Friday 22nd May
Breakfast in the hotel dining room
CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH I deserve this. I’m RELAXING. CRUNCH But it’s sliced white pan toast and fake blackcurrant jam. The first slice is hot but by the time I get to the next one a little time has elapsed and it’s bendy and cold. I smear butter on it and it sits there, not melting. This isn’t me, I think, and I leave it. I also leave most of the porridge, as the cook isn’t on his A-game this morning, unlike yesterday, when he made wonderful porridge. But the enormous plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon is perfect and I wolf down the lot. I can’t linger over my sketch of the strand though, not because I am being rushed (I’m not) but because there’s a wedding on here today and forty friends and family have joined the wedding party for breakfast, along with babies. The babies are very quiet but the adults are extremely loud and don’t give a fiddle that there are two tables of quiet breakfast-goers less than two feet away. I must be getting old though because my misanthropic thoughts are almost immediately replaced by charitable ones, vague ones about hoping they all have a lovely time. Back in the day I would have hated on them violently in my mind. I am losing my touch.
The morning before, my touch was clearly in evidence: a young man in the table next to me (two feet away) had chosen to douse himself in aftershave, and like a sheep being wormed he must have got into the entire trough. Every bite I take I can taste it, and even when he totters off to get orange juice the miasma doesn’t clear, nor even when he and his girlfriend leave. She is a sports obsessive and talks ninety to the dozen about a sports reality show she’s been watching – something like Gladiators but sounding a bit less slapstick – and she is so serious and so rapid-fire about her predictions as to how it’s going to go that I think she might be neuro-sparkly. Perhaps it’s her special interest. Her male companion answers in monosyllables. He is English, she Irish, and they are both extremely handsome and fit-looking. But I watched Naked Attraction on the hotel telly in my room the night before, like an eejit, and I cannot imagine ever finding anyone attractive ever again. I am in nudity-trauma.
Wednesday 20th May
I meet the group I am going to spend two days with. I know from the start that they are going to be warm and open.
I am making a monthly magazine, and I need a title for it. It’s all about life here on the west coast of Ireland. Once, an Irish marketing lady working for the local enterprise office told me that the Wild Atlantic Way is as well known in the US as Route 66 is to us, so I decide to name my magazine along the lines of the Wild Atlantic Way. Besides, I don’t just live in the vicinity of the route that stretches all the way south from Donegal to Cork – I live ON it. My house backs onto a field which ends with the coast on one side, and there isn’t any thoroughfare between the road in front of my house and the sea so I guess that means I am on the actual Wild Atlantic Way, even if it’s not marked on the map. But I digress! Have I told you that I live in paradise? You see, our area is completely mobbed by tourists from April to October every year, but I happen to live on a peninsula that’s accessed by a tiny road you just drive right past. In fact, when I hear cars slow down and the hum of a window being opened to ask me a question, I can be certain the driver is going to ask me if this is the road to Kinvara. I always tell them that they took the wrong turn. And when we cycle, we have the road to ourselves, and in minutes we’re at the sea for a swim or just a nice walk.
I outsource the naming of the magazine to my daughter Olivia, and I send her the contenders: Wild Atlantic Wail, Wild Atlantic Post and Wild Atlantic…Drawing A Blank. Olivia likes the last one the best, but dutifully takes on the task. She comes up with Wild Atlantic Ink. I love it, and the magazine has a name.
I realise I have stumbled upon a secret joy. I first made comics when I was seven or eight years old, when I was still cocooned in bliss.
