McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy Read Free Book Online

clever gobshite. Didn’t he buy his own island, now?’
    And so it went on. The EC, and the billion pounds we’ve had from them. Or is it 34 billion? Laughter all round. Then Sinead O’Connor. Riverdance . That Terry Wogan. Adams, Paisley and Blair. The internet. Clinton’s sex addiction. Spanish trawlers. And all the time, what did I think? Really, now? Is that so? It was a long time since I’d had a conversation like that. A sharing of opinions, to be digested, rather than differences, to be confronted. No music, no slot machines, no TV, no food, no till. Just three interruptions, two from kids buying sweets, one a woman buying tights and a cabbage. The perfect evening, in the perfect pub. The kind of evening that leaves you with a warm feeling. Especially when accompanied by seven pints of Guinness.
    Before I left, I asked where the fragrant local potatoes came from.
    ‘Egypt.’

    On the way home, I fell over a wall.
    I think Mrs Goggin knows.

Chapter Three

Drimoleague Blues
    The next morning, and I’m cruising the back lanes of West Cork in the repmobile, trying to remember whether the bull had any udders, as I look for the beach at Red Strand. I’ve already tried to find Castlefreke, because it’s got an interesting name, and a ruined old Gothic house, and you’re meant to be able to walk through the woods to the beach; but it was altogether too elusive for me. I did manage to find Castlefreke post office, mind you, which sits, quite clearly marked ‘Castlefreke post office’ in the middle of the picturesque village of Rathbarry.
    I’m taking it easy on account of the hangover, just plodding along at thirty while I try and find a station on the radio; but the radio refuses to cooperate and stays in constant search mode, as it has been since the day I hired the damn thing. Just relentless static, interrupted every few seconds by a tiny fragment of a phone-in about adultery, or sexually active bishops.
    I’m heading up a gentle hill, trying to forget the expression on Mrs Goggin’s face when I declined black pudding, white pudding and a third sausage, when suddenly, round the corner at the top of the hill, a car appears. It’s airborne, like a rally contestant, nearside wheels in the middle of the road, the rest of the car entirely on my side. It swerves out of my path and thunders past, pinging a stone against the corner of my windscreen, where it makes a tiny crack. I get a clear look at the driver: a slightly batty-looking sixty-something lady, who grins amiably and waves with one finger as she rockets past. She seems untroubled by the realisation that if I’d been going ten miles an hour faster, or had been fifty yards further up the lane, or both, we’d have met head-on, on a blind bend. Not for the first time I have cause to reflect that all the recklessly fast drivers I come across, who in England would usually be men in their twenties, seem to be elderly women with a strange gleam in their eyes.
    Yet their driving seems entirely devoid of aggression; they’re just, y’know— fast . And at least they retain that old-style country habit of raising a finger off the steering wheel in acknowledgement, for all the world as if you’re the only person they’ve driven past all week. At least, I think it’s in acknowledgement. If it’s, ‘Sit on this, ya English fecker,’ then I have to say it’s done with great charm.
    By the time I happen upon Red Strand I’m more than ready for a burst of air. It turns out to be a beautiful expanse of sand between two green headlands, with the ancient fort of Galley Head just visible away to the west. So it’s unfortunate that slap in the middle of the green fields that face the sea, behind the beach, is an extremely hard-on-the-eye mobile-home camp of thirty or forty units , I think, is the polite word for them. Still, they’re not permanent, I suppose, and they allow people with not a lot of money to come and enjoy this beautiful spot, and no one’s