I was getting petrol in a filling station just outside Cork on my way home to Leitrim. It was early so I decided to risk a small breakfast, even though the sausages looked like they had been cooked the previous night. And the black pudding crumbled like cement in my mouth.
Nonetheless I believe that if you wash down any risky food with a few mugs of tea, everything will eventually settle in the stomach. So I finished off two fried eggs, a hash brown with a black pudding and sausage and hoped for the best. I said to the lady behind the counter that I would take toast if she could do it quickly, as I had a long journey ahead.
“I have only two hands,” she said as she swept up chips for another customer and roared at a lanky boy to get me the toast.
“I’ve only two hands,” is a phrase my mother used to mutter several times a day as she wrestled with dirty dishes in the kitchen. I would wonder why she pointed this out so often. After all, I knew she had only two hands. It was clear from the time I began to count that she had only two hands and that in fact she had two of many things: two eyes, two legs, two nostrils and two ears. It must be a rule of the universe, I concluded, that so many things were paired. When I went out into the garden, I noticed that the bees had two wings.
I decided to risk a petrol station breakfast on the way home from Cork. It was a bad move
My worries and anxieties dissolve when I hear the notes rise from a flute or a fiddle
An Irish man told stunned Ukrainian refugees: ‘We had wars here but we didn’t leave our country’
I tried giving up my phone. It was a disaster
I stopped in Portlaoise at another roadside restaurant to meet Laura, a friend who lives in Portarlington. It was midmorning and she asked me if I wanted to share a breakfast. But I could feel the little black pudding from Cork rolling around in my stomach so I said I’d just have a Coke.
That has been my go-to for stomach ailments ever since I worked as a night porter in a Cavan hospital when I was a teenager. The nurses always gave Coke to children with gastric pain during the night. Maybe it was just the soothing voice of the nurse that made the children’s’ little tummies better but it always worked.
Laura devoured her full Irish breakfast, including a juicy black pudding that I admired from a distance.
“Did I tell you about Fernando Banana?” she asked.
“Go on,” I said, listening to her as if she were a character in a García Márquez novel.
“So I was away for a weekend in Dublin,” she began, “when I got a text from my son Tom, saying there was a bird in the house. I texted back saying to make her a cup of tea and assure her you’ll order a taxi when she’s leaving.”
Her son texted back an image of a yellow canary perched on top of a framed print in his bedroom. It probably escaped from a neighbour’s house.
“So Tom went out and bought canary food,” Laura continued. “And he went around to neighbours’ houses inquiring if anyone had lost a canary but with no luck.”
So they kept the bird. Laura wanted to call him Banana because of the colour but Tom, who has a Spanish girlfriend, wanted to call him Fernando. And Tom’s father wanted to call him Spock because they had a cat called Spock who died last year. Initially I didn’t see the connection between the canary and the cat.
“My husband thought maybe the canary was a reincarnation of the cat,” she explained. “Don’t you believe in karma?
“Not really,” I confessed.
I’ve never quite understood what karma means; apart from some vague notion that all my actions have consequences and that the consequences follow me like a shadow, and particularly from one lifetime to the next.
But even before leaving Portlaoise a sharp lesson about karma was dawning on me. The black pudding had not gone away, and I was forced to stop again; this time at a lay-by near Athlone. I spent 10 minutes bent over the bonnet of my Toyota and wretched until the little morsel of pudding sprang from my gullet like a lark from it’s boggy nest.
Afterwards I felt cheerful enough to pull into a nearby station, freshen up in the bathroom and fill a takeaway coffee at the machine. I even dared a glance at the breakfasts still on display as I passed the deli and another lanky boy asked if I wanted anything. But I politely said no.