Out With the Old

I PUT the fear of God into this callow New Year when he first encountered me about an hour ago. I came up out of the bedroom properly hung over after having finally disposed of his father a few hours earlier at venues in Clare and Kerry, and it is fair to say that I was not a pretty sight.

Gray dressing gown, wild white hair, battered slippers, skewed beard, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other.

The Dutch Nation took a backward step, the cats disappeared out the window and the dogs out the door.

I glanced in the mirror and recoiled myself for God's sake. If they were still making those Hammer horror movies I would get the kind of role that lasts for the first 10 minutes. Lads would be digging me up in a dark cemetery at midnight.

But that was an hour ago, and now I'm a lot more presentable and I'm behind the keyboard writing my first words of 2008. And Divil take the hindmost.

Like old tomcats I do go a bit feral at this time of the year. Dramatically, like the old cavemen, I let my locks and beard grow very long as a protection against the harsh weather. Both are infinitely more trimmed in the summer.

Sometime during these limbo days I walked with my sons Cuan and Dara into the Railway Bar in Ballybunion. There were two warm hearth fires there and a warm and lively atmosphere.

We sat up to the bar. Cuan and Dara were clean-shaven and tidy.

The character beside them, foxy and rascally, is the kind of character who garnishes all seaside resort bars, even in winter. A man with craic in him.

Inside the first minute he says to my sons, "Where are you lads from?" Dara responds that they are from Galway, but their father is now living in Newmarket-on-Fergus in Clare. The character responds at once that he knows Galway well and spent holidays there.

"But the only thing I know about Newmarket is that the barber is dead!" Quick, sharp risky jab out of the top drawer. I love that.

Inside 10 minutes he is singing a good version of "Dingle Bay" for us. The west is different still.

We are in Ballybunion for a surprise birthday party for my brother Mickey. We surprise him a little later in McMunn's Hotel down the road. There is a wild Kerry gale blowing outside, but nothing to the gale of music and craic within.

We have a great night of the kind you need to dispel the common enough lassitude that can attend the short dark days between Christmas and the New Year.

During the small hours I am moved to deliver unto the throng my song about Christmas in the trenches 1915 which fared very well in the charts this season. There are young German waitresses on the staff, and the tears roll down their pretty cheeks.

The party moves back by minibus to Mickey's home in Listowel, and we all see the dawn before sleeping.

Back home in Clare I sadly have to attend the funeral parlor for the first stage of the funeral of Bridgie McBride from Stonehall, a marvelous, feisty, witty octogenarian neighbor and friend.

Bridgie used telephone me on air at Clare FM when I was there, always on folkloric matters and craic. Once she was accused by neighbors of having a dangerously aggressive gander called Ulick. We had great sport around that.

I last saw her in the Honk on Christmas Eve, out with her talented artistic daughters and son, celebrating the season. She died suddenly a few hours later.

In the coffin in the funeral parlor in Ennis she looked serene, but it was strange to be passing her by without laughing at one of her jokes.

On the way home we dropped into the fabled pub of another special octogenarian, Mrs. Anna O'Neill of Newmarket. One drink led to another.

The Pudden and myself, in perfect harmony, went into the trenches again to loud applause. My friends had to drag me away.

I go alone in the dying hours of the year to collect another consignment of poitin from my trusted source. Not alone do I get it, but I'm also given a tiny bottle containing about four inches of the Mother of All Poitins (distilled five times, instead of the usual three).

It's aglow in the bottle. It would nearly burn its way through altogether.

I give a sip the next evening to a friend whose enjoyment of the butt days of the year is being hampered by a flu. He's completely cured, he tells me, inside three hours. I have the rest in reserve for myself against anything this callow New Year throws at me and mine.

Coming home from Kerry the afternoon after the party, I noticed with some little shock that both Cuan and Dara, now in their early thirties, have already got a few grey hairs on their temples.

I say to myself that I am not at all ready yet to be the sire of sons going grey. We talk about for a while and decide that the best solution is to forget all about it. Which we duly did.

And that's it for now. All of you out there would be well advised to treat this New Year, this callow youth of a thing, with no more respect than it deserves.