1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge Read Online Free PDF

if it hadn’t been for the rucksack. Initiation ceremony out of the way we headed off. Shane had exceeded his initial brief by organising bed and breakfast accommodation for me in an area south of the River Liffey called Donnybrook. He started to relax and we chatted more freely. He revealed himself to be quite amused by my prospective expedition and suggested that I get in touch with a radio show on RTE FM 2 called The Gerry Ryan Show . He said that they liked to get behind wacky ventures and mine fitted the bill perfectly. I hadn’t thought of doing anything like that but as we progressed slowly through the gridlocked centre of Dublin the idea grew on me.
    We reached Donnybrook and I paid Shane the £130 I owed him for the fridge.
    ‘By the way, how much is the bet for?’ he asked.
    ‘A hundred pounds,’ I replied.
    He was confused for a moment, then he rather hurriedly wished me good luck and drove off with a look on his face which suggested that he was relieved that I wasn’t in his car anymore.
    §
    I was greeted at the B&B by Rory, a young man who looked as if he’d just graduated and was some way from being the middle-aged maternal lady called Rosie who I imagined ran all these kinds of establishments. He had very thick lenses in his glasses and I found the resulting enlargement of his eyes a little disconcerting. He declared that he had no problems on the vacancy front given that he had no other guests staying. Initially he didn’t comment as I wheeled the fridge into his hall, but he surveyed it in such a way as to suggest that he wasn’t confident that his thick lenses were thick enough. A few seconds passed and he capitulated.
    ‘Is that a fridge?’ he said.
    This was an enquiry I was to hear a good deal more in the weeks to come.
    ‘Yes,’ 1 replied accurately.
    He didn’t pursue this line of questioning and I offered nothing further although I could tell that he was curious. I had made a decision before leaving that I would try not to volunteer information about this fridge unless it was asked of me and then I would tell the truth. I was interested to see how many people wouldn’t ask, either through politeness or a general lack of interest. Rory fell into the former category.
    Shortly after I’d settled into my room and was embarking on some gentle unpacking there was a knock on the door. It was Rory asking me if I would do him a favour. I carelessly said ‘no problem’ in a manner of which Shane would have been proud. Rory said that he was popping out for a while and would I mind answering the phone if it went, and once again I obliged with another ‘no problem’. Forty minutes and three bookings later, I decided that the best course of action was to go out myself.
    I was feeling pretty jaded, with recent sleepless nights and the trauma of the flight taking their toll, but I had two things I wanted to do before I turned in for the night. Firstly, since Shane had pointed out that the RTE studios were fortuitously only five minutes walk away, I saw no harm in dropping a note into The Gerry Ryan Show giving them details of the journey I was about to embark on and leaving the phone number of Rory’s B&B if they wanted to speak to me in the morning. Also I wanted to take a photograph.
    On a previous visit to Dublin I’d gone to a nightclub in a basement in Leeson Street called Buck Whaley’s. It was an evening of no significance other than for an estate agent’s sign which had caught my eye. Two doors down from Buck Whaleys another basement club had closed down but the dormant neon light letters spelling out the word ‘DISCOTHEQUE’ remained. Outside an estate agent had placed a board saying:
TO LET
    COMMERCIAL PROPERTY
    SUIT DISCO
    I was impressed. After all that’s what you pay your money for. Without the particular expertise of that estate agent and for his aptly chosen words ‘surr DISCO’, heaven knows what doomed commercial venture an entrepreneur might have considered for that