Continuing the diaries from Ballina in the late 1960s
Ballina, Wednesday, October 1st, 1966. My considerably tidier appearance in the library, the result of my recent shopping trip, has impressed Miss Cartwright to the extent that I find myself blushing.
It is extremely difficult to know what to say when one's middle-aged female employer fingers the lapel of one's jacket three times in a hour while also caressing one's tie and uttering only the sound "mmmmm".
Were I to circulate in a more sophisticated milieu even for a short while, perhaps in London or even Paris, I should doubtless learn to handle such situations more adroitly, and deflect such unwanted attentions in a polite but firm manner.
As it is, I feel gauche, clumsy, inept and embarrassed. To think that I am 17 years old, in the year of our Lord 1966, and have not yet travelled beyond these benighted shores! Ardnaree, Ballina, Mayo, the Catholic religion and the Irish so-called nation: you have much to answer for.
Thursday, October 2nd: Having spend many Saturday mornings over the summers in this towns open-air swimming-pool at Bunree, enjoying what I thought was a healthy dip, I now learn from the Western People that the pool has been polluted for an indeterminate period by effluent from the septic tanks of our grandest local hotel.
In other words, I have been swimming in the urine and ordure of wealthy hotel residents for God knows how many years. Who knows what effect this has had on my insides? I learnt to swim there in my early teenage years and probably swallowed the equivalent of the entire pool over that period.
Human waste from Dublin sales representatives, drunken wedding parties, the humblest hotel employees, Golden Sunset pensioners, and from cheating couples on dirty weekends, has probably all passed through my system.
My only hope is that the amount of Guinness I have been drinking in the past two years has helped to counteract the effects of the effluent.
Saturday, October 4th, midnight, Ardnaree, Ballina: I am absolutely shattered, but peculiarly serene, after last nights extended drinking session with P.J. in Paddy Jordan's. I have that purified feeling that often arrives when a hangover lifts.
It is briefly as if the waves of alcohol have washed away the unpleasant aspects of day-to-day existence and cleansed the brain of all mental debris. Those who warn of the dangers of drink conveniently forget to point out this advantage.
Of course the cleansing effect does not last very long before the rubbish begins to pile up again.
Anyway, as a result of the somewhat garbled diary entries I made recently, I must fill in some gaps.
On the night before Jimmy and Seβn∅n's party in Galway, P.J. and I planned to travel down from Ballina by train. We had a couple of pints in McGrath's after work, and when the train was delayed, we slipped over to Jordan's for a couple more.
As usual, Walter, who has now been the temporary station porter for 11 years, was on duty (he is never off duty, to the best of my knowledge) and he said he would alert us when the train was ready to go.
Instead of that, he appeared on a bar stool beside us five minutes later and announced he "m-m-m-ight have t-t-time for a q-q-q-uick one". For the next 20 minutes he talked to us about H-h-heiddeger" and "W-w-wittgenstein" while casually disposing of three pints of Guinness.
The next thing was, we heard the train whistle shriek and had to race out of Jordan's across the road, narrowly avoiding being run down by P.J.'s father, Rehins NS headmaster Paddy Glavin, in his new Wolseley. We barely made it on to the train before it pulled out.
The worst thing was that we had to leave behind us two newly pulled pints of Guinness and, with Walter in no hurry back to his nebulous duties, we knew (with mixed feelings) they would not go to waste. Was this planned, we wonder suspiciously?
Walter is a great Guinness enthusiast and he is inscrutable at the best of times.
It was half an hour before we got our breath back on the train. "Well," said P.J., breaking the silence, "Walter is more porter now than he was before."
And I thought it was Walter who was supposed to be the philosophical party.
(to be continued).
bglacken@irish-times.ie