DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I SPENT LAST week in Listowel at Writers' Week, trying to improve my conversation skills. I believe in the Tibetan principle that if you place a stick of wood among incense sticks, then after a while even the stick of wood will smell of incense.
Thus did I hope to acquire some fragrance, as I rubbed shoulders with Booker Prize winners, and young women who write poems like movies, and poets from Australia who make films, and bank officials flogging screenplays, and psychiatrists, and famous musicians, and one novelist whose books are read by Barack Obama.
The sun was shining all the time, and there was a constant flow of people through the foyer of the Listowel Arms Hotel, holding sunglasses, suitcases, Apple laptops, pints of Guinness and glasses of wine. There were novelists from London and New York, as thin as rakes and stunningly attractive in their cream linen suits. But to be fair to Listowel, the members of the committee also scrubbed up very well, in summer frocks and dresses, so that the hotel maintained a glittery excitement all week.
A writer from Northern Ireland confessed to me that she had not slept well the night before she arrived. She was tall and thin, with long black hair, and she wore spectacles that reminded me of Nana Mouskouri.
She bought a bedside lamp in Belfast that was supposed to turn itself on and off automatically if a human hand touched it.
“But the damn thing kept turning itself on and off all night every time I moved in the bed,” she said. “Which is why I look wrecked.” Then she said: “Believe me, you just can’t imagine what it was like.”
I tried hard not to imagine what it was like, in her bed, or how naked she might have been, without spectacles.
“Well, at least you have a good opening for a novel,” I suggested.
I wanted to tell her that she reminded me of Nana Mouskouri, but I was afraid it would sound as if I were trying to get off with her, or just silly, or both.
She said I looked very sad, which is something people say to me occasionally when I can’t finish my sentences or keep up momentum in a conversation.
I said: “I grew up in Cavan and, like a mushroom, I spent my youth in darkness.” This confession confused her.
“It’s the drumlins do the damage,” I explained. “People are surrounded by sloping hills, and there are no distant horizons on which to feast the eye or the mind, so eventually everyone becomes short-sighted.”
She began laughing, and said: “I was wrong about you. You’re not sad at all; actually you’re very funny.”
I said: “I don’t see the difference; there’s nothing as funny as complete misery.”
Then she went to the bathroom, and never returned. She just disappeared off the face of the earth, and may even have been abducted by aliens, for all I know.
I spent the afternoons sitting on the hotel balcony, waiting for her, and looking out on the empty racecourse, hoping she might appear. At one stage the balcony was chock-full of young ladies, and a man approached me and said: “The barracudas are all around, but the stinger has not yet arrived!” I suppose he too was in search of some particular woman.
I drove home on a hot Bank Holiday Monday.
In Ballymahon, there were politicians all over the place. Two opposing candidates had arrived in town at the same time, each chased by a cavalcade of Mercs and jeeps, and the street was buzzing.
I stopped to buy a cone in a shop and I asked the man behind the counter, who looked about 50, and was bald but for wisps of black, oily hair across his skull, which of the two desperadoes on the street might win.
“It’s neck and neck,” he said.
Then he asked me was I on holidays. I said I was coming back from the Writers’ Week in Listowel.
“Good man yourself!” he exclaimed.
Clearly he was a person who approved of literature, though he was a bit jittery filling the cone, and the ice cream slobbered down the sides.
“The young fellow usually does the shop for me,” he explained, “but the Junior Cert is starting on Wednesday so he’s at home eating the books!”
mharding@irishtimes.com
