Our national holiday can be a truly gas occasion, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I WAS DROWNING the shamrock with the General last year in a local hotel, and I mentioned to him that I intended climbing the Reek. “Be careful about that,” he said. “It’s not the ankles you need to worry about; it’s the wind.” I said: “You can’t avoid wind if you’re on a mountain.” He said: “You’re not getting my point; mountain climbing is a useless and unnecessary exercise. And excessive exercise is widely recognised as a cause of flatulence.”
He should know; he breaks wind like an officer’s horse, and usually excuses it by saying: “I am becoming more like Dr Swift, by the day!” – as if his wind was as bracing a comment on modern society as one of Jonathan Swift’s pamphlets.
“When a man exercises, he shakes up the innards, and the intestines are left like a leaking balloon; so beware of the mountain.”
We were sitting in the foyer. Green shamrocks had been painted on the windows. The receptionist wore a leprechaun hat, and the foyer was full of children in green uniforms. The General finished his sixth pint of Guinness and belched pleasantly.
“And avoid cabbage,” he declared, “at all costs.” “But cabbage is full of zinc,” I protested. “Great for the prostate.” “Bacon and cabbage are consumed by the Irish in unnatural quantities,” he replied, “but people don’t realise that cabbage can do to the stomach what a lighted match does to a tank of petrol. I used to feed it to the horses years ago, the night before a hunt, to make them jump higher.”
“You may be correct about the cabbage,” I conceded, “but nobody could accept that climbing a mountain is a cause of flatulence.” “My good man,” he said, “when I was meditating in India, I always did yoga stretches before sitting; then, I often experienced methane bursting from various orifices. My guru explained that this initial period in the meditation session is known as ‘the settling of the winds’. But I was only doing yoga; consider what you would be like after climbing the Reek.” The General’s massive eyebrows lifted, and he stared at me with great intensity. “And another thing to avoid is the boiled egg. A formidable source of wind; especially if it’s a bit off.”
He paused as if to contemplate some profound sorrow. A waiter in a green waistcoat and tie was passing. “Bartender,” the General bellowed, “two more pints of your finest stout, please.”
“What’s wrong with eggs?” I asked. He said: “You can’t be too careful; nowadays they feed hens far too much corn. I see the result in the supermarket – corn-fed free-range eggs. Nothing worse! If they were fed scraps from the dinner plate they would lay much better. Just imagine a person, fed on nothing but muesli. Egad! You wouldn’t want to be in the same room.”
There was a tall woman sitting on a nearby sofa wrapped in a fur coat, and sipping from a long glass of something green, through a straw. She was listening to the General with great attention.
“Those hippie families in the west,” the General said, “give their children nothing but lentils, and when the poor creatures go to school everybody laughs at them.”
The woman on the sofa rose. Clearly she had heard enough. She approached us and I dreaded what she might say. “I kept chickens,” the General continued, “when I lived in Kilkenny; I would cook one, occasionally, in a pot and make a hot curry, and by jingo, if there was curry left over, I fed it back to the other ones in the yard, and they lapped it up.”
I said: “That’s disgusting.”
“Ah yes,” he said, “but they laid wonderfully spicy eggs.”
“Forgive me for interrupting,” the lady said, her eyes on the General, “but I believe we knew each other, when you lived in Kilkenny.”
The General’s face brightened.
“Delia!” he exclaimed, with great excitement, and he stood to embrace her, and just then, and without the slightest embarrassment, he broke wind enough to sail an armada.
“Oh don’t mind me; it’s only the Guinness,” he declared, as two more pints arrived on a tray, with little shamrocks imprinted on their creamy heads.