It's a busy Monday morning on Grand Parade and Oliver Plunkett Street. Small trucks and vans are parked or hovering with their goods like bees around a beehive: beeping, taking a chance, reversing; that urgent bleep-bleep-bleep to warn pedestrians. People say that Cork was busier in the 1960s. I doubt it. Traffic flow was just more chaotic. Now it seems to flow very well. Those traffic engineers have done a good job, writes Thomas McCarthy.
White vans do a kind of morning polka around the busy English Market. Walking through any city, there is nothing more beautiful than to float on the cacophony of small vans. They are the life-blood of a city, carrying goods and bringing service. Here in Cork, they carry rich Arbutus bread; cheeses from Ardsallagh, Gubeen, Keatings of Tipperary; and food from Waterford - chickens, Barron's bread and apple juice from Cappoquin, crisp lettuces from Dungarvan, lamb from Tallow, McGrath's jam from Mount Melleray, fish from Helvick and Dunmore East. Not to mention the overnight flowers from Holland, flowers disgorged from a huge articulated double-container lorry to be delivered in scurrying white Transit vans to the flower shops on Grand Parade and Winthrop Street, as well as to florists in far-flung Mahon Point and Bishopstown.
Vans and taxis - a city should keep such essential vitamins close to hand. Sure, pedestrians have rights, but van drivers have rights that were established with honour by cattle-drovers and carriers on the butter roads of Munster. To become a driver, a delivery truck driver especially, was one of the ambitions of my childhood. I was brought up in a factory town, Cappoquin in Co Waterford. Truck-drivers were the blue-collar elite. Their children owned tricycles before any other child; their wives were well-dressed and contented. There was a newly-painted, luxurious atmosphere around their terraced homes.
They delivered chickens for O'Connor's and hams and sausages for Cappoquin bacon factory. Men of substance, they connected townland with townland, bringing back sports gossip and sports intelligence to Cappoquin. They knew important men on the county board; two or three of them would become inter-county referees.
Within that elite there was an even greater elite: the long-distance men and those who manipulated the giant carriers of JCBs and earth-moving equipment; they were the real giants of society. There was one man who had driven a truck full of bridge-building equipment behind the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards from Normandy to the Rhine. He held court twice a year. In 1960 he had a "big job" with Pan-American, pulling loaded Constellations away from the terminal buildings at La Guardia. He was a god.
You cannot fill out a CAO form to become a truck-driver. More's the pity. It's a noble and very useful life. To insert oneself into the transport chain is to gain a living for a lifetime. While I wouldn't take a revolver to a son who wanted to be a poet, I'd insist he take D-licence instructions as well.
I learned to drive on a delivery van, a Morris Minor which carried 20 crates of milk for the Central Dairies in Dungarvan. I must have been 13. Shuddering to a start with 400 bottles of milk rattling in their wire cages is something I'll never forget. My teacher was the only working-class Protestant I've ever met. She drove her truck like Stirling Moss, especially when the bottles were empty. The rattle was outrageous and she loved it. We roared with laughter through the Waterford countryside. "Christ, man, put the boot down!" she'd say to me as we sped along. "You'll be a bacon factory long-distance man yet!"
Today I walk past the flower shop on Winthrop Street. Eventually I find my perch at the back of the Long Valley bar to wait for the usual beef salad. I fall into conversation with a taxi-driver who is studying computer printouts of second-hand vans.
"What do you think of that?" he asks. "Doesn't it look right handsome?" I look at the plain white Ford Transit, a trade mark which has become part of the language. Now the word Transit means almost any zippy small delivery van, whether Ford, Renault or Toyota.
"There are five million of them yokes zipping around, so I won't have trouble with parts. It has Durashift transmission, with the controls on the dashboard. What more could a man ask?"
He tells me that when he was a teenager in London in the late Sixties he drove an old Thames 400, a Zephyr-based van every bit as good as the heavy British Commer. He has sold his taxi licence. "There's no life in the taxi business anymore. It's a job for kids."
He and his son intend to buy three vans. His grandson, who dropped out of school in transition year, will drive the third van.
I watch him as he exits, a tall and handsome man in his late 60s. A van driver, and now the patriarch of a small transport company. What a lucky man. What a lucky grandson.
Mary Raftery is on leave