Tommy Tiernan
The offside pint and the stray ride
Ihad reason most recently to be in east Galway, a quare place for sure. Stone walls start giving way to hedges and the Atlantic is no longer as easy to call on. Instead of seagulls we now have a plenitude of ducks. The sea breeze doesn’t travel this far and there is a hint somewhere somehow of lake. ’Tis that part of the West which is almost the midlands. ’Tis almost Roscommon.
The sense of humour here is not one in which I feel fluent and I’ve had some strange shows there where the audience almost behold me in defiance. ‘You haven’t found the key to us yet’, they seem to be saying. Indeed I’ve held a prejudice against the place on account of it. Their delight, to my mind anyway, has always been in logic and mathematical word play and my inclination has been to waffle and wind. There’s a hesitancy in them to embrace superfluousness and
seafoideach, and if I was to throw a theory on it, it would be this… (ahem… clears throat in preparation of an almighty ill-informed generalisation) — they’ve abandoned the stigma of the Irish language and sought safety in the rigours of English!
Gaelic to them was poverty and backwardness, the Tudor tongue was hope and security. They do not trust the wayward ceo draoicht of the western people, preferring instead the civic guarantees of the east. (Good lord… give me a minute to get over meself. Oh what is a personality only a collection of prejudices?)
Anyway, these daft notions were rightfully ridiculed when I was gigging there recently. Thrown up from the crowd were two of the most mischievous, life-loving, crooked phrases that I’ve ever come across. Phrases that suggest that the natural contrariness and outlaw mind of the Gael is alive and well in the flatlands.
The first one given out to me was this. The ‘offside pint’. We were discussing a bar that mightn’t have been too glamorous and a fella let loose that, ‘It was the type of place that you’d pop into for an offside pint’. You know those ones. The type of pint that you shouldn’t be having. Only the one, mind. An afternoon pint when you had 20 minutes to yourself and the tracker app disabled on the phone. Wouldn’t you love a man or a woman who’d allow themselves that?
Wouldn’t Leo soar in your estimation if he swung into some dim-lit cosy for a solitary jar at 2.30 in the day before meeting some Eurocrat off the plane? Wouldn’t you liked to have brought the Pope into Grogan’s for a pot of decent stout and him on his way to Croker? The ‘offside pint’ suggests an awareness of the ultimate futility of labour and the wisdom of the idle hour. My kind of phrase. My kind of people.
The other adage is a slightly more contentious one and needs a bit of digging to reveal its goodness. It is the notion of the ‘stray ride’. Now, rather than it being a spineless attempt to put a rosy glow on adultery, I see it more as a soft encounter between partners when maybe they weren’t expecting it.
Say ye’re both at a bus stop of an autumn evening and a gentle impulse to hide behind the hedge and feel flesh on flesh arises and ye obey. No panic, no stress, just the righteous motion of hands under coats, the ecstasy of the familiar. The wonder of it. The entitlement of it. And then all done, back on the bus and into town.
The ‘stray ride’ is a friendly one and means no harm to nobody. It’s very ordinary but nonetheless astounding. You’d settle for one a week. But it can’t be planned. It starts with a glance, an awareness of space and time and the realisation that despite the tensions and pressures, you really are rather fond of your spouse and divilishly turned on to boot. You might almost be laughing while it’s happening.
It’s defined by the fact that during the course of it you will both still be wearing some of your clothes and that ye haven’t got long. It’s tender and friendly with the added impetus of urgency to give it an edge.
The gig finished anyway and off I drove, into the night, delighted. Went past the Indian takeaway which was ‘now doing pizza’, and Sally’s Country Cafe that on Tuesdays and Wednesday was an authentic Chinese, but the rest of the week did burger and chips. I always knew that that type of eccentricity was here, but the kindness of their phrasemaking was a surprise.
As the nostalgic fortune teller said: ‘I’m looking forward to going back.’
Wouldn’t you love to have brought the Pope to Grogan’s?