘Goodnight!’ I announced with a rock and roll wave.

  Surely that had assured my place in Ballybunion. As I proudly walked from the stage with the cheers still ringing in my ears, I noticed that the DJ wasn’t there to introduce the next bachelor. I was intercepted by the unusually slim assistant, whose demented smile had now become a demented grimace. He waved me back on.

  ‘You’ll have to do some more, Callum’s in the toilet,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got to keep going till Callum the DJ gets back from the toilet. He heard that you were a bit of a comedian and he thought you were going to do about twenty minutes up there, so he thought there’d be time to go to the bog.’

  ‘Can’t I introduce the next bachelor?’

  ‘No, cos Callum’s got the running order with him.’

  What did he need the bloody running order with him for? Wasn’t there any toilet paper? The assistant pushed me back out to the microphone. What followed undid all the good work that the song had done because I couldn’t think of anything further to offer. The chorus of unhelpful suggestions began again, and all the time I could hear Joe persistently whispering behind me—‘Do some more of the jokey stuff.’

  Callum was taking his time. For the first time in my career, my success on stage was entirely dependent on a disc jockey’s bowel movements. I floundered. If you had wanted to demonstrate to someone the meaning of the word floundering’ you simply could have led them there and pointed at me. There, see that bloke there—now that’s ‘floundering’.’ The day needed saving and Brian provided the requisite initiative. Recognising that I wasn’t in the midst of one of show business’s most outstanding performances he had nipped outside to the van to fetch something he felt might help. Just as the audience contributions had reached a level where an outsider walking in would have believed there was a riot about to happen, Brian marched up the middle of the dance floor pulling my fridge behind him.

  ‘The fridge! It’s the fridge!!!’ cried excited voices.

  Brian drew it up alongside me and laid it to rest by my side. He withdrew and left the two of us, an Englishman and his fridge posing like oddities before Ballyduff’s revellers. We must have looked quite a pair because someone called out, ‘Hey, look how good they are together! I reckon he’s not a bachelor after all!’

  ‘I am,’ I replied. ‘But we’re part of a team. There’s room for another, but it’s a case of ‘Love me, love my fridge’.’

  The audience liked this and rewarded it with a polite round of applause. The sound of a polite round of applause must have been so unusual as to cause Callum the DJ to curtail his bathroom activities and to reappear looking mildly panic stricken. He looked at me and shrugged, as if to say ‘How did you get a polite round of applause out of that lot?’ I shrugged back. By the end of this trip I would certainly be all shrugged out I wanted to lean into the microphone and say, ‘I have to go now, my work here is done.’

  Perhaps a little too grand.

  ‘I’m going to hand you back to your DJ now,’ I said with immense relief. ‘Goodnight, you’ve been great!’

  Ugh! ‘Goodnight, you’ve been great! ‘ Well, I had certainly drawn on all my show business experience there to leave the audience with one of the all time offerings of trite insincerity. No one minded though and for the second time in the night, I left the stage to rousing cheers. One familiar female voice cut through the rest, ‘HAS THE FRIDGE GOT A FREEZER COMPARTMENT!?’

  She would make someone an interesting wife.

  Half an hour later the winner was announced. Brian, who knew the organisers, had already informed me of it.

  ‘Well the good news is Tony, that you won. The bad news is they can’t give it to you, because they’ve got to give it to a local.’

  This wasn’t such bad news. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted an entire week of nights like this in Ballybunion. Besides justice was being done. The main reason for my gaining favour had been that I was travelling with a fridge, and that is by no means sure fire evidence of one man being any better a bachelor than the next.

  I sat down and watched the fridge at the end of the dancefloor completely surrounded by young people anxious to sign it with pens, crayons, and whatever else they could lay their hands on. Beside it stood Paddy, the winner of the 1997 Ballyduff bachelor festival. No one was paying a blind bit of attention to him. A similar fate befell the rest of the bachelors, including myself. It seemed that the few females of Ballyduff who had turned out to this special night preferred the company of a small appliance to a man. For some, it would be a preference which would continue well into their married lives.

  As the DJ wound up the night I wrested my fridge from its deranged inscribers who were continuing to cover it with names, messages and jokes. For a moment, I felt strangely protective of it. I realised that in the interests of sanity, these weren’t feelings I should look to encourage.

  Eye make-up pencils, felt pens, and a ubiquitous maroon crayon had all been used to transform the fridge into a modernistic objet d’art. A closer study revealed that the Mother Superior’s message had been almost obliterated. Her words ‘God bless you Tony and Saiorse’ were barely visible beneath the profane scrawlings of Ballyduff’s youth. Almost a metaphor for the Church’s present standing in society.

  Apart from a particularly crude joke which now adorned the fridge door, one other message caught my eye. On the back, just below ‘Stay Cool!! Luv Chris and Jean’, it read, ‘Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.’

  There you go. Even amidst the most disorderly inebriated rabble, wisdom is to be found. Brian, Joe and I drew on some of ours, and called it a night.

  19

  I Did It Dunmanway

  I had been lucky with the changeable weather. Up until now, when it had been raining I had been fortunate enough either to have been inside a vehicle or a pub. I had been granted periods of precious sunshine but clouds had always been hovering impatiently, threatening a return to the climate for which Ireland had made something of a name. Today was different Clear blue sky without a hint of cumulonimbus or stratus to stop the radiant sunshine from prevailing. The refreshing unpolluted Kerry air was up for grabs and the door needed only to be thrown open for a glimpse of a lush green landscape basking in the healthy rays of an inviting sun. A beautiful morning awaited.

  Unfortunately we spent it in the dark, dingy windowless back room of a pub in Tralee.

  ‘You can’t lay a hardwood floor without wood,’ Brian had said.

  He knew his stuff. His mobile phone was turned on, and as soon as news of the required delivery of wood reached him, we would proceed to Kllarney, but until then, what better way to while away a morning like this, than by playing countless games of darts.

  Darts. Dart players. Unlikely to conjure up the same levels of excitement in females as, say, your average surfer might. For some reason, the fit, muscular, tanned and s
cantily clad brute gliding across the waves will always edge it over the pasty fat bloke drinking beer and aiming his diminutive projectile at a small target. I longed to be outside in the sun, and the longing affected my darts. Whatever variation of the rules was adopted, I consistently claimed third place for my own, whilst Brian and Joe traded victories in a titanic struggle for outright supremacy. It was almost enthralling.

  ‘How far is it to Killarney from here?’ I asked, having just scored sixteen with three darts.

  ‘Oh, about another hour,’ said Joe, doing some mental arithmetic. ‘Sixteen eh? Not bad. Better than your last two goes.’

  Once we had word of this eagerly awaited delivery, darts’ would be abandoned for the day and Brian and Joe would have to begin smothering themselves in glue and seeing to it that a floor would get laid. Lucky old floor.

  By lunchtime, there was still no word of the delivery, but we headed off to Killarney anyway. I didn’t understand the thinking behind this, but I didn’t question it since Killarney was where I had set my sights on being by the end of the day. When we arrived there, Brian and Joe took me on a tour of the town which involved showing me the interiors of three pubs. Thankfully, all were without windows and offered a dimness which was a welcome contrast to the resplendent sunshine which those who had been foolish enough to venture outside had to suffer. In one of the bars a gaunt old man who looked like he was stony broke, on learning that I was the fellow who was travelling with a fridge, leant over to me proffering a pound coin.

  ‘Here, take this and God bless ya,’ he commanded.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘For whatever charity your collecting for.’

  ‘I’m not doing it for charity.’

  ‘Yes, you are now. C’mon, now take the pound.’

  ‘Honestly, I’m not doing it for charity.’

  ‘C’mon now, why else would anyone bring a fridge round the country with him? Take the pound now, c’mon.’

  It was a full five minutes before I could convince him that I wasn’t a registered charity and was by no means worthy of his pound.