In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .
I was going to tell you about my adventures trying to get a straight answer from city hall as to why they are building gulags in Ireland, but that will have to wait. I haven’t been able to make it to the hall because our family has been more or less constantly sick for the past three weeks. That’s one thing they don’t tell you about moving to a new continent: it’s full of viruses that you’re never experienced before and you can count of being ill for about six months. In other words, for exactly as long as we’re going to be here.
Anyway, despite illness Karen and I went out on Saturday night. Our older son’s school was having a fundraiser and since they been so good about fitting him into the curriculum we thought it would be churlish not go. So Saturday night we called a cab and bombed over to the very swish Salt Hill Hotel.
Now, Salt Hill itself is a stylish/touristy part of Galway that runs along the waterfront. There’s a promenade there that some lunatics like to walk along for exercise. If I may be allowed a digression, I’ll tell you why these people are lunatics. It’s because of the weather? Now, in the phone calls that I’ve made back to Canada, the people I’ve spoken to have always asked, how’s the weather. Usually I cannot answer without opening the door and looking. The reason is simple: if the question comes more than one minute into the call, the weather may be entirely different than when I first dialed the phone. No guff, gentlemen, but I climbed in the car one morning to hear this weather forecast on the radio: "Sunny today, with rain, sleet, hail, snow, thunder and wind." Now the forecaster didn’t mean, as he would in Canada, that this wild melange of weather conditions would play out over the day. No. He meant it would play out every ten minutes. And it did. It is possible, in this country, to leave the house in sunshine and be in a hail storm by the end of the block. You need to carry six different outfits with you on any given day.
The only constant, and the reason for this lunatic weather, is the wind. Now let’s think about wind. Some days you may say to yourself, "hey, it’s really blowing out here! Maybe I should take the kids out kite flying! It would be a good day for sailing!" Uh huh. Yeah. That ain’t the sort of wind we’re talking about. The wind here works like this: you’re lying in bed, sound asleep, when suddenly WHAM! A truck drives into your house! You sit bolt upright, gasping in fear, and start to fumble for the phone. Quick! Call the police, call the ambulance! A truck has crashed into the house! Before you can find the phone, however, it happens again. But this time you notice it’s not at ground level. The truck has smashed into the second floor! A flying truck? A double-decker bus? Or is there some lunatic out there with a crane and a wrecking ball trying to take out your house? We’re under mortar attack!
No. It’s the wind. A wind so strong it rips plants out of the garden, bends trees to the ground, and topples fences. How strong it is? An American tourist was hiking west of here a couple of weeks ago. She climbed to the top of the hill AND THE WIND BLEW HER OFF! She died. The wind killed her. We have driven along Salt Hill Road, past the promenade, on a windy day and seen the ocean being washed up over the walk, through a parking lot, across the road, to deposit sea weed and rocks on the far side. This is the length of a city block away. Big rocks.
Anyway, some lunatics walk through this. They find it bracing. Energizing. They are often found washed out to sea.
This also serves to explain why the windows in our house here each have five locks on them: two on each side and one at the bottom. These things lock so tight you could put them in the side of a submarine and not worry about leaks. But if they weren’t that securely fastened, the wind would rip them from the building and send them crashing down the street.
Anyway, the Salthill Hotel. The fund-raising event being run by the school was called "A Night at the Races." The invitations said to be there at 8 sharp. We showed up at 8, found the big room, and it was nearly empty. Punctuality is not a concept the Irish are comfortable with. We’ve been to several plays where people were walking into the theatre 45 minutes late. That for a play that runs 90 minutes. We retired to the bar and tried again at 8:30. It had begun to fill up.
Now, picture a fair-sized meeting room. It’s full of small round tables, each set with a white table cloth, an ashtray, and two bags of chips. At the back of the room is a large, well-stocked bar manned by one of the biggest women I have ever seen. This lady was two axe handles across. She could hoist a keg of Guinness on either shoulder while carrying a tray of drinks in her teeth. Don’t mess with the bar keep. Anyway, at the front of the room is a table with prizes on it. We were given a little yellow booklet full of ads from sponsors and 12 "racing charts." Each listed the names of ten horses, their owners, and jockeys.
Gentlemen, we were in a hotel, not at a race track. What the hell was going on here?
An MC came out and told us to place our bets on the first race. Bet tickets cost 1 euro. ($1.40 Cdn). Utterly fucking confused, I went to the betting table and bought two tickets for the first horse. Why the first? It’s name was Karen’s Fancy. I then sat down and craned my neck around to see the horses. Where were they? Behind the bar? Where were they going to run? Around the tables? From bag of chips to bag of chips? Between you and me, I’m rather frightened of horses. They’re big and have hooves. They’re also stupid and easily spooked. You let loose ten horses in a room full of drinking, smoking Irishmen and it would be a blood bath. I was beginning to sweat as race time approached. I noted where the nearest exit was and braced myself to bolt. Any damn horse comes in the room and I’m gone. Karen, well, Karen likes horses. She’d be fine.
But I was being irrational. No way they would bring ten horses into a hotel ballroom. It had to be ponies. Perhaps the famous Connemara ponies, wild natives of rocky western Ireland. Small and sturdy, these beasts are famous for their endurance and hardiness. You could get ten of them in the room no problem. You could even put midget riders on them and still clear the ceiling. But they would play havoc on the carpet.
The betting finished and the MC grabbed his microphone and shouted "Let’s go racing!!" He dimmed the lights and I tensed to sprint. Then a movie started. I had not noticed it before, but in the corner was a movie screen and a projector. This was one of those old reel-to-reel projectors, the type they had in our grade schools. You know, the ones that never quite worked, that burned the film, that had really bad sound. One of those. Two old geezers started this antique up and a film of a horse race, than might have taken place 40 years ago, played on the screen, slightly out of focus and with bad sound. The racing commentator on the film called the horses’s progress but did not use their names, only numbers. In a minute it was over.
Karen’s Fancy, horse no. 1, won. I made 6 euro.
Get it? The entire night was dedicated to betting on horses in movies. Horse race movie betting. Every race was a separate one-minute film, laboriously threaded into the projector by the old boys. Before each film the MC exhorted us to lay our money down. WE WERE BETTING ON MOVIE HORSES!
Am I the only one who thinks this is insane? How do you make an intelligent bet on a horse that appears in an old movie of a horse race? How are the odds figured on the horses? And why, oh why, were people CHEERING ON THE HORSES?! By the last race, when people were really liquored up, folks were jumping out of their chairs, tearing their hair out, and SCREAMING at the screen as their horses ran around the track. What? I mean, screaming at a real race track is illogical enough: how would a horse, a creature that is slightly stupider than a cat (and that’s saying something) surrounded by nine other horses thundering around a track, while being whipped by some saddle monkey on his back, how would that animal be encouraged by the sound – as if he could hear it – of some yahoo in the stands calling his name? Now, how would the movie version of that same horse be motivated by someone yelling at the screen?!
The Irish are a strange and superstitious people.
The only time they stopped screaming was when the hotel staff put some complimentary snacks on the tables: bowls of tiny fried and salted pork sausages. Those grease-bomb type that you have for breakfast when you’re hungover. A bowl of those. With salt.
People hoovered them up. They evaporated out of the bowl. Throw that sort of snack food in with the ciggies and the booze and you have to wonder a) why everyone in this country over the age of 15 doesn’t have heart disease, and b) why the streets aren’t full of the sort of hyper-obese specimens you see in so much of middle America.
But back to the race. Maybe it’s not such a surprise. The Irish love to gamble. The Irish Sweepstakes was, for years, the largest lottery in the world. There is a bookmaker on every corner of downtown Galway. The Irish will bet on anything: horse racing, dog racing, cow racing. They will happily take odds on what colour will come up next on a traffic light. And every sports organization, church group, and public works project has a lottery. Some of these, like the ones run by the church groups, are laughably small, but they are still reported on the radio. Yes, the radio. A couple of times a week 20 minutes of airtime is taken up with reading of ALL the lottery results in the county. We’re given winning numbers, names of winners, and amounts won. It gets very odd when they get down to the smaller lotteries: "And this just in! The Ladies Auxillary of St. Joseph of the Bloody-Nail-Filled-Cross Church in Upper Rahoon, Galway County, has a winner in their Easter Basket fundraising lottery. The winning ticket number was 7, and that was held by Mrs. Fiona O’Leary, who won 12 euro. Well done Fiona!"
Now throw into the mix the Irish love of sports. They’re nuts about any and all sporting events. The sports section of the newspaper is easily twice as big as all the other sections put together and the news broadcasts are regularly two-thirds sports. How is that possible in a small country? Because the sports at ALL levels are deemed newsworthy. International sports, of course, but also national, county, university, highschool, primary school, and play-school sports are reported: "Little Mary O’Casey, aged 5, bested her friends in a thrilling game of hopscotch this morning before a record crowd of admiring parents. That marks the third straight victory for Mary who is expected to be moving on to Grade 1 hopscotch finals next month. We will be keeping a close eye on this up-and-comer and will keep you posted on her career."
And they don’t just report on soccer, rugby, Irish football (like rugby but much less polite), and hurling (like field hockey but much more dangerous). I have heard radio reports of the results from billiard tournaments and (wait for it) dog trials. Yes, dog trials: "This just in! Patrick McDonnell’s prize bitch, Snapper, has just won the gold in sheep herding at the Rosmuc Sheepdog Trials. Congratulations to Patrick and Snapper!"
So, the Irish love to bet and they love sports. On a windy spring night there’s no horse racing so they get hammered, eat pork sausages, and bet on movie horses. The next day they play Irish football and burn off the calories. It all fits. It’s nuts, but it fits.
And by the way, this Sunday is St. Patrick’s Day. I shall report on the festivities.
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