Hungary, Argentina and Ireland all in the one bar in Paris.

Isabella stared into her glass. Her husband’s phone had rung and he had gone out onto the street to take the call saying, as he always did, that he would only be a few seconds. She stopped watching him through the large plate glass window that gave onto Place de la Contrescarpe and its leafless trees. The cold, November wind was whipping his words from his mouth as he spoke and he had to shout to make himself heard. She could hear nothing from inside and turned back to stare at her glass as if she were contemplating either her future or her past. It was warm in the bar and there was whiskey in her glass. In her loneliness she began to wonder if she were real, or if the universe was playing a trick on her even though she didn’t exist which would surely mean that the universe was playing a trick on itself. That line of thought became too complicated for her and reminded of the doubts that assailed her mind as a sick child - was she adopted, was she really Hungarian, did she have a serious illness that her parents weren’t telling her about but of which all her friends at school knew. The barman offered to fill her glass and she let him. He was Irish and his wife had just had a baby boy. He was planning to return to Belfast after finishing his studies in Paris. He lived in the apartment Hemingway had once lived in. Isabella’s husband returned. He came up to the bar and the Irish barman could feel the sharp November cold coming off his face and his clothes, countering the heat coming off Isabella. Hungary, Argentina and Ireland all in the one place. Hot and cold. Whiskey. Everyone needed to start over

Russia as I remember it.

Before the revolution I always looked forward to traveling home to welcome the new year with my sister. Leaving the Academy I took the train from Petersburg, changing onto a small branch line at Pikalevo where a much smaller, slower train filled with peasants and their packages took me to within 30 versts of our family estate. 

At the small halt with its overgrown, deserted station house, Elsa always waited for me with anxiety scribbled on her face. She settled me in the troika, fussing round me like I was a sick child, covering my knees under blankets of fox pelts. She always sat close beside me, holding onto my arm and dragging information about Petersburg and my studies from my travel-tired head while Grigori spanked the horse with his whip sending us speeding smartly across fields of crisp snow and on into the eeriness of the winter forest.  

It was only when we crossed onto our own land that Grigori showed any mercy to the horse and let it slow to a trot as we emerged from the forest, and my heart always leapt when the familiar shape of the house came into view on the far side of the small, frozen lake. 

Servants were always on hand to bring in my luggage and take it up to my room that Elsa had made sure was well heated, a fire roaring in the fireplace. The bed sheets and my linen would be smelling of pine gathered from the forest. As soon as I arrived a bath would be drawn for me in front of the fire. Elsa always withdrew when she saw that I was about to undress, leaving one of the servants to stand by with towels for when I was ready to emerge from the scalding water pink and steaming.

Christmas at Capri

December, Naples 1976. I was alone, staying in a pensione out by Mergellina. I was sharing a room with an Australian who asked if I wanted to go up Vesuvius with him. I looked at Vesuvius across the bay and said no because there were dark clouds swirling around the mountain and I didn’t want to get wet. He went on his own and the clouds became a storm and he was struck by lightening and didn’t come back.

Instead of climbing the volcano I agreed to buy a ticket for the boat out to Capri from a girl who was also staying in the pensione. She was called Helga and she turned up at everywhere I went. I met her first in Genoa then in Rome and now she was in Naples. After that she turned up in Igoumenitsa, Athens and finally Belgrade. I don’t know what happened to her after that.

Anyway I bought the ticket she said she couldn’t use and during the thunder storm that finished off the Australian I set out for Capri. It was a small boat carrying mostly stuff rather than people although there were a few old ladies in black there too with bundles of ….. stuff. There was a small truck with a pig tied up in the back of it, and it sat on one side of the deck with nothing to balance it on the other side.

As soon as we hit the open water with the boat sitting low and lop-sided in the water I started to panic. I concluded that this was the end of me but the old ladies looked unperturbed. The wind picked up as did the waves and we pitched and the pig squealed a bit but the ladies just moved their tongues around their toothless mouths a bit, gumming rather than on plugs of tobacco, and spitting it over the side.

The rain blew straight into my face as did spray from the sea each time we plunged down into it. Clouds came down to obscure the island we were headed for till eventually it disappeared in the grey, dismal mist. Thunder rumbled and I got uselessly angry with Helga and wished I’d gone up Vesuvius instead although I didn’t know that one of those thunder claps was a follow-on from lightening that had struck the Australian.

From the Memory Bank of Italy

I really must get round to making myself a few new memories. There’s nothing wrong with my old memories of course, and I’ll never throw them away or give them to a charity shop; I just need to start making some new ones. While I wait however, this old one is worth another spin. It jumped out at me as I was sorting through my underwear drawer and I thought I’d share it; I don’t know what it was doing in there. It was in 1977 that a lot of good things happened with me. I got a ride from Genoa town centre out to a hostel along the coast. It was late November but early in the day so the hostel was shut, or at least it wasn’t open and wouldn’t be until late in the afternoon. I sat on the steps and let the sun bless my face for a while and looked about the grounds with their trees and flowers and bits of old cars. The edge of the garden dropped onto rocks and on into the sea. Soon another traveller came along. She was called Yolanda, a Canadian, and had enough luggage for six of us and a guitar. We left our stuff behind rocks and went in search of food. We found a café but it had no food so we didn’t eat. At five the hostel opened and we ate then and met up again later. I found her on the steps in the dark strumming in the quiet night. By then we'd both had some wine. We wondered on down to the rocks along the shore. I lay back on a slab of smooth rock under the big moon and my nose got all filled up with the smell of sage and the sea. The girl from Montreal played and sang weird songs that got me thinking and wondering about how weird and sensible the world is. One song was called Suzanne. I’d never heard of Leonard Cohen before and I’ve never forgotten him since

Melancholy and nostalgia at the Krasnapolsky.

It’s the way it was back in the day when anyone looking for our Jimmy knew to check out the bar in the Krasnapolsky hotel on Dam Square, Amsterdam. They’d find him there all grey-looking and hunched up over whatever drink someone had bought him but he could never tell you who or what or why. He was a fixer, the oil that greased the cogs that turned in the hush of the Grand Café off the hotel lobby where diplomats, generals, monied folk and other ne’re-do-wells met people they weren’t supposed to meet, hiding in the depths of leather high-backed chairs positioned behind giant indoor palms, and early each morning the political, military and economic secrets of the western world were bought and sold there over breakfast after a night that started in the basement bar but ended in one of the luxury suites in duplicitous though fairly comely company. Jimmy didn’t care for military secrets but he seemed to know everyone’s personal secrets and indiscretions, hence some of the furtive, reluctant meetings at the Krasnapolsky. The happenchance that put me in possession of the above information was a mixture of family connections, unemployment and an affair of the heart. Jimmy was the son of a family friend. I went to school with him when we were both teenage wild colonial boys in Africa. My girlfriend (though I’m not sure that she knew that’s how I saw her) was a dancer in the hotel night club, and I had nowhere else to be having just been fired from my job in an aluminium smelt oven in Barendrecht outside Rotterdam. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this dated information, but the memory of Jimmy and those days at the Krasnapolsky came to me as I got lost among the pages of Amor Towles’ ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’. Nothing to do with Towles’ excellent tale, just an atmosphere thing. It’s a day for melancholy and nostalgia and whiskey after all, a day like all the other days.

The Nun and the Gardener

Fiacre gets down off his bike and leans it against a bench to watch over the beginning of another day, the making of a morning. Not even the slightest, quietest breeze rises to stir the mist that hangs lightly in strands among the branches, and the river flows sluggishly, its murmuring waters dark and deep and dappled, but mostly cold. The sun has yet to climb up from behind the low, distant mountains, but it has already brightened the sky with its influence and scored the underside of the few, scattered clouds with an intense orange border. Mornings are for reflection, for reconnecting with what lies above and beyond, a time when, before any other person can intrude upon the day, Fiacre leaves his room at the orphanage ahead of the tears and shouts that greet and spoil every perfect new beginning. His thoughts aren’t always clear, aren’t always good, but he tells the Sisters he needs to go to re-establish some kind of contact with God in the early morning, to make sense of orphans’ tears and broken hearts, to let God’s good earth honey his heart with love for the unloved. That’s what he tells the Sisters. Sometimes that’s what he tells himself, but his heart sneers at his sugar-coated lies and they make him feel ever so slightly guilty about taking a head-long plunge into the beauty of the morning. He remains instead the cynical observer, the outsider, embarrassed before the God he mocks as the one who was not, is not, and nevermore shall be. That’s what he tells himself. That’s what he feels. When the sun finally slips up over the horizon Fiacre returns to the orphanage ready to hear and hopefully heal the tears, to make children laugh and to help them to ready themselves for the futile task of finding love in a loveless world. He spends some of his days preparing the convent ground to receive seed that will grow and bear fruit. From time to time he prepares the same ground to receive the wizened, twisted, wasted body of a dead Nun that will decay without having borne fruit. But unknown, and probably in spite of himself, he daily prepares the hearts of young orphans to be receptive to love if it ever comes their way. Sister Mary slips out of the convent door and climbs the low hill that lies between the orphanage and the river. From the bench under the tree she notices Fiacre leaning on his bike and doubts again the pose of his nature-inspired devotion. She finds his distant presence rude and intrusive, something to spoil the beauty of God’s morning, something that interrupts her precarious, unstable serenity. Fiacre had been a difficult boy during his time at the orphanage. “Thran” and “unteachable” where the words she used in the reports she wrote on him at the end of every school year. “No liking for learning”. Against her advice the Monsignor had kept Fiacre on as a handyman when he passed his sixteenth birthday. He was someone the older children could look up to and it was probably a good idea to have a man they knew well always at hand to help with the heavier work that the aging Sisters were no longer able for. With a supreme effort Sister Mary concentrates on the spiritual discipline prescribed for that early hour but as usual it is fruitless, and the dread and futility of the morning’s English class weigh heavily in her heart. As she watches Fiacre the unbidden thought comes to her mind of the day when his rough hands would lift her dead, never-loved body into a coffin. She imagines him arranging her arms and legs and nailing down the lid, of lowering her unceremoniously into the grave he will have dug for her. She shudders at that thought, partly from revulsion, but also with a strange subconscious delight as she half recognises that being moved from her death bed will be the only occasion in her sixty or so years that the hands of a man will have touched her in so intimate a way, to do for her what she will never be able to do for herself

Yerevan remembered fondly

Right after the Crimean war we used to hang out in Salvo’s bar in Yerevan, me, Nana Mouskouri and Marco Polo. Nana was old enough to be my mother back then; now she’s old enough to be my grandmother. The bar was on the second floor of the Hotel Philosophe and we always took a table over by the window where Russian soldiers couldn’t overhear us: they were everywhere back in those days, and they were none too subtle in their eavesdropping. Hemingway usually had a table in the back where he could smoke and nobody noticed him, or so he liked to think. He was the only one of us who carried a gun. Most afternoons we talked poetry, with good Georgian wine to get us started, while April thunder clouds gathered around Ararat just over the border in Turkey then drifted down the snowy slopes to drop the coldest rain onto Republic Square. None of us had jobs or even the right (or inclination) to work, but we had a book running every weekend taking bets on who would arrive at the opera house on Saturday night on the arm of the French ambassador’s wife, and who would go home with her husband who always left right before the curtain fell with some beauty or other.

Rent an Irish cottage.

How do you know you've seen the "real" Ireland when you go there on holiday? That questions goes for any country of course, and it seems that tourists generally believe that they've seen the real thing only if what they see matches their pre-conceived assumptions of what the place ought to be like, Even Irish people have different ideas and experiences of what constitutes genuine Irish living, and even foreigners who come to live here for a prolonged period of time only get insights into some aspects of Ireland, not Ireland in its entirety.

One misconception is that the Irish are all Catholic, heavy drinkers, red-haired and hate the English - personally I've never met anyone who ticks all those boxes. Nor have I ever seen anyone in the street dressed in what is thought of as "traditional" Irish clothing, whatever that is. Everyone's experience is different. Am I not genuinely Irish if (as is the case) I never get drunk, don't like potatoes, have no interest in emigrating to America and speak fluent Irish which most Irish people do not?

So If you are tempted to come to "do" Ireland you are welcome, just expect us to fit anyone's stereo-typical view of what it is to be Irish, and be done with any romantic nonsense about travelling in a jaunting car.

Much better is to come and live (quietly) not in hotels but in a private house for a week or two. Renting an cottage has become big business, and they are available all over the island and all year round at reasonable prices. Rent one in Donegal or Mayo, in a rural area if you can to experience the feel of isolation, and take one for a day or two in Dublin before you fly back home.

But be warned, there are some things to watch out for:

• It WILL be wet.
• TV reception is not good outside larger towns
• Sheep get everywhere
• It's expensive to eat out
• Signposts on country roads are not to be trusted
• We drive on the LEFT hand side of the road
• Don't order Budweiser by referring to it as Bud - bod (pronounced bud) is Irish for penis.

Have a great holiday.

Sleeping rough.

An empty back street just after midnight in a broken part of town. It could be anywhere - Genoa, Marseille, Hamburg - in the winter of 1977. I’m nineteen. Fine, dirty rain drives past closed up offices with broken windows and the sharp wind explores the depth of every sheltered doorway in a way that discourages drifters and tramps from sleeping there. One doorway is angled out of the wind. I find it, I have a nose for such places. I drag in cardboard boxes that I flatten into a thick, springy mattress and I prop up a bin that’s been left lying so that I feel like I have walls all round me. The only street light that works is more than a hundred metres away. I’m safe. I have a blanket, and when I pull it over my head and breathe my breath can’t float away into the night so it warms my nose every time I exhale. I hear trains shunting, sirens, cats and I’m desperately hungry.

Melancholy in Turin.

What better place for a spot of spring melancholy than a seat in the cold sunshine at a table outside Turin's Caffè Elena. It was Cesare Pavese's favourite bar, frequented also by Nietzsche and me, but not at the same time. Just to sit there looking out over the empty Piazza Vittorio with an espresso and a newspaper in the morning, wrapped up in a heavy coat and a scarf. The lonely figure of a priest walks across the emptiness of the piazza and scares off pigeons that swirl around his head as they lift off the dry, dusty cobbles ..... oh sweet melancholy. I imagine it was on a morning like this that Pavese decided that when he returned to his room in the Rocca and Cavour hotel he would feed himself on barbiturates and depart.