Now that was a night and a half…. Was in Kenmare on Saturday and I’ve rapidly come to the conclusion that I love Kerry and Kerry people. I’ve never been there before but I’ve been in Killarney, Tralee and Dingle countless times and always loved it.

It’s all a blur.

Finding the sign to Kinnitty (where my father was born in Offaly) in a local bar…

Listening to the two most popular songs on the jukebox there (Thunderstruck by AC/DC and One Week by the Barenaked Ladies!)…

Watching the rain get so bad it turned the festival crowd from this:

to this:

And then having the hand pumped off me in the club that night by everyone from the lads who’d come down from Skibbereen to the fellas who work tractors during the day and love the way I “get people to talk about things that are goin on in their heads” to the American girl who claimed it was the best club she’d seen since San Francisco to the two girls who’d turned up just to request Sufjan Stevens 🙂

It all went swimmingly until I was downing me tae and toast in the B&B early the following morning when I realised there’d been a mix up with the taxi to take me back to the train and I was stranded…

You see that’s the wonder of it. Instead of shrugging her shoulders and saying “well, sorry mate, nothing I can do” the landlady ousted her poor veterinarian husband from the bed and made him drive me the 40 minutes or so to Killarney. And, stranger still, this he did gladly via the scenic route because he thought I might like it better, while telling stories to beat the band because, as he put it himself “there’s a bit of the jarvey in me” 🙂

We went up through Moll’s gap (pic not mine), past an Avoca store in the middle of nowhere(!), through countryside so beautiful I could have been looking at John Hinde postcards sellotaped to my retinas, past the farm where you can sponsor a sheep, all the while hearing about the man in Spillane’s bar who was in Vietnam and set up a nightly war council with some other lads every night during the Argentine War and how one of his friends once accidentally spent a night in a hotel with a dead body. Brilliant 🙂

There is, of course, something of the storyteller in the Kerry genepool and long may it continue and be nurtured as one of the true wonders of the world… It ties in a with a beautiful sonse of community where everyone knows everone else (in a good way) and you can still leave your house unlocked in the middle of the day (as they did in my B&B!!)

The train back was a sad contrast as I gamely tried to black out the group of Cork lads on a stag sitting behind me sculling Fosters at 11 in the morning. I did get some small consolation out of imagining how many ways I could inflict pain with a chopstick on the two american tourists sitting over from me who whined nasally on about how “they could have made better places for us to pull over and take pictures”. Seriously. Kerry County Council are already thinking of moving the Gap Of Dunloe to a more photographically suitable location…

R