Teenage music and smells like boom spirit

FIFTY SOMETHING:I think it was a ram. If it wasn't a ram, it was a curiously independent-minded sheep. He was framed by the cottage door when we arrived in the dark. Illuminated by the sweep of our headlights, he stood stock still against the blood-red portal, looking like a talisman. He watched us while we opened up the car to the gale; saw nothing much worth staying around for, just another jaded, car-stiff family, the stench of a dull row wafting from their rumpled shirts. He skipped away in his black stockings, delicately sidestepping the stray pieces of turf the howling wind had lifted from the stack by the door.

We were late and tired, and the bog road had stretched long and black before us, longer and blacker than we had remembered. Already the New Year felt weary and bedraggled. But we were in the west, where the moon is white and night is dense and the mist is as thick as custard. And the silence. The silence was like a hymn. Manna, as the man said. You could bathe in that silence, could feed on it, launch a ship on it.

It had been a cacophonous journey, late getting on the road; the rear-view mirror had snapped off in my hand, the clutch was having a spat with the lower gears; the interior smelt like something had died in there. The vehicle was feeling its age, an old horse baulking at another canter down the motorway. All the way along the rolling road that unravels like a runway from Dublin to Galway, the engine’s moan had been drowned out by CDs vying for domination.

By exit seven I had given up fighting for Joni Mitchell and all the old hippy-chick crooners I drag around with me from decade to decade and town to town, and had succumbed to a bevy of more recent transatlantic exports. By the time we chugged past the Ballinasloe turn-off, I was up to my back teeth in hos and homies and was threatening to throw the shagging CD out the window the next time some dude rapped lyrical about the endless possibilities he imagined for his already overworked member.

I think parental advisory stickers are actually warnings to listeners over a certain age that the contents of the album are going to confuse and enrage them and make them seriously consider moving to a bungalow, taking up macramé and having Vivaldi piped through the house, rather than an indication that one might have the slightest influence over one’s offspring’s musical predilections.

I like the west of Ireland, but I need time to adjust to the panoply of the region. Not the scenery, you understand – there is no fine tuning needed to revere a fjord or gasp at knotted trees growing from the eye of a lake. I’m talking about the visiting city folk (of which I’m one), sporting stiff wax jackets (which I wasn’t), who litter the countryside like dwarf heathers. Man, the towns were rocking with four-wheel drivers who must have been hiding under the duck-down duvet when the recession was scalp-hunting and have re-emerged, brisker than ever, in their microlite thermals and tweedy caps, to stride across the pedestrian crossings and watch their wives riffle through rails of silky cigar pants in the town’s sumptuous general outfitters.

The next day I was eavesdropping in a pretty bar. It was difficult not to; the speaker had the confidence of a man used to being listened to. “How many are we having for duck?” he asked his tersely elegant wife, between mouthfuls of stuffed Galway Bay mussels and calls to the barman for another brace of Pinot Grigio.

Of course, there has always been a well-waterproofed cohort that never feels the sting of the rain, and I’m probably imagining this, but somewhere among the gorse and bog water, I thought I caught a faint whiff of something that smells like boom spirit. Maybe that talismanic ram we encountered on our first night had read the Dublin reg and was checking out our potential for contributing to the region’s economy. (I’m pretty sure he skipped off back to his mates in the ram office to report that we weren’t worth much more than the balding tyres we arrived on.)

If the times really are a-changing, then fantastic, bring it on. If the recession is finally lifting, like a slowly fading mountain mist, then I suppose there’s a chance that more of us might finally see the view. And, who knows, maybe next year we’ll all get to splash in the puddles in our Burberry wellingtons.