The Tour De France on St Kilda Road

If you believe that TV has no influence on kids, then I would invite you to look out your window and see what kids are up to. I think the first thing you’ll notice is the number of kids on bikes, wearing Lycra and travelling in packs, like a junior peloton. Those not on bikes will be finding empty spaces across which they can sling a rope and engage in some back yard tennis. And the reason for this? The Tour De France is on telly and Wimbledon has just finished.

Kids are not the only ones influenced by the Tour De France. I saw my first Astana cycling top on the way to work this morning. I guess its owner, a portly Gentleman in his forties who was taking the term ‘figure-hugging’ to a new level, was wearing it as a tribute to Lance Armstrong. Or perhaps he realised that Astana is the capital of Kazakhstan and he was making a Borat/Bruno fashion statement.

In any event, it made him fit in with the other Lycra wearing fanatics who gathered at the traffic lights at the top of St Kilda road. They had the wrap around glasses, clip on shoes and shaved legs of true professionals. Except these were office workers on the way into the City. I ambled up beside them in my ill-fitting fleece and baggy shorts and drew the occasional sneer in the way Michael Schumacher would if somebody pulled up beside him on a Honda 50.

There is a caste system in play and I was down with the street sweepers while the Lycra boys were Brahmin. I soothed my social inferiority by silently mocking the advertising that adorned their shirts. Why do people pay good money to advertise Saxo Bank, Bbox Bouygues Telecom and other European brands that they’ve never heard of? I refuse to be a mobile advertisement even if I could fit into the clothes.
The lights changed and we were off, speeding towards the City while trying to avoid speeding motorists and badly timed door openings.

A howling Northerly was in our face and everybody wanted to tuck in behind someone else, just as we had watched the riders do in France. Unfortunately, the cycle lane on St Kilda road is narrower than a duck’s backside, so we weren’t able to do the fanned formation as seen in the team time trial. Instead we quickly formed a long line and thanked our lucky stars that we weren’t the guy at the front.

By the third traffic light, the guy at the front had realised that he was dragging 20others up the road and he was pretty bitter about it. We had neglected our team duties and failed to take our turn at the front. I felt a pang of Catholic guilt and decided it was time I discovered my inner domestique. I wasn’t going to be a hero however and I let the Lycra boys take off first. I then stepped on the pedals and presented myself as the leader of the baggy shorts and baggy jumper’s brigade.

Cycling into the wind was like clambering through soup. And not a nice clear soup either but a thick and creamy one. I glanced behind to see how many of my colleagues had joined the train. It wasn’t a pretty sight. My baggy friends were scattered down the road like sprinters trying to make it to the top of Alp d’Huez. Only one guy had managed to stay with my manic pace and was desperately hugging my back wheel as though we were connected by an umbilical cord.

Half way along the road I started to fade. The wind was sapping my energy and the small bowl of cornflakes I had consumed before leaving had long since worked their way through my metabolism. I looked behind and my passenger was still clinging on. I’d seen this on stage 14 of the tour. George Hincapie had done all the work in a break away and was anxious that someone else should take their turn at the front. George flicked his elbow furiously at them which I took to be the international symbol for “get your arse up here and do some work”. I tried it with my passenger but had little luck. He knew he could get a free trip if he ignored me.

I tried going slower and weaving in and out like a drunken sailor but to no affect. He stubbornly stayed on my back wheel until we crossed St Kilda Road Bridge and came into the City Centre. Then like a Tour de France stage winner he clicked into a higher gear and passed me in a sickening blur. I tried desperately to take his wheel but the exertion of giving him a free ride was too much for me.

My honour had been slighted and I felt the bitter taste of defeat. The finishing line was close at hand but ahead one wobbly cyclist seemed to be struggling even more than me. I set my sights on overtaking her before the finish and summoned up one last push. I caught her just before the line, straining my neck and raising a pumped fist in triumph. I looked across and noticed that she had a basket on the front of her bike, was wearing jeans and high heeled shoes and was riding one of those small wheeled machines that could best be described as the bike for people who hate bikes.

In a sliding scale of cyclists with skinny Lycra fanatics at the top, girls in high heels with baskets on the front of their bikes would be at the other end. But no matter, like Alberto Contador in this year’s tour, I’ll take my victories wherever I find them. And as for that guy who stole a ride from me this morning, I hope you get a flat tyre on the way home tonight.

A Broken Pedal on the road to Woodford

The sun only seems to shine in Ireland during recession years, as though God is trying to offer some compensation for the vagaries of the market. In the ten years of the Celtic Tiger, the summers were damp and chilly, which gave people an extra excuse, as though one was needed, to head off for two months to their villa in Spain, bought from selling shares during the dotcom bubble.

This year as the economy has gone south, the mercury has been rising and my peeling arms are testament to the power of the Irish sun. Rather ironically, I have lived in Australia for two years without developing a tan. Three weeks in Ireland and I’m like a ripe plum.

It was also like that back in 1991 in the days before the tiger was even a glint in the Mammy tiger’s eye. The only job opportunities were at the end of a boat or plane ride and college summers were spent washing dishes in Martha’s Vineyard or pulling pints in an ugly Irish theme bar in Munich.

Ray was a college student back then, but his ambitions didn’t even stretch to dishwashing. He was happy to sleep for the summer and let the big world wait for his graduation. He worked occasionally in his Dad’s hardware shop, helping out when old Jim was unwell with his heart and when the cattle fair was in town. On those days, a steady stream of farmers would visit the shop to stock up on bailing twine and pungent pesticides and Ray would earn enough to keep him in beer and curry chips for the week.

Our paths crossed one sunny morning in July 1991. I was on a cycling holiday down the west coast of Ireland, criss-crossing the back roads of Galway. We came to a small incline and I climbed from the saddle of my bike to attack the hill like Lance Armstrong in the Alps. I weighed a lot less then than I do now, but it was still enough to exert unbearable pressure on the pedal and it snapped violently, providing my testicles with an unfortunate introduction to the crossbar of my bike.

I dusted myself down, expressed some choice swearwords and studied my options. The bike was clearly unrideable and I was in the middle of the countryside with only some curious cows for company. Luckily a van passed and took me and the stricken machine into Woodford and pointed out the hardware shop. I walked in full of confidence that my dilemma was about to be solved. But Ray’s Dad was quick to bring me down to earth. Rural hardware shops service the farming industry and don’t tend to stock cycling equipment on the off chance that a passing cyclist might need a spare part.

Amazingly, he actually did have a pedal, but it was the British variety and I was riding a French bike. It seems that in the time of Napoleon, he not only decreed that Europeans should drive on the right hand side of the road, he also said that bicycle pedals had to have a different thread to those pesky Brits.

I was crestfallen, but Ray’s dad suddenly had an idea. Ray apparently had a French bike and we could take a pedal off that, attach it to my bike and bob’s your uncle. It seemed like a great plan to me but I was slightly concerned at how Ray would feel about having one pedal thereafter. Ray’s Dad didn’t think this was a problem as they could pick up a spare pedal in Galway City later that week. He thought a bigger problem would be getting Ray out of bed at 11.30am on a Tuesday morning.

I waited outside until a sleepy Ray appeared, not looking the least upset that his rest had been disturbed by the need to give a complete stranger a piece of his own bike. He led me round the back so that he could examine the problem through sleep filled eyes. He noticed a flaw straight away. The pedal had snapped off just above the thread and it was impossible to get traction on the broken stump to screw it out. He stroked his bum fluff covered chin before nodding sagely. I stood there helpless like the pitiful accountant I am, unable to offer any help apart from holding the bike upright while he examined it.

“I have a lathe in the shed and that might do the trick”, he said. I nodded, pretending that I understood what a lathe was.

Two hours later, he finally extracted the broken pedal, having worked the lathe with all the care and attention of a Waterford crystal maker. He then looked mournfully at his own bike and removed a pedal as though he was extracting one of his own kidneys. Minutes later, I was all set and ready to hit the road again. I reached for my wallet and Ray shuffled uncomfortably.

“I can’t take money off you”, he said. “Sure I only gave you an old pedal off my bike”.

It was my turn to be uncomfortable. “Listen, you got me out of a big hole here and it’s taken you a lot of effort, not to mention the fact that you now have to buy a new pedal and travel into the city to get it”.

“You’re on holiday”, he said. “And you’ve had a bit of an accident. It would be wrong for me to take advantage of that”.

I tried arguing with him for another ten minutes but he was not for turning. In the end, I worked on his old man. He was also mortified that I wanted to offer money and tried to pretend that it was their problem for not having the right product in the first place. Eventually, I left twenty pounds on the counter and implored him to treat his son to a few pints. I raced out before he could object and climbed back on the bike with a renewed faith in the strength of human decency.

That incident became the highlight of my holiday and made me proud to be Irish. Later on, as I lived in Ireland through the Tiger Years, I always thought of Ray when I was being ripped off by shops and tradesmen. That afternoon in Woodford seemed to belong to a different age, when decency and kindness were more important to us than profit.

I’d like to think that Ireland is regaining some of that decency and the Irish tourist board is launching a campaign to try and harness this, so that tourists feel more welcome.

They could start by trying to track Ray and his Dad down and to ask them for advice. I still have the broken pedal and perhaps they could use that as symbol for the country we once had before we sold it to the devil.

Where have all the signs to Muff gone?

Muff is a small town in Donegal in the North West of Ireland. One of the things you notice when driving into it is that there are no sign-posts pointing towards the town and nothing within the town itself to tell you where you are. This may be due to embarrassment on behalf of the local council or it could be because the signs keep getting pinched and now reside in Irish bars from Manhattan to Mandarin.

The petrol company “Top” have a garage on the edge of town. Apparently, they used to provide their staff with sweatshirts that said “Top Muff” but it led to complaints from the female employees. The village doesn’t have an airport but if it did, the signs for “Muff landing strip” would bring a chuckle to the hearts of Irish teenagers who must be bored with the joke about the annual Muff diving championships.

Muff aside, (as the Bishop said to the actress) Donegal is a pretty well sign-posted place. In fact all of Ireland now is, as the change from miles to kilometres a few years ago coincided with the country having a few bob to throw around. Ireland finally had a chance to dress up all those roads that the Germans unwittingly paid for in EU grants.

The blog went on holiday for a few weeks (as you may have noticed) and travelled back to the Old country. I felt like one of those returning yanks that Irish families used to entertain in the 1970s. All I needed was a Stetson hat and a condescending attitude to complete the picture. My uncle used to visit us from Boston when I was a kid and we’d drag him around all the relatives and plague him for money. Well, it turns out that they do that to people returning from Australia too.

I came with several objectives. The main one was to indulge in some Guinness for the first time in eighteen months, to sample some of the culinary delights that can only be found in Ireland, such as Curry chips and Tayto crisps, and to see if the death of the Celtic Tiger had made Ireland liveable again.

I’m pleased to report that all objectives were met and a fine time was had by all. The Guinness tasted like mother’s milk, the curry sauce was thick enough to stand a spoon in and the absence of obscene wealth has made everyone normal again. Before I left, it was impossible to hold a conversation in Ireland without it veering off into a discussion on property prices, what to spend your Special Savings account on, or what size of bouncy castle you were renting for your kid’s Communion. Thankfully, the recession means that conversations have returned to their normal status of football and Michael Jackson jokes.

I apologise to any of my Irish readers who have lost their jobs or found that their Romanian investment property is now in negative equity, but I really feel that the recession has been good for Ireland. There was a vulgarity about the Celtic Tiger that reminded me of Dell Boy in “Only Fools and Horses” after he had made his first million. One thing everyone seems agreed on is that we had really lost the run of ourselves. Now it’s possible to a chat with people in shops and to book a hotel room on the day you want to stay in it.

And the tiger has at least left a few toys behind. All that decking won’t disappear overnight and if the worse comes to the worse, it can at least be used for firewood. Everyone seems to have an “08” Sports utility vehicle, which assuming you can afford the petrol and insurance, will last until at least 2015 and the bouncy castles have to be used somehow and could be turned into cheap fitness centres for unemployed teenagers.

But the legacy of the tiger is pernicious in other respects. During the boom years the Irish government did everything in its power to help the building industry for reasons that are unclear. However, the large bribes paid to numerous government members probably helped. As a result, the country is now littered with ugly holiday homes in areas that used to be called “places of outstanding natural beauty”. As a child, my Dad used to take me to the beach at Baginbun every year. It was a pretty remote place on the Hook peninsula in Wexford and for years was marked only by a few nosy cows and a sign noting the spot as the original invasion point of Ireland by those perfidious Brits in 1169.

Now the beach is surrounded by hundreds of identical houses, standing empty as a silent memorial to the psychotic obsession with property that consumed Ireland for the past ten years.

Thankfully, it’s possible to find places where the blight of the tiger didn’t reach. I have seen many great places in the world. But few compare with the trip from Louisberg to Clifden. As you head towards Connemara, the landscape becomes rockier and the mountains higher. The wow factor increases and just when you think you’ve seen it all, you sweep round a corner into Killary Harbour. The evening sun was shining directly up the harbour towards the picturesque town of Leenane and there was not a sound. A little graveyard stands at the nexus of the harbour and the poor souls buried there are washed each night by the soothing nectar of the setting sun.

Carry on towards Clifden and you pass Kylemore Abbey, nestling at the end of a lake and offering itself selflessly to a million holiday photos. The West was not awake but it was all the better for that.

That is the real Ireland. A country of wild and natural beauty. Go there before the tiger recovers and somebody builds Spanish style hacienda villas all over it.