Round Ireland in Low Gear. Eric Newby

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      Nothing in Ireland lasts long except the miles.

      GEORGE MOORE. Ave, 1911

      (An Irish mile is 2240 yards – an English one 1760 yards.)

      As there is more rain in this country than in any other, and as therefore, naturally, the inhabitants should be inured to the weather, and made to despise an inconvenience which they cannot avoid, the travelling conveyances are arranged so that you may get as much practice in being as wet as possible.

      W. M. THACKERAY. The Irish Sketch Book of 1842

      The next morning I opened a window and was confronted by a painting of a double-headed eagle glaring at me from a wall across what had once been an alley three feet wide, presumably the sign of some former mediaeval hostelry. Rain was falling in torrents and I was in a state of despair and indecision as to what we should do. I could see ourselves sitting in tea shops for days on end waiting for it to abate, playing with nylon pandas and sleeping for endless nights in Boylan’s B and B.

      I became even more depressed when 1 suddenly remembered that it was my birthday. Wanda had forgotten it, and this made her depressed, too. Anyway, she gave me a kiss. Then, after a huge breakfast, we sallied out with our bicycles into the terrifying early morning rush hour traffic of Limerick, among drivers many of whom appeared to have only recently arrived in the machine age or were still on the way to it, with Miss Boylan’s warning still echoing in our ears. ‘Be careful, now, on the Sarsfield Bridge, for there are a whole lot of people blown off their cycles on it every year by the wind of the lorries, and kilt!’²

      We were heading for County Clare, via the dread Sarsfield Bridge, passing on the way the establishments of purveyors of bacon (bacon is to Limerick what caviar is to Astrakhan) and tall, often beautifully proportioned eighteenth-century brick houses, many of them decrepit to the point of collapse.

      It was somewhere in O’Connell Street that Wanda contrived to get in the wrong lane and was borne away on a tidal wave of traffic, crying ‘Hurruck, help me!’ at the top of her voice, although what I was supposed to do to help her was not clear. The last I saw of her for some time to come was disappearing round the corner into that part of the city where stood or used to stand some of the relics of British Imperial rule, such as the County Gaol, the Lunatic Asylum and the Court House of 1810. She finally fetched up back at the station, after which she took a right into Parnell Street and started all over again.

      ‘You’ve chosen a grand day for it,’ an old geezer about the same age as me said as, reunited at last, we were crossing the Sarsfield Bridge. He let out an insane kind of ‘Heh, heh, heh!’ cackle as an afterthought.

      He was wearing a white beard with lovely yellow stains in it that looked like the principal ingredient in a prescription for birds’ nest soup; an ankle-length oilskin coat to match the stains in his beard and a sou’wester ditto, an ensemble that made him resemble the fisherman on a tin of Norwegian-type sardines. I would have hated to live next door to him, in Limerick or anywhere else. ‘Wise guy, eh?’ I shouted after him, but he didn’t get it, probably because his sou’wester was fitted with flaps.

      We were pushing our bikes along the footpath, not even riding them, but still being deluged with un-recycled Irish rainwater that was being thrown up by the west-bound trucks whose drivers, deprived of the pleasure of actually ‘kilting’ us, were now doing their best to drown us, and were damn nearly succeeding – the very same men who, reunited with their wives and eight children all under the age of fifteen at weekends, wear subfusc suits and take the collection bags round on the ends of long sticks at Mass, eventually leaving a bundle, and generous bequests to the Society of the Holy Name.