An Irish road trip with a hint of paranoia

BRENDAN O’CONNOR

INEEDED to get out of Dublin. I needed a change of scene. I needed to break out of the 20 or so square kilometres I had been pacing like a caged beast for three months. The day before I left, I met a woman from Cork. I was getting out of the sea and she just walked up to me and said: “I’m going to Cork tomorrow. I’m going to swim in Myrtleville, and I might swing by Youghal for a swim too, because that’s where we used to go on holidays when I was young”.

Cork people are either really obtuse and beat around the bush with each other, or else we are really direct; either way can be unsettling for people not from Cork. But we appreciate it. We like either having to figure out what someone really means or else knowing exactly what’s going on.

She knew. This woman knew that I would understand the joy and the import of what she was telling me. She was going home.

My relationship with Cork is complicated and I could never have stayed there really, but equally, I need to go back to the source now and then. I told her I was going to Cork the next day too, and I told her where I would be swimming. We were in ecstasy, the two of us. A change of scene. A geographical, as I believe the gang in the AA call it.

So we packed up the car with clothing for every eventuality and we hit the road. I was excited. I was excited to see what it was like out there, about the novelty of being outside of my little corner of the world.

I put on Haim’s Women In Music Pt. III, which I have designated as my road trip album of the summer, laid-back summery Americana pop that gave the vibe of a USA road trip, even though there was soft

Irish weather all around us.

I tried to explain to my wife as we left Dublin that I am actually a person in exile, and that it was something she could not understand. I told her she couldn’t know what it was like not to live in the place where you grew up, to be always slightly explaining yourself. She wasn’t buying my victimhood.

She may have had a point.

The road to Cork generally bores me these days. It’s all motorway now. You don’t have to pass through any of those little towns that used to piss me off as I queued outside them. But the novelty of being on the open road had us all giddy. Who knew it could be so exotic to drive to Cork?

I felt like I was shooting down through a main vein in the bloodstream of the country. Haim on a loop gave the Irish scenery an epic feel, and for the first time in ages I looked around me at the fields and mountains and the big sky. We had got out of the box.

I hugged my mother. We hadn’t planned it or discussed it. But what else are you going to do? It’s been a long time and so much has happened. We were nervous and careful about things. But we found some joy too.

I think that characterised everything everywhere. People are nervous, and almost feel slightly foolish about this new ways of doing things. But everyone is determined that there will be some joy. But all the while there’s a slight shadow there. The news from around the world makes us nervous. And the numbers here feed into a slight paranoia. But still, the determination is there that WE WILL LIVE. We head on into West Cork and everywhere you go it’s a little bit complicated, all these conflicting urges, and in some places a sense of localism tempering the urge to welcome and to trade.

But not when we check into Inchydoney for a couple of nights. Everyone is cherishing every sip of normality, delighting in a gin and tonic drunk somewhere that’s not your own house, a breakfast that someone else cooked, and then noticing that they disinfect the whole chair, underneath and all, when the people at the next table leave.

The constant cleaning is mostly invisible, but you catch unexpected glimpses of it here and there. Things that you think might be complicated are actually quite simple.

Booking your time in the pool and arriving ready to swim works perfectly well. Everyone gets their time, and it’s always empty enough that there’s no tension. And again, everyone is so delighted to be there that we are all willing it to work. And it does. No stress.

I run into the sea at Inchydoney Beach. It is cool and crisp and perfectly clean. Better than the sometimes murky water in Dublin. And you can feel alive for a while and forget the circumstances.

Pizza from a silverstream caravan on the beach with a slight chill in the air makes you feel for ten minutes like nothing has changed, and it was like the Seventies again, but with better pizza.

And then we sit in the hotel bar that night and eat mussels and three types of crab and we are in heaven. And it feels like everything will be okay. But as we pack up to head deeper into West Cork, we are apprehensive about the next stage of the trip.

It could take a week or two for us all to get used to this. Let’s hope we have a week or two.