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

happens more often than you expect.

    Please be nice to the Germans
    We are different than you think
    Our favourite colour isn’t brown, but pink
    Please don’t fun at us poke
    German humour is no joke
    But it is well organised…

    After drawing a blank in Drimoleague, I headed back towards the coast to find somewhere to stay for the night. I stopped near Ballydehob, at a tiny lino-and-Formica pub with a niche market of dung-encrusted farmers, and dined on the Irish national pub dish, the Toasted Special—a sandwich of ham, cheese, onion, tomato, and anything else that’s in the fridge or on the worktop, all served at the temperature of lava. There was a card on the wall advertising ‘B + B—Organic Produce’, so I phoned ahead and booked.

    We are really very sensitive people
    Since the last war we don’t march, only dribble
    Bumptious and presumptuous, stern without a sense of fun
    All this is just a rumour
    You could learn a lot from our humour
    Though in 1939, our gags didn’t run…

    I was expecting an old farmhouse, but instead fetched up some time after eleven outside a large modern bungalow down an eerily dark lane. Doreen, the owner, had waited up to welcome me and to tell me her life story.
    One day, five years ago, her husband walked out after twenty-five years of marriage. No warning, just left one afternoon and didn’t get in touch for eighteen months. He’s living in San Francisco now with a lap dancer. There were crystals and wind chimes and New Agey books around the place, and a small pagan shrine to the Goddess, in the corner where the Sacred Heart or Blessed Virgin should have been.
    ‘This is a non-smoking house,’ she said. ‘I do smoke myself, mind, but I do it outside. Would ye like to see the garden?’
    ‘Maybe in the morning, when it’s light.’
    She said there was a German family staying, but they’d all gone to bed very early.
    ‘Lovely people. He’s a musician. He was asking me to help him with a song he’s writing, in English like, but I wouldn’t have an idea. I’d say he might like you to help him in the morning. Now, so, would you like some sandwiches? A piece of cake? I’ll be watching The Late, Late Show , if you’d like to join me.’
    My bed was fitted with one of those vile plastic undersheets, originally designed to make life easier for carers of the terminally incontinent, that are now found in more and more hotels and guest-houses. These things draw sweat from your pores like suction pumps. It’s like sleeping in a plastic paddling pool full of horse sweat. My dreams of drowning in lukewarm brine were interrupted at seven thirty a.m. by Teutonic warbling, accompanied by accordion and trumpet.

    Two world wars? Three world cups, that’s what counts
    We’d even eat English food
    And afterwards pretend it was very good…

    Breakfast was a huge plate of free-range eggs, organic bacon, vegetarian sausages, wild mushrooms spiked with garlic, and a dandelion. Gunter and I got talking, and within half an hour we were working on the lyrics. In fact we’ve just agreed on the final couplet.

    The time for humility is over
    So thanks for Rolls-Royce and Rover.

    I tell him I’m sure it’ll play well in London. I give Doreen £18, and she gives me a receipt, and a small crystal. As I set off for Dunmanway she’s in the garden doing tai-chi, while Gunter improvises on flute.

    Before I can meet the travellers, I have to find Dominic. Since my last visit he’s moved out of the caravan into a house with no address. ‘It’s sort of complicated to explain,’ he told me a few months ago in Brighton. ‘Best just ask in town.’ He’d been visiting his parents, and turned up with them at my birthday party, wearing one of those white neck braces for whiplash injury, and black jumper and jeans. Twelve years in Ireland, and he comes back looking like a pint of Guinness.
    I know the eight-mile stretch of road between Drimoleague and Dunmanway pretty well. When I was a kid