The annual ritual of returning to Cavan at Christmas

I WAS IN the upstairs bedroom on the phone. Rain was lashing suburbia. The woman on the other end of the line said we should meet before Christmas. She was correcting sociology essays, she said. I said, “We could meet in Dublin next week,” and I imagined flinging my arms around her on Dame Street, like people do on a foreign shore.

I asked her what she was doing. I hoped she’d say she was in the bedroom. But she was in the kitchen. And the television was on. And a sports reporter was saying that Rory McIlroy was battling a virus he picked up in Asia.

“Isn’t that what happened you?” she said.

“That’s correct,” I replied. “I picked up an Asian bug last year, and it was the start of my problems.” I was in Shanghai in November, and one evening I went off with a Chinese lady to a restaurant of her choice, and they served us a fish that looked like the rib cage of someone who died on the Titanic, and by midnight I was stuck to the toilet seat of my swanky all-mirrors hotel room, in dehydrated hysteria.

“What are you thinking of?” she asked. I couldn’t say because I was thinking of her, and how as she aged her eyes became more beautiful, although her once black hair, that had a purple hue the colour of plums, is now grey.

And although she has lived in Dublin for 30 years I asked her was she coming home for Christmas. Cavan people have a powerful tendency to come home for Christmas Eve, and collect in pubs in the centre of town and swim in Lough Oughter on Christmas morning, to banish the hangovers. Cavan people are great swimmers. I suppose it’s because so much of the county is still under water. In the 17th century more than half the county was below the waterline, and even as recently as last summer I saw men walking on Main Street wearing little else but flippers.

At the moment I can’t decide where to swim. I’m living in Leitrim and working in Cavan, so I’m half the week in both places, which is interesting because I can contrast and compare both counties from an anthropological point of view.

For example Leitrim people are extremely reticent. They say little and understate everything. Perhaps they suffered more over the centuries; lost more in the Famine or through emigration than Cavan did. Or perhaps it’s just that Cavan people tend to have a greater relish for the English language. Old Elizabethan words roll off the Cavan tongue with ease; “That’s an odious horrid bad day,” people say in Cavan – even if it’s only drizzling.

And there is a tendency in Cavan to exaggerate everything. I once met a man who told me that he caught a pike so big that he was tempted to save the scales and use them instead of slates, to re-roof the house.

I was in a hotel in Dublin recently and I inquired of a Cavan barman whether, as was rumoured, Nama controlled the hotel. He told me that it did. And then with the relish of a born storyteller he told me who owned it, and how the owner had run away from the wife during the boom, and now the new girlfriend had run off as well, and the unfortunate haveral was in a flat in Sandycove, a broken man.

But in essence, there’s not much difference between one leisure centre and the next; saunas are full of the same clientele; young women, old women, groups of athletic boys and men in their 50s with a dazed silence in their faces, like the whiteness of the earth after snow, that suggests they’ve recently been shocked by the discovery of a dodgy prostate or high blood pressure. They look like disillusioned monks on the wooden bench, trying to remember what their lives were like before they began reading Nietzsche.

And yet each Christmas I return to Cavan like an old fish to the great tapestry of lake and drumlin that lies in the centre of the county where I cycled and fished as a boy. And sometimes I meet other boys with grey hair and we sit in the sauna and discuss our prostates, and sometimes I walk by the lakeshore, remembering the silky texture of a young girl’s hair, which all the boys used to say had a purple hue, like the plums in Lord Farnham’s garden.