MICHAEL HARDINGtook a ramble through the weekend's Phoenix Festival in Tullamore: THERE WAS an indoor market in Tullamore on Saturday. Teenagers sold cheap jewellery, video tapes of 'Buffet the Vampire Slayer', and a young boy from Brazil offered me tomato and fennel bread, walnut log, focaccia and Chester cake. I bought a cordless telephone for €2. Then I had lunch in the Bridge Hotel.
An old man with dyed hair said: “This hotel is alright since they done it up. There was a time you could hardly see your dinner on the plate, it was so dark.”
A group of teenage girls from Spain huddled at the door, with skin like milky coffee. The old man said: “There’s a lot of foreigners in town.” He grimaced, as if foreign girls did to him what warble flies do to horses.
Outside, the lamp-posts were festooned with flags. Real men in black T-shirts arranged speakers on an open-air stage.
In a tent at the top of the square, a storyteller in a long dress was performing, to a handful of children and parents. Her performance was so mesmeric that I wanted to talk to her. I asked her how she became a storyteller. “I fell into it, sideways,” she said.
When she was finished, I walked out to Charleville Castle, where six jugglers were standing in a marquee, discussing tricks of the trade, and balancing balls on their fingertips. It seemed like a private moment, and I didn’t want to disturb them.
I talked instead to a Bulgarian woman, who told me she had a nine-month-old baby. We stood at a distance and she said: “The jugglers are brilliant; if you are in the square tonight, it will be a great show.” Charleville Castle is hidden up a driveway of ancient oaks, planted around the time of the Great Disaster, in 1785, when a hot-air balloon crash-landed on the town, causing a fire that destroyed 100 houses in Patrick Street. The Mallet Tavern was the only building not damaged.
And the Mallet survived; 15 years ago, it was one of the few pubs in Tullamore where a Traveller could get a drink; I know because I often called in, on my way to visit Mikey and Julia McDonagh, who lived on the local halting site.
I mentioned this to Rose Lee, whose small caravan was parked behind the old Texas store. Her poster proclaims her to be the seventh child of a seventh child; she reads tarot cards, angel cards and lots more.
“Julia and Mikey are dead now,” she said. “The light of heaven to both of them,” I said. Rose was gazing out the window.
“I need my palm read,” I said, “but not today.” “Some other day,” she said. There was an aura around her. “Can you see it?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “I can see it.” “I will be in Portarlington next Friday,” she said, and she smiled.
By 9pm it was raining hard, and Túcan, from Sligo, were playing heavy metal in the square. About 20 people huddled under trees and umbrellas. A weather-beaten man drank alcohol from a plastic bottle, and jumped up and down in the rain. But this was not Glastonbury. The chip van looked like a trawler in a gale, the Civil Defence volunteers looked like police in some east European state that had just been abolished.
I went for a drink with a biker who has been off the hooch for 20 years. He looked at me from inside a huge moustache and said: “This is my anniversary.” We were in the foyer of a new hotel, where he had just paid more than €4 for a small bottle of alcohol-free Becks. I congratulated him on his anniversary.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m having a good time; John Spillane is playing in the Square tomorrow evening, and I’ve got tickets for Colm Wilkinson as well.” “But it’s just not fair,” he said, looking at the non-alcoholic beer, “when they charge so much for this.” He stroked his moustache again.
“Hooch took me to the bottom,” he said. “I just kept deluding myself into believing that my feet would not smell, when I washed my socks in the toilet of a pub, and then put on soaking wet socks again, inside my shoes.” He groomed his moustache with the elegance of a character in a story by Dostoevsky.
The Neil Toner Band was tuning up behind us. He called for another beer, and I decided to leave. As I walked to my jeep, the rain ran in rivulets towards the gutters. It would take more than a balloon to set Tullamore on fire now, but inside the pubs, cool boys on guitars and double bases were doing their best.
