McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland Read Online Free PDF Page A

my Geordie friend hasn’t heard of it.
    I head north up some lanes with grass growing up the middle of them, always a sure sign that you’re going the wrong way, whatever it is you’re trying to find. I soon reach a crossroads. A woman of about sixty is standing next to her near-mint-condition Austin 1100, which she has parked inconspicuously in the middle of the road. She smiles and walks across as I pull up and get out of the car.
    Now, if you’re going to go travelling in Ireland, it’s important you know the correct way to ask somebody for directions. What you don’t do is abruptly say, ‘Excuse me! Could you tell me the way to…?’ This is an English technique, the subtext of which is: ‘I’m interrupting you here in a fairly clumsy way in order to elicit a necessary fact, but otherwise this transaction is of no value and will give no pleasure. Go on, tell me then.’
    The preferred approach in Ireland is to turn the encounter into a social occasion, on a par with what goes on when two strangers meet and get chatting at a party or wedding reception. A tangential preamble is essential; something along the lines of, ‘Ah, that’s a great hedge you’re trimming’, or ‘Sure, it’s a glorious day’, especially if it isn’t. Large quantities of personal information will then be exchanged, in the course of which the directions you are seeking may or may not emerge. Some of the best conversations you will have in Ireland may happen in this way.
    I was once travelling in County Clare with a wonderful man called John Moriarty, a Christian mystic who is, by the way, convinced that I do carry the genetic memories of my Irish ancestors, and am therefore genuinely at home here. We were on the edge of the wilderness known as the Burren, looking for one of the ancient holy wells of Ireland, St Colman’s Well. We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up to be a top travel experience.
    On the road ahead of us, a man was walking. No buildings were visible for miles in any direction, so it was difficult to understand where he might be walking from or to. He must have been seventy, and was dressed in a farm labourer’s tweed jacket, shiny with ordure and held around his waist with a length of string. He wore an old flat cap that may once have been shot at by Captain A. E. Percival, and the look of a man who had never been pampered. ‘Ah, look,’ said John. ‘A bachelor.’
    We pulled over and John walked across to him—none of this wind-your-window-down-and-bark-an-enquiry nonsense. They then embarked on a wide-ranging discussion that took in meteorology, natural history, anatomy, theology and chiropody, before John deftly slipped in the crucial question, for all the world as if it were an afterthought.
    ‘We’re looking for St Colman’s Well.’
    ‘Ah, yes. Ah, yes.’
    ‘Do you know it then?’
    ‘Sure, I do. I do.’
    ‘Could you tell us how to find it so?’
    Pause. ‘What country’s it in?’
    So as the woman approaches the repmobile, I’m aware of the social etiquette. But will I be able to pull it off? She opens brilliantly.
    ‘I’m just waiting for my daughter.’
    Of course. So that’s why she’s parked in the middle of a crossroads. She has a look that is at once both blank and intense, as if perhaps she’s spent too many years as a priest’s housekeeper. But I don’t let it get to me, and come back with details of my own family. We then banter about crops and such like for a while, until I sense that the moment is right. And then—ping! I’m in.
    ‘I was wondering if you might be able to give me some directions.’
    ‘Ah. Well, I’m afraid, you see, that I don’t live around here.’
    ‘Oh, I see. Where do you live, then?’
    ‘Over there.’
    She points to a white farmhouse across some fields, on a hillside about a mile away.
    ‘Oh. Right. Well, anyway…’
    I produce the scholarly tome and show her a sketch of the