Ireland Day Six
DAY SIX
THE BEACH
The following morning we had all risen from our beds, breakfasted and gone about our daily ablutions with the general acceptance that today was going to be a “rest day”. This is a euphemism which basically means that we don’t do any driving on that day and we stay sat on our arses doing stuff around the house, or in the gardens or down on the beach. This was supposed to be what the holiday was about for all of us. While holidays where you go to places and do all kinds of crazy things every day may appeal to some, we all lead such hectic lives (apart from me who 'sits on my computer playing all day') that sometimes we just want to get away from it all, and that included doing things. Rest was the byword for the week and it seemed like finally, today we’d all get the chance to unwind in our own differing ways.
By mid morning it was fairly evident what this was going to entail for the majority. My Dad had his nose in Kris’s DS and was busy playing some form of maths game. It was rather like holidaying with the Vordermans with my Dad. Katharine, my Mum and Alex were all reading, with Alex stopping every 30 seconds to answer a text or post something on Facebook via her ubiquitous mobile phones. The three kids were busy asking if they could go to the beach to play and so Ian and I decided we’d take them down because, well to put it bluntly, they were nagging the tits off us to do something more exciting than sitting in the house playing on the Wii and it seemed a safer bet than gaffa taping their mouths shut.
The wind still howled across the beach, although some of the chilly bitterness had been taken off it since it had changed to a more southerly direction and as we walked out into the garden, I had an idea. In our car we had packed a couple of packs of games equipment that we’d bought from Tesco. One was a baseball bat, glove and ball and the other was a rounders pack. While I didn’t think we had enough people to play either game I thought to myself, we could have a game of catch or something on the beach with the kids. So I grabbed the pack of rounders equipment and we walked down to the beach.
The tide was out that morning leaving a large section of the beach uncovered and, as usual, we were the only people out there. We walked along the sand chatting about this and that as the children played with the ball and the dogs, who had staged a mass breakout from the house and joined us on our stroll. It was good to have Pepsi with us once again, bounding along the beach as if nothing untoward had happened to her.
I’d put my cap on before the walk and it was a Tennessee Titans cap, of the erstwhile American football team. As we walked, we noticed Jon walking down to join us and he began chatting to me about the forthcoming American Football season, when an idea formed in my brain. While rounders wasn’t really feasible, why couldn’t we have a three-a-side game of American football? When I mentioned it to the kids they seemed totally baffled initially, but when I explained the simple rules they seemed very keen. The promise of mindless violence against others tends to motivate children rather well.
Using the wickets from the rounders set, Jon, Ian and I drew a large rectangle in the sand and divided it down the middle. This would be our pitch. It was about 15 metres long by 8 metres wide. At each end of the pitch we drew another rectangle and decorated them with the names of our favourite teams, I wrote “Titans” in what was to be our endzone while Jon wrote “Rams” in his. The premise of the game was simple; each team would have four chances to score a touchdown by getting the ball into the endzone without being touched by a member of the opposite team. We could run the ball or pass it through the air forwards once on each play. Tackling was not allowed as it was touch football (tempting as it was to launch my 67 stone frame at Ian’s 10 or Jon’s 12 stone I felt that to do so would be unfair on them and perhaps also my 3 stone son Josh, although when he was gobby, the temptation grew...) Each team had 4 attempts with the ball to score a touchdown and then, if they failed to score, the other team would receive the ball and have their turn.
We divided the teams up as fairly as possible. Because Jon and I knew the rules and the basic skills involved, we took a team each. Because Ian was the only adult remaining, I let Jon have him because both of them added together roughly equated to me. They then took Josh, the smaller of the two kids and I got Kris and an initially reluctant Jess, who warmed more to the game when I pointed out she’d be able to tackle her brother quite legitimately.
The game started with both our teams not really doing much. Tackling was easy initially as the kids (and Ian) struggled to get to grips with what to do. Neither team scored early on as defence triumphed over offence. However that changed when Jon’s team finally put together a neat run and Ian sprinted past Jess, Kris and I into our endzone to put them in front. I couldn’t even call a dodgy penalty on the play to stop them taking the lead.
Kids never take losing well and Kris had something of a titty lip about the whole thing, accusing Jon of holding him and stopping him making the tackle. However I tried my best to calm them down and assure them that we could bounce back. We did so spectacularly, Jess rushing a few yards and then on the next play, Kris raced into their end zone and I found him with an arcing pass to bring our team level! Hurrah! This of course sent Josh into a frenzy of accusation, accusing Jess of cheating (she probably did, but what the hell, I’m not ashamed to admit that I am occasionally blatantly biased) and Jon and Ian then had to calm down the irate 6 year old.
On the next turn Jon foolishly decided to let Ian be the quarterback, who is the person who throws the ball or hands it off to the runner. Even more foolishly, they decided to try and pass the ball to Jon in the endzone. Ian under threw his pass considerably and I was there to catch it for an interception! Woo Hoo!
“Uncle Ian! That was rubbish!” moaned Josh accurately.
Unfortunately for me the positive feelings were not going to last. On our next turn I decided to try a similar pass to Kris in the endzone as I had done previously. When I got the ball, I noticed Ian and Jon had dropped off deep into their endzone to ensure I couldn’t throw the ball to Kris. Josh was close to Jess, but in front of me was wide open space. Deciding that even an elephant like me could gain a few more yards, I decided to try and dash into it.
I should have realised that ‘dash’ isn’t a word that could ever be applied to me and it was an entirely futile hope that I could somehow impart acceleration onto my cumbersome frame and lumber it forwards in any meaningful fashion. As my brain told my legs to move I pushed off on the sand with my feet, only the sand was slippery and my feet slacked adhesion and I felt myself falling unerringly to the floor. As I fell I can clearly remember thinking “Oh No, I am going to look a complete twat now... I just hope that the resulting shudder doesn’t show up on the richter scale, not much of the sand beneath me is fused into shards of glass and that the crater I leave behind will be put to good use in future generations...”
Sure enough as my head plunged into the sand, my team mates fell about laughing and I was tagged by my son who gleefully pointed out “Daddy! You’re rubbish! You fell over!” before falling on the floor laughing next to me. My last vestige of dignity now stripped, I joined in with the laughter and dusted the wet sand off myself before limping, gingerly and red faced back into the huddle to join up with my giggling team mates.
Suffice to say, we didn’t score and soon Ian, Josh and Jon had the ball back. My sister had also wandered down to watch what we were doing with a mixture of bafflement and curiosity. She watched as Ian and Jon almost got into our endzone as we defended for our lives. They were just a yard or so away from scoring when Ian bent down to snap the ball back to Jon. Jon caught it and handed it to Josh who darted towards the corner of the endzone. Jon and Ian were blocking Kris and Jess well leaving me to try and catch my nimble 6 year old son. Fortunately Josh decided to try and take the shortest route into the endzone and I reached out my hand to touch him gently on the chest.
Unfortunately when someone weighing 3 stone dripping wet is running at full pelt, and someone at 53 stone, after two weeks on the Slimfast diet, waddles over and jabs a finger into their chest, even in an attempt to being gentle, the laws of physics state that something has to give. Unfortunately for Josh, it was his legs. My gentle “touch” pretty much clothes-lined him. I can still remember the look of abject surprise on his face as my hand met his sternum, his legs flew out from underneath him almost horizontally before gravity took over and thrust him down onto the sand, landing back first with a rather sickening thud.
“Oh God! Josh! I’m sorry!” I truly was. My sister and everyone else on the other hand was helpless with laughter.
“He’s just fecking clothes-lined him!” Alex cackled bent double almost beside herself.
Josh, fortunately, was ok. He was probably a little stunned that his dad would stoop to such levels to stop him scoring and was a little winded. After a little cry and saying I was a terrible cheat, not to mention very mean, I apologised for the 350th time and cajoled him into playing again. On the next play they tried the same play again handing the ball off to Josh to run into the corner, I once again could have stopped him, but I let him get into the endzone so he could be the hero, much to the chagrin of my team mates who accused me, rightly, of letting him score and saying that I was a cheat and wasn’t playing properly.
Burning with a sense of injustice, Kris and Jess did well to get close to their endzone on our next possession as I took more of a backseat. However Jon and Ian stopped them just short. However another interception on Jon’s pass put us in a good position and Jess levelled the score for us running in as Kris and I blocked their team as best we could.
The game ended in controversial circumstances however when a pitch invader, namely Alex, kicked Ian up the arse as he was attempting to snap the ball. In the resulting fracas Ian dropped some wet sand down Alex’s top while the kids continually argued over who was actually winning the game. I decided to call a time out, with the promise that we’d restart the game again soon, provided that I hadn’t broken Josh’s neck, smashed my hip, Alex and Ian weren’t going to smash each other’s faces in or that the kids hadn’t declared war on each other over who was actually winning.
We never got to finish the game, but I know the Titans would have won anyway...
COTTAGE 8pm
My Dad had set off a little earlier to pick up the chips and fish from the pub under the pretence that the “kids were hungry”, which is a euphemism of “I can have a drink while they get the chips ready for me.” This he duly did, paying for them before coming home ashen faced.
He plonked the meals on the table. The fish was superb, but he chips left a little to be desired, which I found a little odd considering we were in the country which has based a large part of its cuisine and sections of its history entirely on the fabulous tuber.
“How much was it?” asked my Mum
He quoted her what I thought was a telephone number initially, but it soon became apparent that this was the cost in Euro’s. It also explained his ashen face when he walked through the door.
To make matters worse, we had pretty much ran out of money in the kitty anyway and this final meal would wipe it out entirely, and we still had a day to go. We all volunteered to stick a further 50 Euro’s into the pot to keep us going until we left for home two days later, but my mum insisted that we probably had enough stuff in the house to use up for the last day or so, provided we didn’t mind eating Jacket potatoes with marshmallows, vinegar and honey nut Cheerios for tea.
As we tucked into the most expensive fish and chips we’d eaten in history, Alex said that she fancied taking a walk along the road and down to the beach after tea. However that idea was soon scuppered when she looked out of the window to see a rather large cow ambling ponderously down the single track road towards our cottage.
“Agh! Dad! A cow!” she shrieked.
Admittedly the fearsome cow was a good 200 metres away, chewing the grass at the side of the road only stopping to emit potent gusts of methane, or defecate over an area so vast that I didn’t know whether to be disgusted or impressed.
This wasn’t our first encounter with the local herd of cows that week. Earlier on in the week, Ian had decided to go scrambling on the rocks that lay at the foot of the field where the cows grazed during the day. The tide rose to cover most of these rocks and so he decided to climb up to have a look at what he could find in the rock pools. This consisted mainly of stagnant water, a couple of snails, a few dead sand eels and plenty of seaweed. However during the climb Cookie had followed him up onto the rocks and then decided she wanted to go and play in the field with the cows. Cursing to himself Ian had to climb up to the field and rescue the cows from a tiny, but noisy Yorkie puppy who was busy wanting to know why these big things didn’t want to play chase with her.
Our other encounter had been when we were searching for sea fishing marks to fish from and we took the road down to the promontory that reached out into the sea. It looked an excellent spot to fish, but it was also a grazing area for a large herd of cows. A fact which didn’t please my Dad who told me he didn’t fancy fishing with cows behind him. I struggled to find out why and the only reason he could give was that he “didn’t trust them.” Quite why I don’t know, I am unable to put my finger on exact figures for bovine fishing tackle theft but I am guessing it isn’t a particularly common crime.
“It’s coming here! I’m not going out there!” moaned Alex as the cow continued its gentle amble towards the end of the garden.
My sister is one of those people who have many little foibles. She has a great love of horses and has been confident around them since she was tiny. However cows send her screaming for the hills at the slightest mention of a fulsome udder. Quite why this is so is beyond me. Let’s be honest, cows have got more to worry about us than we have about them. Cows kill on average about 5 people a year worldwide, we slaughter on average about 6 million cattle a year worldwide (Statistics courtesy of made up in my head).
We even used to feed bits of the dead ones, all mushed up, to the live ones until we realised that doing so wasn’t a good idea as it made the living cows a bit weird and googly eyed and making big macs out of them gave us a serious brain disease and made us vote Tory. I feel we, as humans, don’t really have too much to fear from these terminally stupid creatures. However it matters not to Alex, who envisages cows as foaming at the mouth savage beasts who are intent on maiming her, presumably with a flick of their udders, a swish of their tail and a fearsome mooing.
“Get rid of it!” she ordered my Dad.
My Dad had tried to tell Alex that the cow would eventually get bored of eating and defecating on the road and wander back to its field. However this wasn’t good enough for Alex who insisted that he needed to go and do something about it now, obviously before the animal launched a deadly solo bovine counterattack on the house.
My father is to farming what Jeremy Clarkson is to tact and he tutted his indignation and resignation as he left the house. I could almost make out his brain thinking; “What the feck am I supposed to do with this thing?” Under his ubiquitous cap, I could almost make out the cogs of his mind slowly turning as he hit upon an idea. Perhaps they’d have turned more quickly if he’d eaten a few less beef burgers in the 80’s.
His plan was quite brilliant. He opened the boot of his car and reached in to pick up something. I thought perhaps a stick to shoo the cow back down the road, but no, my Dad had hit upon a quite fantastic idea, so simple and yet so natural that it would have the cow happily turning tail and fleeing back to its rightful home within seconds.
He slipped on a hi-visibility waistcoat.
As you will all undoubtedly know, it is standard farming parlance to move a cow by wearing a day glo yellow top and clapping your hands and going “Shoo! Bugger off you stupid animal!” and making a variety of whistles and noises that would leave even Percy Thrower baffled. And thus, down the single track road Blair went to deal with the invading bovine.
As he wandered down the road it was only as he got close to the animal that you realised just how big the cow actually was. As he wandered up to within about 10 metres of it, I detected a faint hesitancy in his steps as the cow stopped eating and regarded him with a somewhat curious yet truculent look. I can only assume the cow must have been thinking either “I may weight more than a ton and be able to stamp him into the ground with ease, but he has the yellow high-viz jacket of doom and therefore I must retreat!”, it was either that or “What does this dozy basket in the daft coat think he is doing?” To be fair to my dad, the cow actually managed to stop defecating as he approached which was a small but welcome gesture.
It wasn’t quite the scene in Crocodile Dundee where our erstwhile hero comes across a huge horned bison on the road and using some kind of outback super mind power, commands the animal to lie down out of the way. For one, Mick Dundee didn’t have the all encompassing power of a yellow hi-viz jacket and secondly, his bison hadn’t farted enough methane to raise global temperatures by 3 degrees during the encounter.
As man and beast stared at each other, it was my Dad who made the first move, talking quietly he tried to reason with the cow to move back. The cow responded by looking blankly at him and chewing grass. To be fair most cows look blankly at people while chewing grass, unless they are about to be killed (in which case they look a little miffed about the whole thing), milked (in which case they look thankful to relieve their heavy udders) or have Kreutzfeld Jakob disease, in which case their eyes face inward, they hang their tongue out and walk into the nearest fence singing the latest Eminem song.
With no immediate response from the cow to his gentle gestures, Ireland’s own unmistakable Crocodile Dundee, began to clap his hands and go for a rather more forthright approach. He used technical terms only known to Irish farmers and veterinary surgeons like “Hoo Haa! Whoooa! Back ye go! Go on! Feck off! Bugger off you stupid animal or you’ll be on the barbecue later!” He clapped his hands wildly and in the end, the cow got so bored of the whole sorry spectacle, it turned tail and wandered amiably back to the field where it was supposed to be with the rest of its herd, leaving a contemptuous dollop of defecation by the gate as it did so.
What the solitary donkey in the field opposite must have made of this magnificent, visceral tussle between man and beast, does not bear thinking about. However it is my guess that he decided against trying to tangle with the mighty luminous one, for fear of receiving a fearsome clapping.
As my dad wandered back to the house, he was met with ironic rapturous applause from the crowd of holidaymakers that had assembled to watch this incredible interaction between a feral, ugly, foul smelling, oddly coated beast of the wilds of Ireland and a harmless cow.
“I’m not going out now anyway, Eastenders is on.” said Alex.
THE BEACH
The following morning we had all risen from our beds, breakfasted and gone about our daily ablutions with the general acceptance that today was going to be a “rest day”. This is a euphemism which basically means that we don’t do any driving on that day and we stay sat on our arses doing stuff around the house, or in the gardens or down on the beach. This was supposed to be what the holiday was about for all of us. While holidays where you go to places and do all kinds of crazy things every day may appeal to some, we all lead such hectic lives (apart from me who 'sits on my computer playing all day') that sometimes we just want to get away from it all, and that included doing things. Rest was the byword for the week and it seemed like finally, today we’d all get the chance to unwind in our own differing ways.
By mid morning it was fairly evident what this was going to entail for the majority. My Dad had his nose in Kris’s DS and was busy playing some form of maths game. It was rather like holidaying with the Vordermans with my Dad. Katharine, my Mum and Alex were all reading, with Alex stopping every 30 seconds to answer a text or post something on Facebook via her ubiquitous mobile phones. The three kids were busy asking if they could go to the beach to play and so Ian and I decided we’d take them down because, well to put it bluntly, they were nagging the tits off us to do something more exciting than sitting in the house playing on the Wii and it seemed a safer bet than gaffa taping their mouths shut.
The wind still howled across the beach, although some of the chilly bitterness had been taken off it since it had changed to a more southerly direction and as we walked out into the garden, I had an idea. In our car we had packed a couple of packs of games equipment that we’d bought from Tesco. One was a baseball bat, glove and ball and the other was a rounders pack. While I didn’t think we had enough people to play either game I thought to myself, we could have a game of catch or something on the beach with the kids. So I grabbed the pack of rounders equipment and we walked down to the beach.
The tide was out that morning leaving a large section of the beach uncovered and, as usual, we were the only people out there. We walked along the sand chatting about this and that as the children played with the ball and the dogs, who had staged a mass breakout from the house and joined us on our stroll. It was good to have Pepsi with us once again, bounding along the beach as if nothing untoward had happened to her.
I’d put my cap on before the walk and it was a Tennessee Titans cap, of the erstwhile American football team. As we walked, we noticed Jon walking down to join us and he began chatting to me about the forthcoming American Football season, when an idea formed in my brain. While rounders wasn’t really feasible, why couldn’t we have a three-a-side game of American football? When I mentioned it to the kids they seemed totally baffled initially, but when I explained the simple rules they seemed very keen. The promise of mindless violence against others tends to motivate children rather well.
Using the wickets from the rounders set, Jon, Ian and I drew a large rectangle in the sand and divided it down the middle. This would be our pitch. It was about 15 metres long by 8 metres wide. At each end of the pitch we drew another rectangle and decorated them with the names of our favourite teams, I wrote “Titans” in what was to be our endzone while Jon wrote “Rams” in his. The premise of the game was simple; each team would have four chances to score a touchdown by getting the ball into the endzone without being touched by a member of the opposite team. We could run the ball or pass it through the air forwards once on each play. Tackling was not allowed as it was touch football (tempting as it was to launch my 67 stone frame at Ian’s 10 or Jon’s 12 stone I felt that to do so would be unfair on them and perhaps also my 3 stone son Josh, although when he was gobby, the temptation grew...) Each team had 4 attempts with the ball to score a touchdown and then, if they failed to score, the other team would receive the ball and have their turn.
We divided the teams up as fairly as possible. Because Jon and I knew the rules and the basic skills involved, we took a team each. Because Ian was the only adult remaining, I let Jon have him because both of them added together roughly equated to me. They then took Josh, the smaller of the two kids and I got Kris and an initially reluctant Jess, who warmed more to the game when I pointed out she’d be able to tackle her brother quite legitimately.
The game started with both our teams not really doing much. Tackling was easy initially as the kids (and Ian) struggled to get to grips with what to do. Neither team scored early on as defence triumphed over offence. However that changed when Jon’s team finally put together a neat run and Ian sprinted past Jess, Kris and I into our endzone to put them in front. I couldn’t even call a dodgy penalty on the play to stop them taking the lead.
Kids never take losing well and Kris had something of a titty lip about the whole thing, accusing Jon of holding him and stopping him making the tackle. However I tried my best to calm them down and assure them that we could bounce back. We did so spectacularly, Jess rushing a few yards and then on the next play, Kris raced into their end zone and I found him with an arcing pass to bring our team level! Hurrah! This of course sent Josh into a frenzy of accusation, accusing Jess of cheating (she probably did, but what the hell, I’m not ashamed to admit that I am occasionally blatantly biased) and Jon and Ian then had to calm down the irate 6 year old.
On the next turn Jon foolishly decided to let Ian be the quarterback, who is the person who throws the ball or hands it off to the runner. Even more foolishly, they decided to try and pass the ball to Jon in the endzone. Ian under threw his pass considerably and I was there to catch it for an interception! Woo Hoo!
“Uncle Ian! That was rubbish!” moaned Josh accurately.
Unfortunately for me the positive feelings were not going to last. On our next turn I decided to try a similar pass to Kris in the endzone as I had done previously. When I got the ball, I noticed Ian and Jon had dropped off deep into their endzone to ensure I couldn’t throw the ball to Kris. Josh was close to Jess, but in front of me was wide open space. Deciding that even an elephant like me could gain a few more yards, I decided to try and dash into it.
I should have realised that ‘dash’ isn’t a word that could ever be applied to me and it was an entirely futile hope that I could somehow impart acceleration onto my cumbersome frame and lumber it forwards in any meaningful fashion. As my brain told my legs to move I pushed off on the sand with my feet, only the sand was slippery and my feet slacked adhesion and I felt myself falling unerringly to the floor. As I fell I can clearly remember thinking “Oh No, I am going to look a complete twat now... I just hope that the resulting shudder doesn’t show up on the richter scale, not much of the sand beneath me is fused into shards of glass and that the crater I leave behind will be put to good use in future generations...”
Sure enough as my head plunged into the sand, my team mates fell about laughing and I was tagged by my son who gleefully pointed out “Daddy! You’re rubbish! You fell over!” before falling on the floor laughing next to me. My last vestige of dignity now stripped, I joined in with the laughter and dusted the wet sand off myself before limping, gingerly and red faced back into the huddle to join up with my giggling team mates.
Suffice to say, we didn’t score and soon Ian, Josh and Jon had the ball back. My sister had also wandered down to watch what we were doing with a mixture of bafflement and curiosity. She watched as Ian and Jon almost got into our endzone as we defended for our lives. They were just a yard or so away from scoring when Ian bent down to snap the ball back to Jon. Jon caught it and handed it to Josh who darted towards the corner of the endzone. Jon and Ian were blocking Kris and Jess well leaving me to try and catch my nimble 6 year old son. Fortunately Josh decided to try and take the shortest route into the endzone and I reached out my hand to touch him gently on the chest.
Unfortunately when someone weighing 3 stone dripping wet is running at full pelt, and someone at 53 stone, after two weeks on the Slimfast diet, waddles over and jabs a finger into their chest, even in an attempt to being gentle, the laws of physics state that something has to give. Unfortunately for Josh, it was his legs. My gentle “touch” pretty much clothes-lined him. I can still remember the look of abject surprise on his face as my hand met his sternum, his legs flew out from underneath him almost horizontally before gravity took over and thrust him down onto the sand, landing back first with a rather sickening thud.
“Oh God! Josh! I’m sorry!” I truly was. My sister and everyone else on the other hand was helpless with laughter.
“He’s just fecking clothes-lined him!” Alex cackled bent double almost beside herself.
Josh, fortunately, was ok. He was probably a little stunned that his dad would stoop to such levels to stop him scoring and was a little winded. After a little cry and saying I was a terrible cheat, not to mention very mean, I apologised for the 350th time and cajoled him into playing again. On the next play they tried the same play again handing the ball off to Josh to run into the corner, I once again could have stopped him, but I let him get into the endzone so he could be the hero, much to the chagrin of my team mates who accused me, rightly, of letting him score and saying that I was a cheat and wasn’t playing properly.
Burning with a sense of injustice, Kris and Jess did well to get close to their endzone on our next possession as I took more of a backseat. However Jon and Ian stopped them just short. However another interception on Jon’s pass put us in a good position and Jess levelled the score for us running in as Kris and I blocked their team as best we could.
The game ended in controversial circumstances however when a pitch invader, namely Alex, kicked Ian up the arse as he was attempting to snap the ball. In the resulting fracas Ian dropped some wet sand down Alex’s top while the kids continually argued over who was actually winning the game. I decided to call a time out, with the promise that we’d restart the game again soon, provided that I hadn’t broken Josh’s neck, smashed my hip, Alex and Ian weren’t going to smash each other’s faces in or that the kids hadn’t declared war on each other over who was actually winning.
We never got to finish the game, but I know the Titans would have won anyway...
COTTAGE 8pm
My Dad had set off a little earlier to pick up the chips and fish from the pub under the pretence that the “kids were hungry”, which is a euphemism of “I can have a drink while they get the chips ready for me.” This he duly did, paying for them before coming home ashen faced.
He plonked the meals on the table. The fish was superb, but he chips left a little to be desired, which I found a little odd considering we were in the country which has based a large part of its cuisine and sections of its history entirely on the fabulous tuber.
“How much was it?” asked my Mum
He quoted her what I thought was a telephone number initially, but it soon became apparent that this was the cost in Euro’s. It also explained his ashen face when he walked through the door.
To make matters worse, we had pretty much ran out of money in the kitty anyway and this final meal would wipe it out entirely, and we still had a day to go. We all volunteered to stick a further 50 Euro’s into the pot to keep us going until we left for home two days later, but my mum insisted that we probably had enough stuff in the house to use up for the last day or so, provided we didn’t mind eating Jacket potatoes with marshmallows, vinegar and honey nut Cheerios for tea.
As we tucked into the most expensive fish and chips we’d eaten in history, Alex said that she fancied taking a walk along the road and down to the beach after tea. However that idea was soon scuppered when she looked out of the window to see a rather large cow ambling ponderously down the single track road towards our cottage.
“Agh! Dad! A cow!” she shrieked.
Admittedly the fearsome cow was a good 200 metres away, chewing the grass at the side of the road only stopping to emit potent gusts of methane, or defecate over an area so vast that I didn’t know whether to be disgusted or impressed.
This wasn’t our first encounter with the local herd of cows that week. Earlier on in the week, Ian had decided to go scrambling on the rocks that lay at the foot of the field where the cows grazed during the day. The tide rose to cover most of these rocks and so he decided to climb up to have a look at what he could find in the rock pools. This consisted mainly of stagnant water, a couple of snails, a few dead sand eels and plenty of seaweed. However during the climb Cookie had followed him up onto the rocks and then decided she wanted to go and play in the field with the cows. Cursing to himself Ian had to climb up to the field and rescue the cows from a tiny, but noisy Yorkie puppy who was busy wanting to know why these big things didn’t want to play chase with her.
Our other encounter had been when we were searching for sea fishing marks to fish from and we took the road down to the promontory that reached out into the sea. It looked an excellent spot to fish, but it was also a grazing area for a large herd of cows. A fact which didn’t please my Dad who told me he didn’t fancy fishing with cows behind him. I struggled to find out why and the only reason he could give was that he “didn’t trust them.” Quite why I don’t know, I am unable to put my finger on exact figures for bovine fishing tackle theft but I am guessing it isn’t a particularly common crime.
“It’s coming here! I’m not going out there!” moaned Alex as the cow continued its gentle amble towards the end of the garden.
My sister is one of those people who have many little foibles. She has a great love of horses and has been confident around them since she was tiny. However cows send her screaming for the hills at the slightest mention of a fulsome udder. Quite why this is so is beyond me. Let’s be honest, cows have got more to worry about us than we have about them. Cows kill on average about 5 people a year worldwide, we slaughter on average about 6 million cattle a year worldwide (Statistics courtesy of made up in my head).
We even used to feed bits of the dead ones, all mushed up, to the live ones until we realised that doing so wasn’t a good idea as it made the living cows a bit weird and googly eyed and making big macs out of them gave us a serious brain disease and made us vote Tory. I feel we, as humans, don’t really have too much to fear from these terminally stupid creatures. However it matters not to Alex, who envisages cows as foaming at the mouth savage beasts who are intent on maiming her, presumably with a flick of their udders, a swish of their tail and a fearsome mooing.
“Get rid of it!” she ordered my Dad.
My Dad had tried to tell Alex that the cow would eventually get bored of eating and defecating on the road and wander back to its field. However this wasn’t good enough for Alex who insisted that he needed to go and do something about it now, obviously before the animal launched a deadly solo bovine counterattack on the house.
My father is to farming what Jeremy Clarkson is to tact and he tutted his indignation and resignation as he left the house. I could almost make out his brain thinking; “What the feck am I supposed to do with this thing?” Under his ubiquitous cap, I could almost make out the cogs of his mind slowly turning as he hit upon an idea. Perhaps they’d have turned more quickly if he’d eaten a few less beef burgers in the 80’s.
His plan was quite brilliant. He opened the boot of his car and reached in to pick up something. I thought perhaps a stick to shoo the cow back down the road, but no, my Dad had hit upon a quite fantastic idea, so simple and yet so natural that it would have the cow happily turning tail and fleeing back to its rightful home within seconds.
He slipped on a hi-visibility waistcoat.
As you will all undoubtedly know, it is standard farming parlance to move a cow by wearing a day glo yellow top and clapping your hands and going “Shoo! Bugger off you stupid animal!” and making a variety of whistles and noises that would leave even Percy Thrower baffled. And thus, down the single track road Blair went to deal with the invading bovine.
As he wandered down the road it was only as he got close to the animal that you realised just how big the cow actually was. As he wandered up to within about 10 metres of it, I detected a faint hesitancy in his steps as the cow stopped eating and regarded him with a somewhat curious yet truculent look. I can only assume the cow must have been thinking either “I may weight more than a ton and be able to stamp him into the ground with ease, but he has the yellow high-viz jacket of doom and therefore I must retreat!”, it was either that or “What does this dozy basket in the daft coat think he is doing?” To be fair to my dad, the cow actually managed to stop defecating as he approached which was a small but welcome gesture.
It wasn’t quite the scene in Crocodile Dundee where our erstwhile hero comes across a huge horned bison on the road and using some kind of outback super mind power, commands the animal to lie down out of the way. For one, Mick Dundee didn’t have the all encompassing power of a yellow hi-viz jacket and secondly, his bison hadn’t farted enough methane to raise global temperatures by 3 degrees during the encounter.
As man and beast stared at each other, it was my Dad who made the first move, talking quietly he tried to reason with the cow to move back. The cow responded by looking blankly at him and chewing grass. To be fair most cows look blankly at people while chewing grass, unless they are about to be killed (in which case they look a little miffed about the whole thing), milked (in which case they look thankful to relieve their heavy udders) or have Kreutzfeld Jakob disease, in which case their eyes face inward, they hang their tongue out and walk into the nearest fence singing the latest Eminem song.
With no immediate response from the cow to his gentle gestures, Ireland’s own unmistakable Crocodile Dundee, began to clap his hands and go for a rather more forthright approach. He used technical terms only known to Irish farmers and veterinary surgeons like “Hoo Haa! Whoooa! Back ye go! Go on! Feck off! Bugger off you stupid animal or you’ll be on the barbecue later!” He clapped his hands wildly and in the end, the cow got so bored of the whole sorry spectacle, it turned tail and wandered amiably back to the field where it was supposed to be with the rest of its herd, leaving a contemptuous dollop of defecation by the gate as it did so.
What the solitary donkey in the field opposite must have made of this magnificent, visceral tussle between man and beast, does not bear thinking about. However it is my guess that he decided against trying to tangle with the mighty luminous one, for fear of receiving a fearsome clapping.
As my dad wandered back to the house, he was met with ironic rapturous applause from the crowd of holidaymakers that had assembled to watch this incredible interaction between a feral, ugly, foul smelling, oddly coated beast of the wilds of Ireland and a harmless cow.
“I’m not going out now anyway, Eastenders is on.” said Alex.
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