1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge

by Tony Hawks; Prefers to remain anonymous

  ‘Ah well, please yourself,’ he said eventually, and promptly spent double the amount by buying me a pint when I wasn’t looking.

  Brian and Joe’s delivery of wood never came. It was close to five o’clock when we said our goodbyes after a meal in a basement Chinese restaurant swathed in artificial light Brian and Joe dropped me at a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town and headed back for Ballyduff. It was all in a day’s work for your average hardwood-flooring boys.

  I took a shower and made the two-mile walk down to Ross Castle on the shores of Lough Leane. As I walked, the tourists rode by on their pony and traps. A pony and trap idea if there ever was one*.

  *Please check your cockney rhyming slang dictionaries.

  Killarney appeared to be the tourist capital of the west of Ireland, no doubt because it is the gateway to some of the most breathtaking scenery in the country.

  Ross Castle was the last stronghold under Irish control to be taken by Cromwellian forces in 1653.1 arrived there at 18.53, which was perfect timing since it closed at 18.00. The final tourist dregs were returning to their lodgings to clean themselves up for dinner, and I was left to enjoy the beauty of this spot in relative solitude. I struggled along the shore of the lough, climbing over rowing boats and through bushes until I had found the ideal location for enjoying the sunshine for the first time in the day. It was a totally secluded and magical spot, perfect for viewing the sun setting over the lough and the distant mountains, Macgillycuddy’s Reeks, which were reflected in the waters. Nature’s way of recognising that they were worth seeing twice.

  As I sat looking over the reflective waters with their stunning backdrop, I too became reflective. I began to wonder whether my ‘fridge journey’ could be considered an allegory for life. I decided that there was some persuasive evidence. Each day I was faced with a number of choices, some were easy and others were harder. The same was true of life.

  I had learned not to worry; to make my choice and allow things to happen. For the most part they turned out to be good, and when they weren’t—like the night from hell in a hostel—then they were character building. There weren’t any wrong or right paths to choose, just different ones, and where they led was governed by the attitude adopted towards them. It seemed to me that was true of life also.

  So what else? Well, I couldn’t manage alone. The nature of hitching, especially when encumbered by a kitchen appliance, is such that you are reliant on others. We may not expect it, but there may come a time in all of our lives when we have to hitch, either physically or figuratively. It doesn’t matter how important, wealthy or talented you are, if your car breaks down somewhere and you are forced to stick out your thumb and hitch, then your fallibility and the fact that you are no better than the next person will become abundantly clear to you. You need someone else’s kindness to take you to safety. What I was beginning to discover was that signing up to this Trust was as liberating as it was fun.

  Fun. That brought me to the final thrust of my lakeside dialectic—my purposeless journey was, like life itself, cyclical. My starting point, Dublin, represented the beginning of life, and throughout my journey, it was destined to be my eventual ‘resting place’. Since my fridge had cost more than the £100 bet itself, I had no valid economic motivation for the trip, and in terms of great human achievement it would go down in the annals of history alongside Timothy ‘Bud’ Budyana and his backwards marathon. Given this ‘purposelessness’, the only justification for my exploits was that I ensured they were fun. It was apt that the Irish themselves had invented the only word that really embraced the spirit of it all. The ‘craic’. Once the people in this country realised that what I was doing I was doing purely ‘for the craic’, they understood fully what I was about, and took me to their hearts. Here, dangling my feet in the waters of this splendid lough, I resolved to take the same approach to life itself. The fridge philosophy’ was taking shape. One thing was sure though. It would need another name before it went on general release.

  §

  I took it easy that night, leaving the fridge holed up in my room and keeping out of pubs. I walked around the busy Killarney streets in search of a suitable restaurant for an unkempt individual, dining alone. I considered treating myself to lobster in an expensive-looking fish restaurant, but the sight of the lobsters displayed in a tank, struggling around with their claws taped up, put me off the idea. On the menu in the window it said;

  YOU PICK YOUR OWN LOBSTERFROM OUR TANK.

  I didn’t like the sound of that either. This would change my status entirely from diner to God-like figure. Instead of ‘innocently’ ordering something off the menu, suddenly I was being asked to exercise an executive decision over which creature should actually die that night, in the interests of my palate.

  I dined in a quaint, homely little restaurant where no demands were made upon me to select any animals for slaughter, and I ate an Irish stew which reassuringly felt like someone’s Mum had cooked it I walked home debating whether I should continue hitching in the morning, even though it was a Sunday when there would be none of the commercial traffic which had been my bread and butter. By the time I reached the guest house I had decided that the following morning I would give it two hours by the roadside and if that brought no reward then I would abort and return to the lakeside for more amateur philosophy.

  I sat on my bed and surveyed the map. I felt immensely proud when I saw what ground I had covered. I had broken the back of the journey. My next goal was to get out to Cape Clear Island, and once that had been achieved I was surely in the home straight. I gave myself the mental equivalent of a pat on the back. Then I realised. Bad news. Today was May 24th!

  Bugger. I had missed ‘SHEEP ‘97’.

  §

  We all make mistakes. All are forgivable in the end. But after five hours standing by the side of a deserted road in the wilds of West Cork, I was finding it very difficult indeed to grant myself absolution just yet.

  It had been going so well. At breakfast in theuuesthouse I had made the acquaintance of two Australian tourists, Chris and Jan, and talked them into making their journey to Cork with an Englishman and a fridge for company.

  It hadn’t been easy at first, since Chris and Jan hadn’t been in the best of moods, as our opening exchange had proved.

  ‘Good morning,’ said I. ‘Beautiful day isn’t it?’ And it most certainly was. The good weather seemed to have broken out and looked set to stay.

  ‘About time,’ countered Jan. ‘We’ve had nine days of rain in Scotland.’

  Chris and Jan were doing Europe. Much of it was leaving them unimpressed. They weren’t easy to please. An interesting yardstick was Chris’s opinion on Venice.

  ‘Venice? That’s over-rated isn’t it? We thought it was just a grotty old place with a load of water running through it.’

  I seemed to remember it having one or two other redeeming features.

  Once again, it was the fridge to the rescue. Mention of it, and its role in my travels lightened their mood considerably and resulted in smiles and the offer of the lift which I had been angling for all the time. I even persuaded them to go to Cork via a place called Skibbereen which meant I could alight there and continue hitching down to Baltimore where the ferry left for Cape Clear Island.

  We set off, and I was entrusted with the map reading, Chris and Jan maintaining that they ‘didn’t have a clue’ in that department It was a measure of the beautiful views of Killaraey’s lakeland scenery that my Australian friends enthused about them and even stopped the car to shoot video footage. One bonus of travelling through this region with tourists was that I got to stop and see the panoramic views and places of interest Bantiy House, a magnificent statety home with spectacular views overlooking the bay, received meagre praise from Chris.

  ‘The toilets are free, and that’s aa improvement on a lot of the places we’ve been.’

  We didn’t go inside the house, because the £5.50 entrance fee was deemed to be too expens
ive.

  ‘We saw a load of these old places in Vienna,’ said Jan, ‘and there’s onfy so much old furniture you can look at.’

  Fair enough. I wasn’t really bothered about going in either. The architecture, grounds and its overall setting were of more interest to me than the roped-off rooms and endless portraits of ancestors. Unlike Chris, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the toilet arrangements. Free they may have been, but one cubicle serving both sexes meant standing in an extended queue when one could have been exploring the Italianate gardens. In a rejection of my British heritage, I shunned the queuing option and slipped between two hedges into a secluded area where I disgracefully gave the plants a generous watering. I then heard a voice and saw a woman leaning out of a top window in what were obviously the private living quarters of Bantry House.

  ‘Do you mind?’ said an aristocratic English voice. ‘That is our private garden!’

  ‘Sorry,’ I whimpered, like a naughty child who was secretly feeling rather pleased with himself.

  ‘Honestly!’ said the woman, and slammed the window closed.

  The ‘honestly’ had a ring about it which suggested that this incident was the last straw and that she would storm down to her husband and say, ‘Right, that’s it! No more tourists! I simply cannot abide these awful people coming on to our land one moment more.’

  I walked back to the car with mixed feelings. I was glad I had urinated where I had, but was disappointed that all I’d managed by way of a riposte when challenged, was a feeble apology. Where was the feisty ‘If you don’t like it, get yourself more lavs, you posh old cow!? Childish, yes, and possibly unjustified but I was feeling some degree of anger that the British still lived in some of these magnificent and ancestral homes. Change obviously doesn’t come about overnight.

  When I told Chris and Jan the toilet story, they warmed to me enormously. I was almost an honorary Australian now, having metaphorically at least, pissed all over the British. We began discussing life in Australia and paid little attention to the road signs and our general route. When I saw a sign saying that Skibbereen was sixteen miles in the direction we had just come from, I began to become suspicious that all wasn’t right here. We pulled over, collectively studied the map and concluded that somehow we had overshot Skibbereen. It wasn’t clever of me to have secured a lift to go exactly where I wanted it to and then to have allowed it to go sixteen miles too far. It was too much to expect Chris and Jan to double back on themselves, and I was left by the roadside to face the consequences of my mistake.

  And boy, did I pay the price. Dunmanway on a Sunday afternoon. A ghost town where the phantoms had moved out because it was too quiet Not a soul to be seen and one vehicle about every ten minutes on one of the bleakest stretches of road I had ever laid a fridge on.

  Five miserable hours in Dunmanway. It was so, so boring. No one was going anywhere. Fast. I searched for the good things about my predicament. The sun was out, and that was it. To try and liven things up I played games with myself, awarding myself points if I correctly guessed the colour of the next car, but the fact that I was alone made it difficult to introduce any real competitive edge. I even tried to write a parody of the Frank Sinatra hit ‘My Way’, in tribute to this particular leg of my journey. From time to time I sang its last few lines at the top of my voice, to prove to myself that I was still alive.

  I’ve hitched around this land,

  Me and my fridge, in a crazy plan way

  But more, much more than this

  I did it Dunmanway.

  Okay, I admit I didn’t spend all of the five hours by that barren track of road. At one point I walked into the assortment of buildings which masqueraded as a town and found a bar where I drank two pints of Murphys. I then walked into the main square and fell asleep on a bench. Boy, I knew how to live life. When I awoke, a confounded woman was nervously surveying me and my baggage, and when I smiled and hauled myself and my fridge to the roadside and began hitching, she rushed into the church behind her. If nothing else, this ghastly experience I was having had brought someone closer to God.

  She must have said a prayer for me, that lady, because a mere two and a half hours later a young lad called Kieran pulled up and drove me ten minutes up the road to Drimoleague. Drimoleague was much like Dunmanway, only less frenetic.

  An hour and a half after that I finally arrived in Baltimore thanks to Barry and Moira, a lovely couple from Bandon who supplied the last leg in this marathon journey. Passing through the town of Skibbereen was particularly galling, since it was taking place almost seven hours later than it would have done had I not been such an arse with the map earlier in the day.

  In Baltimore, an enchanting little fishing port, I checked into a guesthouse with views over the pretty harbour and sat down outside the pub next door with Barry and Moira. I bought them both a drink by way of thanking them for driving well out of their way to bring me here. As the sun set, and the beer hit its mark, the horrors of the day evaporated and my placid mood returned. When Barry and Moira left, I fell in with an English crowd from the Tunbridge Wells diving club. For a while I was confused as to what sort of diving they could do since I had always believed that Tunbridge Wells, like Switzerland, was landlocked. Anyway, once this lot had heard of my adventures, they declared that they had airbags and an underwater camera and would dearly love to take the fridge scuba diving. I thanked them, but declined the offer. Maybe I needed to slow up a little now. And Cape Clear Island seemed just the place to do it.

  20

  In Search Of A Haven

  When the ferry docked at the jetty which the locals laughingly called the harbour I seemed to be the only passenger who was seeking accommodation for an overnight stop. Cape Clear Island was going to be my retreat from the mayhem of the last two and a half weeks. It had all the qualifications for the job, being a kind of Tory Island of the south, with trees instead of a King, and a more hospitable climate. Today it was swathed in warm sunshine. As we had arranged after my phonecall from the mainland, I was met by Eleanor, one of the few islanders who rented out rooms, and whose car even nudged ahead of the one belonging to Toothless Ian and the Travellers for decrepit dilapidation. She made no comment as I lifted the fridge on to her back seat, and the car struggled up and down the island’s single-track roads until we reached her house at the top of a hill.

  I intended to remain here for three or four days, to dry out, rest up and generally prepare myself for the final week soldiering on towards Dublin. However at four o’clock, the ferry took all the day trippers back to the mainland and the island completely emptied of all its walkers, sightseers and birdwatchers. I felt isolated and alone. In a moment, the plan to stay three or four days turned into one night at Eleanor’s.

  I was back in one of those areas where they don’t pry. Throughout my brief stay in the house of Eleanor and her family, the fridge sat in the hallway, but not a single remark was made about it It must have been a talking point, a fridge sitting in their hallway absolutely covered in signatures and good will messages, but there was only one brief exchange on the subject. That night I ate with Eleanor, her family and the two lodgers. As we tucked into our apple crumble, Eleanor’s husband Crohuir leant towards me surreptitiously.

  ‘Is that your fridge in the hall?’ he asked timidly.

  ‘It is.’

  He took a moment to gather himself for his next assault. ‘It’s very small, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Subject closed.

  After dinner, I walked back to the harbour, described to me by one islander, without irony, as the hub of the island. On the way I passed a tennis court which had been built in the most dramatic of locations, almost on a cliff edge, overlooking the Atlantic. That would be some place to play, I thought.

  When I arrived at the ‘hub’, someone must have dismantled the neon lights and advertising hoardings and sent the hordes of partying jetsetters home, because all was quiet. There were two pubs and absolutely nothing else.
Both of them were empty. I took a drink in one and was eventually joined by an Englishman who told me that he brought his family to the island every year for the walks and the birdwatching. Tonight he’d left them indoors so that he could taste some of the crazy nightiife alone.

  ‘Have you played tennis on that tennis court?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, don’t talk to me about tennis,’ he complained, ‘my kids have been dying to have a game ever since we got here, but they can’t’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There aren’t any tennis balls on the island.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I’m not. Not one. The shop’s run out and the guy who was supposed to bring some out from the mainland forgot’

  Island life encapsulated.

  On the walk home the sky was clearer than any sky I had ever seen before. The stars twinkled like teeth in a glitzy TV toothpaste ad, and the Fastnet lighthouse lit up the island every six seconds almost as if it was strobe lighting slowed down to match the pace of life here. On reaching Eleanor’s, I looked out to the horizon and conceded to myself that this was a unique place indeed. It wasn’t for me though, and I would be leaving on the nine o’clock boat in the morning. For some, this isolated tranquillity would be a boon but I had learned that although I enjoyed peace and quiet, I liked to have access to an alternative. Call me whacky, but I needed to be someplace where you could get tennis balls when you wanted them.

  §

  Unexpectedly, I travelled to Cork by taxi. I met an English couple who had been on the island to attend the first protestant wedding there for over one hundred years. They had viewed me with some amusement as I had lifted my fridge on to the ferry, and after some initial English reticence they informed me that they had booked a taxi to take them and their elderly aunt to Cork airport, and if I wanted to squeeze in I was more than welcome. It was a tight fit and the taxi driver was a mite unsure of what to make of a man who had taken a fridge to a wedding. He said nothing, partly because his hands were more than full with the slightly eccentric aunt who kept him busy chatting in the front.