Do You Go To Dublin?

I spent last week in Ireland at our family house in Leitrim. The drive down from Belfast was wonderful, the gorse blazing away on the hillsides, the hedgerows frothing with cow parsley. Then we left the main road and made our way across the border via a road like a green tunnel, through the little village of Kiltyclogher where you could safely lie down in the middle of the road without worrying about the traffic, up the hill to Straduffy, where there is no TV, no landline, only intermittent mobile reception and no internet, and where each morning and evening a hare comes lolloping around the house, grazing on the snow-in-summer that grows beside the path.

Our days and nights were silent except for the birdsong, the bewildered cries of sheep and cattle in nearby fields and the frenzied buzzing of bees in the sycamores. On occasions we wandered down around the broken stones of the old house where my father was born, following the stream that runs through our land in a series of waterfalls. On all sides the bluebells were running riot and here and there orchids peeped shyly from the grass.

It was a blissful few days until, towards the end of our stay, I was obliged to drive into Sligo town on an errand. I like Sligo with its old grey stone buildings and its ridiculous over-supply of bookshops, but it still felt like a betrayal of something to venture back into the busy world we had so briefly and willingly left behind.

As I was leaving, my business conducted, my attention was caught by a man in his late forties standing outside the supermarket. He was smartly dressed but in a strangely unfashionable way, so that he looked as if he had somehow materialized from the early nineteen sixties. There was an unreadable look on his face: anxiety and hopefulness, eagerness and embarrassment, innocence and guile. I couldn't place it.

As I watched, he approached a woman in her twenties who was coming out of the supermarket pushing a trolley. 'Do you go to Dublin?' he abruptly asked. She looked at him in confusion. 'No, I don't,' she said. 'Why do you ask?'

'I just thought, you know, you looked like you might,' he mumbled, crestfallen. Then the eagerness returned to his expression. 'Where are you from?'

'Round here,' the woman said, but she was beginning to edge away from him.

People are friendly in the West of Ireland. It's very common for someone you don't know to speak to you in the street but I realised, at about the same time as the young woman, that the smartly-dressed-but-strangely-old-fashioned man was not just being friendly. He was either slightly unhinged or, more probably, 'going to Dublin' was a euphemism, for what exactly, I leave to your imagination.

It spoiled the picture for me, but it also made the picture. The serpent in paradise – it's peaceful without him but there's no story.