Munster Mash!
18 July 2010 | Glengarriff
Jo/Rain
I was wild to go to the Munster Fleadh! Despite its slightly scary name (pronounce 'Flahr'), it is an Irish regional contest of music, song and dance, with lots of spillover 'craic' into the small town that hosts it - in this case, Kenmare. If you're Welsh, it's an Eisteddfod with more hwyl and more beer, and if you're English or Dutch - well, I guess there's no equivalent. I really wanted to go.
Charlie was an absolute champion about supporting my wish to go. This despite the fact that my main interest was finding some ceili or set dancing to take part in, and he would sooner stab both his eyes out with a rusty nail than take part in organised dancing. We couldn't sail to Kenmare in time, but Glengarriff is directly on the other side of the slender peninsula, and there's a bus that crosses the Caha mountains from one to the other once each day - but only in July and August.
So off we set on Saturday morning, motored over on the little inflatable dinghy, tied it up on the small stone quay and left the lifejackets chained to the engine. Had a brief look round Glengarriff village, which despite its naturally glorious setting seemed snobby at one end and plastic at the other, and hopped on the Bus Eire coach, with its red-setter dog logo in plush on every seat, and headed into truly spectacular scenery. First old, old woods, then climbing over the Caha pass, through wild stoney hills that scrape about 500m, with sweeping views down both sides.
Kenmare itself was more of a real place than Glengarriff, but still too many leprechaun t-towels on sale. We passed the early afternoon trawling up and down the two main streets of the town, sitting outside the Altantic Bar at a table in the town square with a pint of Murphy's and a ringside seat of the 'sean nos' dance workshop (taking place on a specially installed wooden dance floor), and a productive visit to a second hand book shop.
Then it started to rain, so we did the most sensible thing and went to the hairdressers for a cut and a beard trim, respectively. (The hairdresser was a woman about my age, and nearly the first thing she said to me was 'How many sons have ye?') Looking all spiffed up, Charlie and I found (yet another) MacCarthy's Bar, and - wonders - there was a 'sessiun' in progress, with 8 - 10 accomplished traditional musicians informally playing music together, interspersed by song.
The bar was quite full of characters, though whether you'd call them traditional is an open question. Even the village poet was there, looking sullen and pensive in a leather hat as he pondered the deep meaning of life and his lines of verse. Then I managed to get a glance at his work, and he was only doing the crossword. The pub was quite crowded, at one point someone brought in a large metal pot into the pub, it had to be held above the heads of the crowd, but later it was lowered to waist height, so we couldn't tell its purpose or eventual destiny.
This was the 'craic' we'd been after, so we stayed for another pint, and another, until it was gone 6pm and the bar started serving food, so we had some non-traditional but tasty Calamari and chips, while the musicians left and another lot filtered. But by 8pm, I was champing at the bit - a Ceili (dance) was scheduled for the village square. Making an adjustment for Munster time, we left the bar about 8.30 and walked through the rain to the village square to catch the start of dancing.
The specially installed wooden dance floor was now covered in rain puddled swathes of plastic, a couple of musicians played cautiously on the stage - no doubt fearing every brush against a piece of amplification equipment could result in death by electric shock, and a small crowd huddled under the canopy of the Atlantic Bar. Whether they hoped for music or for a role on the TV news as 'Eye Witness to Shocking Death' was hard to say.
BUT - I had a cunning plan B! At the hairdressers, I'd picked up word that there would be set-dancing at the Brooklane Hotel, 'just about a mile out of town down the Kilarney Road'. So at my behest, off we set, through the by now heavy rain down an unpromising stretch of road bordered with bungalows and garages. About 20 minutes later, we found ourselves at something like a Holiday Inn, with a bar that had a pianist and violinist playing traditional folk tunes. From Russia. "Sure and there might be set dancing later", said the barman, but it didn't seem likely unless Cossacks set dance, so we called a taxi and headed back to Glengarriff, arriving about 11ish.
It was such a nice feeling to think that we had only to get into the dinghy, motor the half kilometre or so out to the boat, and there we could put on the wonderful heating that Charlie had installed. And it is so dangerous to think that we "only" have to do anything!
The dinghy had about an inch of rainwater in it by now. As Charlie got in, the water naturally pooled at his feet, since the dinghy floor is not rigid. And the lifejackets we'd left chained to the outboard motor got in the water. Charlie grabbed the uppermost one just in time, but the other - mine, as it happens - got sluiced by the soft Irish rain that had accumulated. And then, just as they tell you on airplanes - "the life jacket will inflate immediately upon contact with water". With a big whoosh, it turned into a kids flotation toy, everything but the yellow duckie head!
Well, I can put up with indignity, and besides, it was pitch dark. Climbing into the dinghy with my large yellow sausage of a lifejacket, I let slip the rope holding us to the quay. We pushed off, with the outboard motor running. And that's where the second overenthusiastic safety device kicked in. The propellers of the outboard brushed the quayside, and the shearing pin (which prevents the prop from grinding itself to a pulp if it is genuinely prevented from turning) --- sheared. This severed the connection between the drive shaft and the prop, so we now had no means of propulsion!
With a certain amount of swearing coming from some part of the dinghy that I couldn't see in the dark, we had only one option - row! Well I row like a girl, so this job fell to Charlie, while I was in charge of navigating. We'd unintentionally left the fridge on when we'd left, so Dark Star's battery was low, and the light hung on her rigging as a safety device for other boats was now flickering. This in theory gave us some clue to her location, since it was completely dark, and all boats were utterly invisible, except for a few with these riding lights on. Our only other help was from a small hand-torch with LED light, and with this I tried to avoid the rocks and islands that are scattered around the harbour.
Steering us confidently towards the flickering riding light, I tried not to mind the fact that my feet were in water up to my shoe tops, or that the rain was coming straight at my face and every other part of me - from both directions at once, and additionally managing to get up my sleeves. Until, that is, Charlie (who, rowing, had his back to the direction we were heading, though this afforded him no protection from the rain) declared in not entirely neutral tones that we were way off course. Well, how was I supposed to know there were TWO boats with flickering riding lights? Actually, Charlie didn't complain even a bit, which is quite remarkable considering.
Eventually, having rowed twice as far as we should, we reached the boat, and managed at least to get onto Dark Star without further mishap. Having made fast the dinghy, we came below and tried to get out of our wet things. Charlie was literally pouring water from his shoes, like a cartoon character, and I kept on peeling off the wettest garment, thinking that I'd be dry, only to find the next soaking layer, so everything had to come off. And the consequence of the fridge having been left running was that the battery was too flat to start up the heating, so we had to run the boat's engines for a while, no doubt to the annoyance of our nearby anchored neighbours at what was by now, midnight.
Eventually, we were in pyjamas, with the heat running, and wrapped ourselves gratefully around the last part of a bottle of Paddy Whiskey. (There was only a bit left, and EVERYONE knows that Paddy's goes off if you leave just a bit in the bottle.) Of course, with the continued rain and humidity, there's no chance of our clothes getting dry for days. So it came to be, that when we left this rather toney anchorage on Monday, we had not one, but two pairs of Charlie's knickers fluttering from the rail.