Postcard from Ireland - Cobh and Kinsale

The Irish are supposed to take their drinking seriously. They do, I’m sure, but that’s as nothing compared to how seriously they take their food.

Cork has a food market called ‘the English market’. It’s made up of various stalls selling everything from soup to nuts and, to put it in context; the fish counter is sixty feet long and that doesn’t include the lobster tank at one end and the portable oyster bed at the other. There was very little that I didn’t want to buy but, I suppose, fruit has its place (which is adorning the side of a cocktail).

In the end, in seeking a picnic lunch, I purchased what appeared to be a loaf sawn in half and stuffed with enough cheese and meat to feed a regiment but was, I was reassured, just a sandwich. I managed to get the thing loaded in the car without assistance, although I was wondering if assistance might be required in eating it. The sandwich counter at the English Market manages to combine artisan sandwiches manufactured on an industrial scale.

Cobh is famous for being the last port of call of the Titanic. It’s also famous for being the place that many of the emigrants from Ireland left their home country, driven by the lack of potatoes to seek a new life, and a tan, in the United States. So, obviously a place that is associated with tragedy and grinding misery is a must see on the tourist trail.

And for many, it is the beginning of the Irish tourist trail. Because the reason that the Titanic anchored off Cobh was that it provides excellent deep sea anchorage for ocean liners or, today, cruise ships. I wonder if they play up the Titanic connection to those who still have some sailing to do on their ‘Europe in two weeks’ package.

Cobh was also the first time I saw an image on a tourist guide book brought to life; the houses are all painted different colours. Not unusual you might think but an unusual effect when it’s a row of terrace houses and every house is a different, vibrant, colour. The Irish, it would appear, do not go in for ‘blush of pea’ or ‘murmur of straw’. No, it’s green green, yellow and the red normally found on post boxes or the lips of a certain type of hooker.

The overall effect is charming, even on a grey day. Maybe the houses are a colourful revolt to the predominant weather front of the Atlantic, where nature has a colour scheme of ‘grey with a hint of damp’. Of course, when the sun shines the place is transformed, the sky turns a dazzling blue and the houses resemble a giant painter’s pallet.

Cobh is also where you take the Cobh to Monkstown ferry (five Euros for a car), cutting out a lot of tedious driving around roads in a landscape that would delight industrial historians and is beloved of those that like to see thriving industry but is not as appreciated by those that like to see their landscapes unblighted by, for instance, steam plumes, spoil piles, ugly warehouses, cranes, more warehouses, docks and yet more warehouses.

Catching a ferry is a very holiday thing to do. In normal life, one very rarely feels the desire to catch a ferry, incompatible as they are with any city without a river running through it. However, if global warming really catches on, we may all be catching the ferry to work. So catching the Cobh to Monkstown ferry was great fun and something special…so I thought right up until the moment I realised that my car was just one in a line that had arrived to make the short (two minutes) trip across the river. To the others on the ferry this was no doubt just another crossing but to me, seeing the waves slosh and froth through the raised ramp in a ‘should that really be happening?’ sort of way, it was all very jolly.

I was so happy to be travelling on a ferry (really, they ought to have one of those funfair wooden signs on the boarding ramp, showing a middle aged bloke in a suit, with moustache and a wife-and-kids-and-mortgage hangdog expression and a notice saying ‘you must be at least this mature to ride on this ferry’) that I forgot the problems that previous Cobh maritime departures have had. Luckily, I can report that the trip was Iceberg, Kate and Leo free.

I was also mature enough to sit in the car and not demand to see the engine room or to pilot the ferry in by pretending that it was my birthday. In truth, getting the car off of the ramp was challenge enough and I think the ‘woo-hoo!’ I uttered was entirely justified.

I do though have to consider whether or not I have an issue with the Sat Nav directing one onto a ferry. I thought the whole idea of a car was to be in charge of ones own destiny, and go by road. It was quite a novelty though to hear ‘next left, next right, next left, onto ferry’.

On to Kinsale via roads straight out of ‘Return to Glennascaul’. Kinsale is, I strongly suspect, very different in August than it is in March. Ireland in March is much as you would expect. The rain is cold but, hey, the people are warm and that’s what we’re here for. Seeing the Irish countryside obscured by a soft rain and the spectre of the sun trying to break through the clouds, highlighting the daffodils with the promise of spring is enough to lift the heart, and remind one why Ireland has a reputation for being green.

Postcard from Ireland - Cork

Cork is a mobius place. The city itself is small, but by the clever application of a one-way system the city-planners have managed to wrap at least twelve thousand miles of road around what is essentially a small port.

Cork has some interesting features. For instance, if you’re asked in a pub quiz where the greatest number of coffee shops per person is, then forget Naples, New York or anywhere obviously peppy and suggest Cork. The only rational explanation to the very great number of coffee shops in Cork is that the national social health system can’t afford methadone and so everyone is combating hard drugs by downing double shots of espresso in various forms.

I’m not kidding. Everyone is drinking coffee, all the time. Possibly this is to give them the energy to get them to the next coffee shop and score their next hit of the dark gorgeousness. Given that many of the coffee shops double as chocolate shops, this is a good reason to sprint to the next one. Frankly, I can’t get excited about latte but give me a free chocolate truffle at the same time and I feel so good I want to have a dog tail grafted to my ass so that I can wag it and show my appreciation.

One citizen of Cork not drinking coffee was the baby being breast fed in a pub. That’s right, I was in Ireland for about an hour before I saw what has to be the ultimate in underage drinking. Actually, it sort of made sense. Cork has pubs everywhere and they are usually of a type: quiet, made gloomy by all the dark wood and dully shining brass and Guinness and affording many places where you can have a quiet pint, or a conversation, or unfetter your boob and feed junior. Much better than having to do it in a more public place.

One of the odd things about Cork (as soon as you accept breast feeding in pubs as normal, you realise your whole yardstick for what’s odd and what’s not in Ireland has to shift) is one of the main streets comes equipped with these green lights recessed into poles. What the hell is that all about? I could only assume that the city council have imported the maritime idea of giving guidance and they produce a handy marker for those who are weaving their way from bar to bar, pub to pub, on a dark and rainy night. Or if they are a bit pished.


One thing that becomes quickly apparent is just how seriously food is taken in Cork. The main food market ‘the English Market’ is home to the longest fish counter I have ever seen. Never mind that some of the fish looked spectacularly ugly, I was too distracted by the lobster tank at one end and the portable oyster bed at the other.

Taking food seriously, having a passion for it is, I think, linked to the famine in Ireland all those years ago. Not having enough food does rather concentrate the mind and, once the immediate threat is averted it’s natural enough to carry on thinking about food – not just ‘where can I get a potato’ but ‘I wonder what interesting things I can do with garlic and seafood today’. I think the collective historical memory of the famine may also go some way towards explaining the portion sizes. When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you make sure that the current one involves piling the plate high.

Hethrow Airport

(On our drive into Heathrow, we gave the strikers from UNITE a friendly toot. This was not out of any particular sense of solidarity; after being comically overcharged by BA on a flight back from Edinburgh to London (my carbon footprint is the size of a yeti’s…what of it?) I’m going to be punching the newly uncluttered air when BA fold like a cheap tent, but I reckon a little toot makes the workers feel a lot better and hey, the flags were jolly. Actually, I can’t see what all the fuss is about over the BA strike. This is cabin crew striking, right? So, if the people who hand out sandwiches, crisps, tea and stun guns (I’m presuming) on National Express coaches go on strike, can we expect the same degree of media hysteria? God, I hope so.)

Heathrow Airport. It’s huge, like a modern urban sprawl composed of places that were once villages in their own right, with customs like inbreeding, morris dancing, scrumpy festivals and duck ponds for dunking witches in. At Heathrow, it’s the terminals that are the villages, with their own shops, cafes and pubs. But unlike most villages, the majority of the population are just passing through and those that do work here come from all over the world, (well, all over Eastern Europe) rather than from all over the surrounding half mile radius.

The main occupations of the transient population of a terminal village (odd name for a place where most people are going from or through rather than ending up) are: waiting, sleeping, eating, drinking, battling constipation or nerves, and shopping. Luckily the shops of the terminal village are there to provide a diversion, reasonably priced coffee and extravagantly priced luxury items.

In the golden age of air travel, rich people flew from aerodromes where the terminal was a hut and transatlantic flight was mostly powered by glamour and hair oil. The arrival of the package holiday meant affordable travel for the oiks – sorry; ordinary folk, while the rich invented first class. Now the terminal is full of the sort of people who might travel standard class on a train or even, throwing caution to the wind, decide that coach travel is for them.

However, if you want to purchase a handbag that costs three hundred quid and, because it’s tax free, still feel like you got a good deal, then the airport is the place for you.

Mostly because in the terminal you have quite a disconnected sense of reality and it does make sense to buy designer sunglasses in preparation for an English summer and a bar of chocolate bigger than your mouth (Toblerone, what’s going on there?). Boredom has a lot to answer for.

And like many villages, it has it’s own backroads, byways and winding lanes, or in this case, a walk to a boarding gate so far away that I fully expected us to be greeted with a different regional accent when we arrived and then asked to adjust our watches to the new time zone.

The Beautiful Sentiment

Why support a premiership football team? Certainly, if you like matching decorations then supporting Manchester United is fair enough, as a visit to their shop will outfit you with a themed duvet, lampshade, wallpaper, toothbrush holder and loo roll. The same can be said of Arsenal and Chelsea, with the added benefit that you can complete your collection of footie tat with a tattoo.

If you were born in the area and they are your team then fair enough, but it's something of a mystery why most of Manchester United's supporters don't live in a Manchester post code, they can't all have moved out of Manchester (although having visited Manchester, that's not a bad idea).

Maybe it's to be associated with success. If one had to support one's local team, simply by being in their catchment area, most supporters would spend their weekends shivering in rain-swept provincial footie grounds, risking food poisoning from the catering and trench foot from the stands, instead of watching Premiership football matches from the warm safety of the pub.

Misery. That's the usual reason you stick with a team. You watch one match where they should have won and that they lose and that's it, you've made an emotional investment and the next thing you know you're buying replica kit to wear at 3:00pm on a Saturday.

Which is what, perversely, has drawn me to take an interest in Aston Villa. They have followed the lead of FC Barcalona, who don't have a sponsor's name on their kit but rather sport the word UNICEF to raise awareness of that organisation and have the name of a local children's hospice, Acorns, instead.

This, I think, is tremendous. And imagine the edge it gives you over some tosser with the name of a paint company, arms dealer or airline on his chest.