We begin as we began

Saturday 3rd June 2006. 6.12pm.

The road to Ennistimon is so Irish you could almost bottle it. Twists, turns, grass and dolmens. Hills winding every which way. As the car launches us into another in a series of wild, juddering bounces myself and the chief discuss pressing matters.
'Did I tell you that I modularised the front page now?' he says excitedly.
'Really' I say levelly.
'It means that if I make a change in one place, that change takes place on every page. Very handy for the individual pages. No more arsing around with html. It all gets a bit messy. I have my reservations about div tags but I think I know what I'm doing now.'
'Uh huh'
We exchange that look - the one that lets him know I haven't understood a word of what he's said.
'Never mind'

We briefly discuss the idea of taking acid and sitting on a Dolmen. Instead we stop and have an ice cream. Later, we're pulled in beside a graveyard, seventh century. The chief consults the map, looking for Lyra's house. 'Two miles' he announces, putting her into gear and pulling away.
'So which fish is it that I can't eat?' I ask by way of conversation, great streaks of ice-cream dribbling all over my hands.
He pauses, grimacing slightly.
'Cod' he says sternly.
'Really?'
'Cod are fucked. Totally over-fished'
'Jesus. What about tuna?'
'Fucked'
'Salmon?'
'Totally fucked'
'Prawns? Don't tell me I can't eat prawns. I love prawns.'
The car swerves violently.
'Prawns are one of the worst problems. Prawns and shrimp have the worst bi-catch rate. That's the amount of other fish that get dragged up in the net with them. For every kilo of prawns caught, harvested and sold as much as ten kilos of other shit gets killed. But even with all that the prawns are still...' he pauses, waving his hand around, the car taking a momentary westward lunge towards a sixth century B.C. ring-fort.
'...what's the word I'm looking for?' he asks.
'Fucked?'
'Yeah. Fucked.'

24 hours earlier

I'm in Stanstead airport. Leaving London. And, I'm in Ryanair hell. At any moment I expect a hairy, cloven-hoofed agent of Satan to approach me and try to sell me some aftershave.
'Scratch card?' says the minion of the dark prince sidling up behind me.
'No thanks. But here's what I would like. I'd like to be on that plane. The one I paid you to be on four hours ago. The one I've been sitting here waiting for. Me and the other 120 people'.
The hairy one shifts slightly. 'Train ticket?'
'No thanks' I say, brushing some flakes of sulphur from my collar.

She goes off to speak to another haggard passenger: a big beered-up Irish guy. He looks even more drunk and grumpy than me. He's one of a bar full, sat in Wetherspoons in the darkened airport terminal. Drunk, grouchy, laughing, joking. It's the last-gasp saloon in Stanstead and delayed passengers are trading Ryanair war stories. Some are angry. Some are more stoical.
'Ah sure lookit: complaining about the service on Ryanair is like going swimming and complaining that the water is blue,' says a grizzled veteran, slapping a gin and tonic on the table. 'Gimme a light' he says. I look at him as I hand him the lighter. He knows what he's talking about: a man of fifty-odd, crumpled but expensive suit, lot of air miles. Seen the raw combat conditions of the budget airline business. He, like I, has sat sulking and cursing himself for being a cheap bastard and flying with this shower. He has been sat, disconsolate and in need of a shave, in airport after airport, alone, with nothing better to do than chug down another over-priced, luke-warm beer, stare at a random woman's arse, and pray to anything that is listening to change the departures board.

It changes. Flight boarding. I make the gate in about five minutes flat. One minor incident with a fascist cabin-crew member (who seemed to think that my mp3 player could cause serious problems for the aircraft) later and I'm in Dublin. Taxi. Wallop. Bang. Keys, sandwich, glass of milk. Blessed, sacred and holy fuck I need some sleep. Lying in bed, I wonder how it is that something I can buy in Dixons apparently has the ability to interfere with the navigation systems of a brand new Boeing 737-800. I wonder am I the only one that finds that unsettling.

Thundering myeloma

Breakfast. I sit with my dad in the kitchen. We talk about the latest hospital visit. It looks good. It's been three months now since he matter-of-factly told me has a cancer. Myeloma, to give the malignant little bastard it's proper name. To be honest, it seems to be one of those things they didn't even have a name for ten years ago. I've been learning that the word 'cancer' is, in fact, a rather broad umbrella term. We sit, slurping out of coffee mugs, discussing how he is.

'Myeloma' I say, trying the word out. It feels wrong in my mouth.
'No big deal,' says the father, 'for now,' he adds. He's not in any pain. They're monitoring him closely and he's changed his diet completely. In his favour he's never drank or smoked. They're gonna put him on pills and test him every month. He's as calm as always.

He fills me in on some of the things they've told him at the hospital. On a scale of one to one hundred, he is a fifteen. When it gets to about twenty-five or thirty, they start taking it seriously. That means chemo. But for now, he's fine. He says that his condition is called 'smouldering myeloma'. Unfortunately, whilst he was sitting on a trolley in the hospital, the flap of the double-doors sending a gust up the arse of his gown, the Chinese doctor made a mistake and told him that he had 'thundering myeloma'. We laugh like horses.

Not long after he disappears out the door and down to the church, where he's involved in helping out with the community. But before he does, we talk about some issues that have arisen at my job recently. I had forgotten that at one stage my father was managing, literally, hundreds of men, whilst he chased scumbag embezzling union bosses. He spent most of his professional life uncovering corporate fraud. At the same time he was raising five kids, paying a mortgage and dealing with mental illness. He knows how to deal with difficult people and situations at work. I listen. And maybe for the first time in my life, actually hear him.

Temporal blog-anomaly

Sunday 4th June 2006. 11.18pm

I'm drunk. Well drunk. With a pain in my face from laughing. I stand at the door of a pub in Ennistimon, cursing all and sundry that I have to stand outside and smoke. Although I actually came outside because the missus rang. She found the hiccuping amusing. Music is blasting from inside the pub. Locals, bodhrans, guitars and pipes yelping and yowling, elderly couples flinging themselves around. I hiccup. Squeeze out a sneaky fart. Snigger to myself.

'Bout ye?' roars the chief as I walk back in. He hands me a fresh one. People are slobbering into pints. We're not quite sure what happened earlier, but there was a ferocious ruckus when somebody was borne on a wave of screaming and cheering into the back bar holding a silver cup. Guessing by the decor, we reckon someone's madra has just won a race. There are pictures of whippet-skinny dogs all over the walls.
There's been kamikaze drinking.
'Is it just me...' I begin.
The chief grunts into his pint.
'Or is that clock running backwards? The one over the bog door.'
He considers it, lowering the glass.
'It fucking is,' says the chief. It's that stage of the night when he's started, as a result of several gallons of stout and three fat ones, to look slightly edgy. He's giving it the crazy eyes. 'It's backwards alright. Highly-localised, temporal anomaly. Probably caused by the stress-energy from the large gang of elderly men furtively smoking behind that door'
'What?' Lyra asks. She's just been singing and battering the shit out of a bodhran in the middle of a great heaving sea of dancing, porter-guzzling flesh. She sits down, a wine glass swishing about.
'The clock over the toilet runs backwards' says the chief, fingering his photo lens.
She looks over the door. 'Bugger. I thought we had another hour 'til last orders'.

We drink. We drink some more. I tell a joke which involves Ian Paisley's cunt. Or maybe he was the cunt. I can't remember. There's a brief discussion about the recent societal acceptance of the word 'cunt' and we ask ourselves if there are any taboos words left. Following on from that we discuss a proposal to create a fake news piece which tells the story of how an angry Irish blogger had won a prestigious award for 'most gratuitous use of the word cunt in a single blog entry'. I have no recollection of getting back to the house. I sleep next to a drum kit and a cat. During the night a bass guitar falls on me emitting a long, dull C-flat.

Come here often?

When the sun comes up, I'm out the back door: to look at the birds, sniff the air and watch the light pour over the top of the hill and on to the lake. It's going to be a scorching hot day. Three cows stand some twenty yards away, chewing contentedly. I walk over. One of them, a big white one, stops chewing and stares at me. The second one (a big fresian) stops chewing and looks. The third glances at me briefly and continues chewing.
'Morning folks' I say.
'Morning' says the white one. The fresian farts.
'Nice day' I say.
'Lovely' says the cow.
'Come here much?' I ask.
'Meh' says the cow lazily, 'not that often. Good in this weather though. Great grass'
'Yeah. It looks good'
'You?'
'No. Just here for the weekend. Back to London tonight'
'Ah, London. Playground of my youth'
'Oh yeah?'
'Yeah. I lived in Russell Square. Used to drink with Peter O'Toole. Nice chap.'
'Cool'
'Yep. That it was'.
We chat: the nearest dolmen, an Iron-age hoard buried in that lake, Wayne Rooney's metatarsal.
'So what has you out here so early?' the cow asks.
'Myeloma'
'Smouldering or thundering?'
'Thundering'
'Hmmm'. The cow nods. Eventually, I look at the sun coming over the top of the hill again. Closer now.
'Anyway, I better go. Gotta catch a train. Then a bus.'
'Yeah?'
'Then a taxi and a plane. Followed by a bus and a walk'
'Well, take it easy man'
'You too'
'Seeya'
'Seeya'

Image courtesy of Moo Amp