The one about the jellyfish, and doing things backwards

All this talk of the Banshees of Inisherin is making me a) want to see it (I’m a huge Brendan Gleeson fan; if you haven’t seen The Guard, you should) and b) want to go back to Ireland. I’m a bit closed in these days, sort of shut off, as I’m trying hard to write and have ended up doing it in reverse, which is super-frustrating, but I was walking WH and a young man came up to us and said, ‘Can I pet yar’dag?’ Standard WH fare, and they were getting along, ‘grand’, and I said to Mr I he’s from County Clare. He was as it turned out. Apologies to anyone from Clare for that approximation. Mr I & I continued on our way, discussing how so many Irish people, of all the nations we know, have a presence larger than their physical body, even when they aren’t saying much of anything at all.

In what seems like a century ago, and is now, horrifyingly nearly 30 years, an ex boyfriend (the design genius) and I took a few holidays to Southern Ireland. I’ve worked in Dublin since and that’s another story, but in the mid 90s, Ireland still had a sense of another world, and the otherworldly. Looking back, we were children, off the boat.

We had a tent but for the first night, just outside Dublin, I’d written a letter, yes, a letter, to book a B&B from a guidebook and herself had replied. When we pulled up the lady closed the door on us and drew all her curtains, as if an unmarried couple was Beelzebub himself trying to cross her threshold with a harem in tow. ‘Welcome to Ireland,’ I muttered, as we went off to find somewhere to camp. I think we slept in the car that night. The rest of Ireland, from coast to coast, was remorselessly welcoming. We camped on a stud farm, near a castle, on a beach, accidentally next to a prison in the dark, and tbh, we stopped anywhere that looked as if it served food.

Over the course of a few years, we knew these places. That first year, I said, I’d love to see Tipperary. I was a teenager. In a car. Map-reading. I got out, and there was nothing, apart from the carcass of a burnt out Volvo, and a little house with a peat roof and a thread of smoke rising what I imagine was a peat fire. The most remarkable thing was the sound of water running, everywhere, yet no visible streams. As if the water were moving through the land itself.

Limerick, too, was a source of endless fascination. Barefoot children everywhere riding ponies along main roads, grazing them on roundabouts. It wasn’t unusual to find a pony tied up at a petrol station, while the jockey was inside getting sweets and a can. It always made me think of Kes, but with horses.

There is a hard copy, in the ether somewhere, a photo of me sea swimming, with dead jellyfish in Galway Bay. The dead jellyfish were not there when we arrived as the tide came in, but in the water there were suddenly dozens of them. The size of dinner plates, trailing their horrible tentacles. All dead. I emerged, screaming, onto the beach (hence the photo, very funny, haha not), but they were so dead I was barely stung. As the tide began to recede, they were washed up, probably about 100 in the end. That was a great day….

Twenty years later I was working in Dublin, and the changes brought by the euro were immeasurable. The people however, remained unchanged, such as Patrick, from Cork, whose son Alan the Electrician serves as his father’s interpreter. William from Trinity. The Poor Clares of Ballsbridge, who only use the telephone when absolutely necessary and usually with some urgency, but you would never know from the cheery announcement upon answering of, ‘Well, hello, it’s Mother Mary Bridget here, we have a little problem now’.

Ireland is a place of great memories for me, and friends, but I'll end on the best piece of advice I was given in Ireland. We were going to do the Ring of Kerry, and stopped at a village shop to buy something. It had a noisy early twentieth century register where the little tiles still popped up in punts, and an aggressive cash drawer like Open All Hours. I started chatting to the lady, but I couldn’t understand much of what she was saying, but I told her were were going to walk the Ring of Kerry and she started explaining something to me in great detail - no idea - I stopped her and asked her to start again. ‘You have to do it backwards,’ she said, as if speaking to someone very stupid. By this time I’d been caught out so often having my leg pulled in Ireland, I hesitated. ‘Walk it backwards?’ ‘Yes, backwards.’ Nope, I was convinced she was having me on. A pensive silence ensued. ‘Backwards?’ I was pretty sure it was going to take more than a week. Suddenly she broke into gales of laughter. Almost to the point of tears. You could see she thought I was borderline not fit to be out alone. ‘Not backwards!’ More laughter. ‘I meant, you shouldn’t walk it the way they tell y’to. Everything you want to see is behind you. Start at the end and walk it backwards. That way, all the views are in front of you, th’way round, y’see?’ Again, apologies for my attempt to replicate a Kerry accent.

That lady was still laughing as I left the shop. We drove for half a day so that we could start the Ring of Kerry in reverse, and of course she was right. Sometimes the best way really is to do something backwards.