Aliens arrived in Edinbugh last weekend and abducted all the city's taxi-drivers, probably to perform experiments on them in outer space. They're probably back on earth now, their memories deliberately blanked; most of the Irish at Murrayfield wish we could share their amnesia. The optimists among us still keep a perky grin on our faces and murmur, "Roll on Tibet". Pessimists doubt if we could hold our own for long against the Dalai Lama's umbrella. Gloom and doom specialists - in other words, moi - would now be inclined to back sardines on toast against the Ireland XV.
But I have a certain reason for my bitter and twisted attitude. I am not as others. I am a damaged man. Life has little left in it which could make it palatable. Hearken, and mark me well. Most of you watched the match at home. Some of you paid to see it in Edinburgh. A few of you - journalists, of course, and alickadoos - got to see it free. But as for me, a hack who is used to free admission at the drop of a phone call, I paid not once, but twice over to see it: one entry to the Guinness Book of Records coming up.
Edinburgh Festival
Edinburgh is nonetheless a perfectly magical city for a rugby weekend. I have been to the Edinburgh Festival, a vastly over-rated beano in which everything worth seeing is booked out long before the average visitor gets a whiff of the Royal Mile, leaving available only dire productions of some deservedly forgotten Agatha Christie Who-cares-who-dunnit by the Scunthorpe and District Colliers Amateur Dramatic Society performed in a bike-shed in nearly-neighbouring Aberdeen a mere two-hour train journey away. But in the event of even that being sold out, you can catch street theatre of the kind which makes you want to do to Edinburgh what the Red Army did to Berlin in 1945. Of the Edinburgh Festival, two words: steer clear.
But of the Edinburgh rugby weekend, two words: pure joy. I once met an Ethiopian taxi driver in Edinburgh who loathed the city with a Caledonicidal passion. Its residents, he insisted, were cold and aloof and as grim as granite and he spent his time when not driving hunched over a two-bar electric fire trying to master the art of bomb-making. Possibly Edinburgh folk are as my Abyssinian chum described them. But on rugby weekend, the Scottish capital is taken over by the rugby-hordes of Scotland, burly burghers from Jedburgh and of course the two score maidens from Inverness, waiting to waylay the Irish.
In the Republic we tend to have a largely austral notion of Irish rugby, though the reality in Edinburgh last weekend was that the majority of Irish fans were Northerners who were not called Seamus but Mervyn and Neville and Lee: few things reveal the bewildering complexity of tribal loyalty as does the unwavering but unfailingly unrewarded devotion of Northern unionists to the Irish rugby team.
Never works
They travel to Dublin, they travel to Paris, they travel to Edinburgh, invariably to be treated to the displays of that branch of science called the Certainty Principle. This is an intellectual discipline which was invented by Irish rugby, and it means this: if a ploy doesn't work, you must certainly repeat it again and again, to make certain it never works. And when you have certainly proved this to an utter certainty, you make certain of your certainty by certainly doing it all over again. Enormous fun.
Perhaps there are words to describe my own emotions at this elaborate laboratory vindication of the Certainty Principle, but I am not acquainted with them, and if they exist at all, they are in Persian or Pushtu, not English. For a friend I shall call El Beau and I were due to meet a third friend with tickets which we had already paid for at a rendezvous outside the ground to be achieved by mobile phone. But alas, the aliens who were to make off with the city's taxi-drivers that night performed a little experiment in advance by kidnapping all cell-phone signals and sending them to Pluto. Rendezvous was never achieved. Tickets did not change hands. At one minute to kick-off, we bought £30 tickets on the street - miraculously, at face value - from a Scottish gentleman whom at that moment I would have thanked Monica-style, had I had time. I hadn't. I'm sorry now that I didn't draw my sword and slay him where he stood.
Celebrating in defeat
To have paid once over to see the most convincing proof ever of the Certainty Principle is unbearable enough; to have paid for it twice over produced emotions hitherto unknown to medical science, and this, just as the taxi-drivers of Edinburgh were being inhaled to outer space, where they remained in orbit for the rest of the weekend.
The Scots are mightily impressed by the way the Irish celebrate in defeat, perhaps because we are relishing the vindication yet again of the Certainty Principle. I am, alas, unable to give a coherent account of all that followed over the evening. Someone seems to have slipped a Mickey Finn into my tea. But I do recall this: at midnight, Edinburgh was full of sodden Irish rugby supporters, probably soaked from within, fruitlessly looking for taxis. Our three-hour walk back to our hotel resembled the Retreat from Kabul.
But Edinburgh, beware: Certainty Principle or not, I Will Be Back.