There’s a nervous unease in my stomach, and the cure is to meet people – we’re on the right road

Billy Keane

Keane’s Kingdom

It's amazing what you see when you get out onto the open road - like a mad heifer trying to sidestep a couple of farmers. Photo: Alexey Zarodov

April 19 2021 07:25 AM

I was on the road to Cork for work this week, when the mad heifer came at me like a charging rhinoceros.

And not a sheet of armour plating welded on to the car, nor a big game gun ready nor cocked in the front seat – only a bar of chocolate. There is no stopping a rampaging beast with a bar of chocolate, unless she had a sweet tooth. The younger of the two farmers shooed her back towards the older man.

The wirey, older man, wearing a peaked cap, took on the mad heifer. The heifer did her best to get drowned or injured in a deep dyke. The experienced herdsman drove her on with a fresh air swish of a sally switch. He forced her down a bohereen to the left. The younger man took the herding on from there. I lowered the window of the car.

“You’re one fit man?” said I, inviting a reply. “Not too bad for 85” he said. “She’s mad” he said, referring to the cracked heifer. “She’s a neighbour’s beast and she broke out.”

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“I’d be Murphy myself”, he said. And off he went on the cattle drive.

If anyone knows Murphy Himself, please tell him he’s in the paper and tell him too, his swashbuckling derring-do convinced me the worst is over.

(Just in case there was another Murphy man chasing lost heifers, the spot I met him in is just after the three signs for free-range eggs, up near the top of Taur, in the hill country between Cork and Kerry.)

The day before, we were in Ballybunion for the first time in nearly five months. Our teacher, the writer Brian MacMahon, taught us a line for our essays. It was “the sun was shining in a cloudless blue sky”. And so it was. Over on the other side of the estuary, West Clare was still there, miles away, but close enough to touch. It was in this very spot, standing there at the water’s edge, that I met the poet Brendan Kennelly. His papers, a treasury of poetry, were lodged for good in the Trinity library on Thursday.

The day we met, years ago, Brendan was glistening and dripping as he came out of the sea. He pointed out over the Atlantic. “Look”, he said, “look at it, and not a furze bush between here and America.”

Up over the Nun’s Strand, I met a philosopher who lived nearby. There is no more beautiful view in the middle of any town anywhere in the world.

Here is his take on life. “I check the tide every morning before I go to work to make sure it’s gone out, and then at evening time, I take another look to make sure it came back in again.” Unlike the man who was Murphy himself, he was too shy to even give a bit of his name.

From the Nun’s Beach, I made my way to the mouth of the Feale at Ballyeigh, near Ballybunion Golf Club. Over the water is the fishing village of The Cashen, where my great grandmother lived.

A seal takes the sun on a sand spit and I bid the great grandmother the time of day with a little prayer.

Mick Ryan, who lives in Ballybunion, wasn’t shy and gave his name.

“Every part of the car used to have a grease nipple. Grease was put in through the nipple and the cars stayed as good as new. The manufacturers realised there was no money in cars that lasted forever and took away the grease nipples.”

There was more than a hint of roguery in Mick’s mirthful voice, but I think he might be right. Bring back the grease nipple.

Mick put himself back into gear for the rest of his walk.

“Do you know,” he said, “I could do with a grease nipple myself. I’m as stiff as a poker.”

The pinch has given us the ticket to speak to each other again. Small talk is freedom’s cry.

I’m lying in bed on this sunny Friday morning, typing away in my old room up over the pub. The heating came on automatically and you could fry an egg on the radiators.

I have no idea how to moderate the central heating. It gives me all I can do to turn the tap on and off.

I open the skylight with a long pole, similar to the ones the gondola drivers use in Venice, and the sweeps shove up the chimneys in Ennis.

The sweetest sound is piped in. The schoolchildren are playing again in Scoil Réalta na Maidine – The School of the Morning Star. I love the name of my old school.

The sounds of the children having fun at small break skinned the cat on flat roofs, skirted the town-top forest of chimney pot bonsai, on then through V-roof valleys, acoustic gullies and drain pipe synthesizers, right in to my man and boy bedroom.

The children are playing in the school yard and we are over the worst. I hope and pray we are over the worst.

The man who was in my class in St Michael’s College, the font of learning, shouted out across the Square just now when I wandered out for air.

“Hi Kane, we’ll have the waccine before we know it.”

If you weren’t from the land where Vs are Ws, you wouldn’t know if he was talking about a Brazilian or AstraZeneca.

For months now I have had this nervous unease in my stomach.

Scientists say there are nearly as many brains in the belly as in the head. The rumbling of hunger brought on by thoughts of a feast of Griffin’s black pudding – made just over the border in famed Athea – replaces the nervous unease. The cure is in meeting people. There are 83 years between the heifer wrangler from Taur and the cat whisperer of Listowel. Marmalade the orange cat is even wilder than the cracked heifer. Hugo Finucane is two and about three weeks. He calls me Billy even though I’m his grandad.

We don’t even know if Marmalade is Marmalade’s real name, or even if he has ever been named. There is no register of births, deaths and marriages for cats. Marmalade fidgeted with last year’s twigs in the warm spring sun. Cats always find the sunniest spots.

Hugo lay down next to Marmalade, flat on his tummy, silent. For the first time ever, Marmalade didn’t run away when Hugo came out to play. The world is surely coming good when crazy cats take no notice.

Notes then from meetings made with seaside philosophers, small boys and old men show us the how, in this, the beginning of the new time, when we must learn to live again.