I got the keys to the Kingdom on the lash with Paidi the poet
WHY would you want Monaco when you could have Dingle? The view from our breakfast table in the Dingle Skellig Hotel last Thursday morning was tres magnifique. Or breathtaking in any language. I could have sworn I saw Fungie out there splashing in the Atlantic Ocean framed by the mountains, cliffs and heathland.
Trying to get children to stay in their seats is difficult enough, but my two wanted to run out to the beach for a closer look at what the Guinness Book of World Records named the oldest solitary dolphin in the world.
Where would you get it? Not in the Cote d’Azur anyway. Chasing after the kids gave mammy and I an opportunity to run off the breakfast — and the dinner at the hotel’s ultra-fancy restaurant the night before. Ihada bit of a hangover. So, fatefully, the hotel kids’ club opened at 10am and the eldest child was able to go there for two hours. The youngest one went back to the room with mammy for a nap.
To get rid of a few cobwebs from the night before, I went for a walk around Dingle town in the rain (did I mention that it rained non-stop since we arrived in Kerry?). Actually, I was sent on a message: get nappies for the young fella.
If you told me a decade ago that I would be out at 10am in Dingle town searching for nappies for one of my kids I would have accused you of needing your head testing.
This feeling was deepened because I had some extraordinary experiences here once upon a time pre-children — most of them with one of the greatest sportsmen I ever met: Paidi O Se.
There were plenty of pints drunk with him and adventures had. He was extraordinarily charming and warm, and fun — even though one night in 2007 he invited me to Dingle to a party and when I got there he was nowhere to be seen. I ended up going on a boat to the Blasket Islands with Sarah Miles instead.
One night when we went out in Dublin for dinner Paidi entertained all of the Town Bar & Grill in Kildare Street with his tales. “For lots of times in my life the three most important people in my life were Paidi O Se, Paidi O Se and Paidi O Se in that f **king order,” he pronounced. We had two, maybe three, glasses of wine (with as many steaks — or steeaaaaaaaaaaks, as Paidi pronounced them. I think he ate mine, too). We’d already had pints earlier in the Leeson Lounge and before that in the Burlington.
We finished the night in Cafe en Seine in Dawson Street and then, around the corner, Lillie’s Bordello nightclub off Grafton Street. At least I finished the night in Lillie’s. Paidi went on somewhere else. I went home because I was the worse for wear.
At 9am, Paidi rang me from his bed at the Burlington. He had lost his glasses. He wanted me to help him retrace his steps. When I met him at noon for lunch in the Burlo, the glasses were back where they belonged above his nose. As a thank you for helping him find his glasses, Paidi said there would be a welcome for me in Dingle any time.
In Dingle, he went on, “you’ll get the best of food, the
best of drink, the
best of hospitality, the best of ceol agus craic”. He didn’t say best so much as
“beeeeeeeeeshtttttt”.
To hear him say the word
“beeeeeeeeeshtttttt” was lyrical in the extreme. Paidi made Noel Coward sound like Michael Healy-Rae.
He wasn’t wrong about Dingle. The “beeeeeeeshtttttt” of food, drink and hospitality. When my wife and I and the kids had dinner in Benners Hotel on the main street on Friday night my heart swelled with memories of Paidi.