We rented out Groundhog Day during the week, laughing at how hilarious it all seemed. That was before the rain, which, when it comes down here, covers Manorhamilton's signature mountain, Ben Bo, and metaphorically blocks the entrances and exits to the town. You get to looking at everything through a small lens, about the size of one of those disposable cameras, and every day when you stare through it, the picture seems the same.
Lower Main Street, or "our end of the street" is home to a few of the town's businesses, where commerce plods on, irrespective of, though not immune to, the weather. There's a solicitor's office two doors up, and across the street there's Philomena's pub, the Bank Of Ireland, Agnes's shop and of course Keenan's Butchers. I say "of course" because that's how we tell people where we are. "It's the yellow and blue house opposite the butchers," we say to friends. In city or a town, you become familiar with the habits and routines going on around you. Whether it's the incessant clicking of all those feet heading for the bus or DART, or the sound of vans delivering early morning newspapers. The difference here is that you hear the sounds, but you feel more connected to them, because you know the people. The fact that they are up and about their business is a challenge to your own laziness, especially when you've nobody to answer to but yourself.
The exterior of the butcher's shop looks like an Edward Hopper painting, with its striped canopy, terse drama and that blue neon hue. Seamus, the owner, has a routine where in bad weather he makes a jump young Brian O'Driscoll would be proud of, and hits the canopy a belt with a stick. The rainwater which is lodged there comes down in a torrent, showering the pavement on either side. If I leave the windows of our bedroom open, we can hear the strange sounds of a slicing machine cutting through bone. I never thought I'd be so intimately connected to minced meat.
Joe, who works with Seamus, is his partner in irony: you get the feeling they know just about everything that goes on, as they gaze through the window, peering over the neat writing which declares "Fresh Fish", like some sort of consumer challenge. The little old lady was ahead of me in the queue the other day, when everybody's sense of the surreal got a run for its money. "Joe, would you have a tongue and a heart?" she asked, in a tiny little voice. "I have a tongue alright ma'am, I don't know about the heart," said Joe, grinning at me over the top of her head.
Maybe it's cabin fever, but I could feel a strange hysteria overtaking me which I just about managed to control while watching Seamus rooting around in the freezer. There is something about seeing two vital organs plonked on a counter top which makes you connect with your own mortality. It took three days before I could go back, making sure that there were no customers around to snigger at my naivete. "Remember the woman who wanted the tongue and the heart?" I asked. "She wasn't going to eat them, was she?" The question hung in the air, and you would want to have been blind, not to see the opportunity which was opening up.
"Would it have been for the dog I wonder," said Joe to his partner in crime. "I don't know," said Seamus. "I'm partial to a bit of pickled tongue myself." I was just over the threshold on the way out when I heard Joe's whispered question: "Why? Are you going to write about it?" Now, I know enough about American anthropologists in the Aran Islands, who've been taken for folklore rides, so I was covering all bases. Nothing for it but to consult Mary over a few of her creamy pints. "Would people actually eat that?" I asked, putting my fate in her hands. "A bit of tongue is nice," she said. "I don't know about the heart though."
We were mulling over that when in walked Conor, a Dublin print-maker who relocated here with his partner Natashia and has lived here for the past four years. "How are you finding it?" he nudged myself and Tony. "Ever see the movie Groundhog Day?" he said, with a conspiratorial look. It was weird to feel like someone was reading your thoughts, and freaked us out enough to call it a night. All I can say is that winter is settling in, and our resolve with it. If it's not Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, then why does it feel so much like home?
