Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?. Tim Bradford
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_74c9c566-cd01-5666-88e4-c3ded8f8b0f1">7 As well as the Irish centre there’s a thriving busker scene in west London, usually situated in the subway at the top of Fulham Palace Road. The best of them is known simply by his unofficial stage name Bloke with Organ in a Wheelchair. He’s a fat old fellow with grey hair and glasses; a more recent addition to the scene. He rests his organ on a stand and plays Irish classics, usually with a tinny drum machine diddling away in the background. One of his better numbers is ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, which goes something like this: Bum bh bum phh daao daaaoooo daooo daoaooo daooo daoo daooo Bum bh bum phh daao daaaoooo daooo daoaooo daooo daoo daooo Bum bh bum phh daao daaaoooodaooo daoaooo daooo daoo daooo. tinkle dee dee deeeeeeeeeee’. I once saw him stand up and pack all his stuff away and for a second I was outraged that I’d given him money not because of the music but because of his disability but then I thought it serves me right, transport is a big problem in London when you’re getting to gigs.
8 Finnegans Wake is the James Joyce book that nobody has read. Ulysses is also the James Joyce book that nobody has read, but everyone claims they have (that’s why it is now the Citizen Kane of novels, up there at the number one spot in recent lists of the best novels of the century). Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s last book, his mangled and messianic attempt to reinvent the language and structure of the novel and piss people off at the same time (he was probably much more successful at the latter). Of course, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, not having read it.
IRISH MYTHS & LEGENDS 2 Hey, Mister, Got any Tayto?
Most Irish pubs worth their salt and vinegar will serve Tayto, the Irish potato crisps. To the untrained palate (i.e. mine) they taste exactly the same as any other kind of crisp. But to the rootless Irish person drifting round the world dreaming of home, they are a beautiful and rare foodstuff which transports the eater on a mystical journey back to Erin’s wild shores. People buy boxloads of the stuff saying they are addicted to them. They’re dry, slightly greasy and very cheese and oniony. But you don’t understand, says the fat person stuffing their face with crisps. Lots of Irish food is special like that, particularly if it’s hard to come by. Here’s a brief selection:
Superquinn Sausages
You’ve got to try some Superquinn sausages, I was told. I sat down to my fry-up with these little fried rabbit droppings at the side of the plate. Mmmm, these fried rabbit droppings look delicious. But where are the Superquinn sausages? Hey, those are the Superquinn sausages. Ah, stop messing.
Irish Butter
Irish people abroad will drive around a new city for days looking for Irish butter. I mean, butter is butter. It all tastes the same to me. But they like their traditional Irish butter – like Kerrygold. Kerrygold was actually created by Heinz magnate Tony O’Reilly for the Irish Dairy Board in the mid-sixties. But if you mention this to an Irish person, it’s as if you have criticised Michael Collins or the drummer out of u2. Kerrygold is simply a recent brand with an invented fictional heritage, like the crap beer you get in many new Irish pubs. Hey, managed to get a dig in at crap Irish pubs again there. The proofreader’s obviously not concentrating.
Ring Cheese
In the long-gone days when I played rugby, the concept of ‘ring cheese’ would have been enough to send me into paroxysms of mirth before collapsing on the floor in a soggy puddle of giggles (at least I hope that’s giggles and not the product of the ‘cream cracker game’ – oh, never mind). Ring is an Irish speaking area in Waterford. Cheese is a dairy product made from milk and – but you probably know that already.
Chocolate Kimberleys
Ordinary Kimberley biscuits are, apparently, disgusting and taste like cardboard. But you’ve got to taste Chocolate Kimberleys. They’re simply heaven. You’re supposed to leave them in the fridge for a while. Mmmmmm. It’ll be an experience you’ll never forget. It’s a biscuit thing with marshmallow in, a bit like Wagon Wheel but not as tasty or big.
Red Lemonade
Lemons are yellow but lemonade is red, at least in Ireland. White lemonade, or to be more precise, see-through, is for amateurs. Real drinkers take red lemonade with their tipple. Is it like Lucozade or Tizer? I asked in all innocence. Don’t be silly. It’s lemonade made with special red lemons. Right. But it’s not really red, it’s orange.
Visions of Beer and Loathing on the Road to Holyhead Hammersmith to Dublin
As usual I had left everything until the last minute. This was fine with me – in a way I was happier like that because it didn’t give me too much time to cock things up. When other people were involved, however, it became more of a problem.1 I had only mentioned to Terry a couple of days earlier that I was definitely heading off at this time. He’s usually pretty spontaneous, but this was short notice even for him. I’d spoken to him earlier in the day and he said he’d call some time in the evening if he’d managed to get it all together. I smelled disaster already (it smells sweet and sickly like treacle pudding except it’s also as dry as chalk on a blackboard). Why couldn’t I organise anything properly? Terry would most likely be in a pub doing the crossword and thinking subconsciously about Ireland. That was something, I suppose. I sat in the little box room at the end of the flat and stared down at The Car, waiting for the phone to ring.
I had had strange fears that either mine or Terry’s short-term memory tanks would give out and one of us would forget about the trip. The thing was, Terry and I had one thing in common, a dramatically deficient short-term memory system. We could both recall events which took place in the sixties, news broadcasts, the colour of the sky on a spring morning, what the three-year-old girl next door wore at her birthday party, where we were when we first heard ‘Yellow Submarine’, the Radio Times with Philip Madoc as an Indian warrior in Last of the Mohicans on the cover, how we felt when we could count to ten, Thunderbirds, Captain Fantastic and Mrs Black, the metallic and salty taste of Knorr soup, the lavender-water smell of great grandparents’ houses, recurring dreams of flying and five-year-old girlfriends.
But ask us what we did yesterday or where we put that thing we were holding five minutes earlier, you know, the thing, and we were lost. We both had our theories about this. I felt that there was a little tank where the short-term memories were left to ferment for a while into long-term memories, after which they would progress to the much larger long-term memory tank. Our short-term memory tanks were just too small for the amount of sensory data we experienced in our frenzied lives, so it all got pushed into the long-term memory tank, which could not be accessed for at least eighteen months. The fantastic thing was that we’d be going on a trip together which neither of us would remember for a year and a half. The thing was, Terry and I had one thing in common, a dramatically deficient