Round Ireland in Low Gear

Ireland is not Paradise.

JONATHAN SWIFT, in a letter to Alexander Pope,

30 August 1716

I spent our last evening in England in the basement bedroom of our daughter and son-in-law’s house up on the highest heights of Bristol, where those who are chronic worriers wear oxygen masks, making final adjustments to the Crossfell and the Wild Cat.

There were no other contenders for this utterly boring task. Somewhere upstairs, above ground, my eleven-year-old grandson, using his father’s computer, was extracting information in a matter of seconds from what appeared to be thin air. Elsewhere in the building my granddaughter was dancing the sort of dances that little girls of six habitually execute, dreaming of being Flossie Footlights or Fonteyn. In the kitchen my daughter was about to start roasting a duck, happy, one hoped, at the thought of going back to work in the outside world from which bringing up her children had largely excluded her. Half a mile up the road, immured somewhere in a wing of the University, her husband, a mathematician turned biologist, was locked in what looked like becoming a lifelong struggle to extract the secret of what makes eyes and ears function.

And somewhere in the house was Wanda. She was about as interested in the finer points of her Wild Cat as I imagine Queen Boadicea would have been in the alignment of scythes on the axles of her chariot wheels. Both assumed, rightly, that some member of the lumpenproletariat would be keeping their equipment up to scratch. For Shimano Deore XT hubs, Biopace computer-designed drive system chainwheels, 600 EX headsets with O ring seals, and such – all items I had been forced to take an interest in, simply to know what to try and do if they went wrong – she cared not a hoot.

One of the best reasons for owning an ordinary bicycle with no expensive trimmings is that everything about it, apart from mending punctures, which is a bore whatever sort of bike you have, is comparatively simple. With expensive, thoroughbred bicycles it is another matter altogether.

If I had ever forgotten this I re-discovered it when I tried to fit Wanda’s final selection, the Brooks B72 leather saddle, the one ‘for those wanting a broader support’, to a highly sophisticated, space age Sr Laprade XL forged alloy fluted seatpin with micro-adjustment and a replacement value of around £20. A lot of money, you may say. But worth every penny of it since, according to those who know, anything nameless in the field of seatpins may snap off with rough off-the-road usage, leaving the rider either impaled on what is left of it or, at the very least, pedalling away without any visible means of support, rather like a fakir using a bicycle to perform a variation of the Indian rope trick. I had asked Overbury’s for a seatpin which gave the maximum amount of adjustment and this was it.

By now it was seven o’clock. ‘It won’t take long,’ I said, talking to myself in the absence of an audience.

The saddle was mounted on a frame which consisted of two sets of parallel wire tracks and each of these tracks had to be attached to the Laprade pin by means of a clamp with two parallel grooves on it. The principal difficulty I experienced in performing this ostensibly easy task was that the track wires were not only too far apart to fit into the grooves but were extraordinarily resistant to being drawn together. However I finally succeeded in doing this making use of a form of Spanish windlass made with a lace from a climbing boot and a skewer.

I was so pleased with myself at having accomplished this feat that I failed to notice that when I inserted the tracks into the grooves I did so with the saddle the wrong way up.

This was the moment when my daughter, fearing for her dinner and my sanity, set off in the rain and darkness to enlist the help of Charlie Quinn, who lived a few doors away. Apparently Charlie Quinn was a schoolboy who was completely dotty about bikes and when not engaged in doing his homework spent most of his spare time either riding them or working on them in a part-time capacity at Clifton Cycles, a rival bike shop to Overbury’s.

Charlie arrived with a comprehensive tool kit which included a pair of clamps, with the help of which he drew the wire tracks together with shameful ease, and inserted them in the grooves. It was therefore not without a certain despicable satisfaction that I noted that when he tightened the bolt the tracks were still loose in the grooves and the saddle wobbled.

By this time I would have been in despair, but not Charlie. ‘That’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll get some scrim. That’ll hold it.’ It did indeed hold it. By now the duck was nearly ready.

‘Is there anything else?’ he asked.

‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind terribly I’ve got to fit some pannier adaptor plates. It’s quite a simple job. But what about your dinner?’

‘I’ve already eaten it,’ he said. ‘I call it supper.’

All those bored by the horrendous complexities of bicycle mechanics should skip the rest of this section and resurface on page 30. For those who are not, I should explain that pannier adaptor plates are flat pieces of alloy with holes cut in them and drilled to take a single nut and bolt. These plates had to be fitted because the hooks on the elastic cords supplied with the Karrimor rear panniers to keep them in place were not a proper fit on the American-designed Blackburn alloy carriers. Although they will work at a pinch the hooks cannot be guaranteed to remain hooked on, especially when the bicycle is being used on rough ground.

It was soon obvious that we were in trouble. In order to fit the plates, the bolts used to attach them to the carriers had to be inserted through the brazed-on carrier eyes at the lower end of the chain stays, and then through eyes in the triangulated struts at the bottom of the carriers. The devilish thing was that it was not possible to insert one of these bolts from the outside in, and secure it with a nut on the inside of the carrier eye, because any nut on the inside would become enmeshed with the teeth of the outermost low-gear sprocket on the freewheel block.

This meant that both rear wheels had to be taken out so that the bolts could be inserted from the inside. At the same time the rear axles had to be packed with sufficient washers between the cone locking nuts on the hub axles and the wheel drop-outs to spread the chain stays sufficiently to give the necessary clearance to keep the bolt heads out of range of the teeth of the outermost sprocket.

But this was not the end of it. The addition of these washers had the effect of throwing the rear derailleur shift mechanism out of its pre-set alignment and this in turn affected the alignment of the front derailleur which shifted the chain on the triple chainwheels. And it was not only the shift mechanisms that went on the bum. The springing of the seat stays with the washers on the axles caused subtle alterations to the settings of the Aztec brake blocks fitted to the XT cantilever brakes operating on the rear rims and also to the amount of travel on the brake levers.

Almost literally enmeshed in all this Charlie was in his element, rushing backwards and forwards between our house and his in pouring rain, for nuts, bolts, washers, more tools and so forth. Meanwhile, I wondered if it would be all right to desert him and go off and eat the duck. When I did, feeling a pig for doing so, I don’t think he even noticed I’d gone.

It was not until we got back to England that I discovered that there had not been any need to fit these plates at all, as Blackburn marketed special shock cords to attach Karrimor panniers to Blackburn carriers.

The morning after Quinn the bicycle wizard had performed his magic and we had eaten the duck and gone to bed, we set off in torrential rain that turned day into night to drive our van with the bikes in it to Fishguard.

Here, on the coast of Dyfed, otherwise Pembroke, in what is known as England beyond Wales, in windswept, watery Fishguard with rainbows overhead, with its brightly painted houses glittering in the sunlight and its harbour built in the 1900s, itself a period piece, there was already a feeling of Ireland. Perhaps the French thought they were in Ireland when they undertook the last invasion of Britain here in 1797, commanded by an American, Colonel William Tate, and laid down their arms before a bevy of Welsh ladies dressed in traditional cloaks, under the impression, it is said, that they were soldiers.

We spent most of the voyage re-packing our pannier bags. Sitting surrounded by them in the ferry saloon we looked like beleaguered settlers on the old Oregon trail. It was remarkable how much room two sets of front and rear panniers, not to speak of the stuff sacs, took up when removed from the bicycles. All the contents had to be put in plastic liners as the panniers were not guaranteed waterproof against torrential rain, and since these liners were opaque, once they were packed it was difficult to remember what was in them. We had started off very efficiently at home before leaving, sticking on little labels bearing the legends ‘spare thermal underwear’, ‘boots and spare inner tubes’, and so on, but now Wanda decided on a complete and more logical redistribution, while other passengers looked on with fascination.

It was seven-thirty before we finally disembarked at Rosslare; and a cold, dark evening with the wind driving great clouds of spray over the jetty. We had planned to stay the night there in a bed and breakfast and take a train to Limerick, where we proposed to start our cycling, the following morning, but we now discovered that in winter there was only one train a day to Limerick, and this was due to leave in seven minutes. We had to buy tickets and somehow find something to eat and drink as we had eaten nothing except a cold sausage each and a rather nasty ‘individual rabbit pie’ in a pub since leaving Bristol.

A porter told us to put our bikes in a van at the end of the train. When I had finished locking them up he changed his mind and told me to put them in an identical van at the other end of the train, so I unlocked them and did so. Another man said that was wrong too, so I unlocked them again and took them back to the original one. Meanwhile Wanda was buying the tickets at a reduced rate using our international old age pensioners’ cards. By now, in theory, the train should have left.

The station buffet was warm and friendly, but served no hot food, only ham sandwiches which had to be made-to-measure. Wanda boarded the train while I waited for the sandwiches, but after a minute she got down and rushed into the buffet crying, ‘The train, the train is leaving!’

‘It isn’t leaving, whatever your good lady says,’ remarked a rather quiet man in railway uniform whom I hadn’t noticed before, who was only about a quarter of the way through a pint of Guinness. ‘Not without me, it isn’t. I’m the guard,’ and he took another long draw at his drink. Emboldened by this I ordered a second one myself. Eventually we left more or less on time: the station clock turned out to be about ten minutes fast.

There ensued an interminable journey through parts of Counties Wexford, Kilkenny, a large segment of Tipperary and Limerick, in a hearselike, black upholstered carriage with doors to the lavatories that looked as if they had been gnawed by famine-stricken rats. Outside it was still as black as your hat with a howling wind and torrential rain, and the dimly-lit, battered stations at which the train stopped reminded me of our travels in Siberia. At Wexford our kindly guard, who was in his early sixties, and very old-fashioned-looking in his peaked cap and blue overcoat – infinitely preferable to the ludicrous Swiss-type uniforms affected by British Rail – brought us a jug of hot tea which, after two pints of Guinness in something like five minutes, I was unready for. Meanwhile we spent an hour or so continuing with our re-packing, forgetting which container was which and starting all over again, but this time without an audience.

At Limerick Junction a man with wild hair, a huge protruding lower jaw, wearing a crumpled check suit and looking like a Punch 1850s cartoon of an Irishman joined us in our carriage and began producing unidentifiable items of food from plastic bags.

His meal was interrupted by the arrival of the guard to inspect his ticket, and he spent the next twenty minutes slowly and laboriously going through his pockets and his plastic bags, time after time, without ever finding it. Eventually he produced a 50p piece which he offered to the guard who, by this time bored with the whole business, rejected it. The train – could it be called the Limerick Express I wondered? – arrived at Limerick thirty minutes late, at 11.45 p.m. The weather was still appalling but the area round the station at least still seemed lively and the pubs were still taking orders.

Pushing our bikes through the rain we arrived on the threshold of the Station Hotel, from which the last revellers were being ejected, to find that a double room was £22 a night and the night was half over.

So instead we went round the corner to Boylan’s, part gift shop, part B and B, where we were warmly welcomed and our bikes put in the shop to see the rest of the night through in company with a consignment of nylon pandas. A kindly girl, Miss Boylan, brought tea and cakes – ‘Try and eat them’ she begged, as if we were convalescing from an illness – and we went to bed after a nice hot shower, whacked and surrounded by our mounds of kit.

‘What a fucking day,’ Wanda said before she dropped off. It was difficult not to agree with her.

CHAPTER 3 Birthday on a Bicycle (#ulink_ccc052f2-0a52-5dd3-938d-067700a94728)

Nothing in Ireland lasts long except the miles.

GEORGE MOORE. Ave, 1911

(An Irish mile is 2240 yards – an English one 1760 yards.)

As there is more rain in this country than in any other, and as therefore, naturally, the inhabitants should be inured to the weather, and made to despise an inconvenience which they cannot avoid, the travelling conveyances are arranged so that you may get as much practice in being as wet as possible.

W. M. THACKERAY. The Irish Sketch Book of 1842

The next morning I opened a window and was confronted by a painting of a double-headed eagle glaring at me from a wall across what had once been an alley three feet wide, presumably the sign of some former mediaeval hostelry. Rain was falling in torrents and I was in a state of despair and indecision as to what we should do. I could see ourselves sitting in tea shops for days on end waiting for it to abate, playing with nylon pandas and sleeping for endless nights in Boylan’s B and B.

I became even more depressed when 1 suddenly remembered that it was my birthday. Wanda had forgotten it, and this made her depressed, too. Anyway, she gave me a kiss. Then, after a huge breakfast, we sallied out with our bicycles into the terrifying early morning rush hour traffic of Limerick, among drivers many of whom appeared to have only recently arrived in the machine age or were still on the way to it, with Miss Boylan’s warning still echoing in our ears. ‘Be careful, now, on the Sarsfield Bridge, for there are a whole lot of people blown off their cycles on it every year by the wind of the lorries, and kilt!’

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We were heading for County Clare, via the dread Sarsfield Bridge, passing on the way the establishments of purveyors of bacon (bacon is to Limerick what caviar is to Astrakhan) and tall, often beautifully proportioned eighteenth-century brick houses, many of them decrepit to the point of collapse.

It was somewhere in O’Connell Street that Wanda contrived to get in the wrong lane and was borne away on a tidal wave of traffic, crying ‘Hurruck, help me!’ at the top of her voice, although what I was supposed to do to help her was not clear. The last I saw of her for some time to come was disappearing round the corner into that part of the city where stood or used to stand some of the relics of British Imperial rule, such as the County Gaol, the Lunatic Asylum and the Court House of 1810. She finally fetched up back at the station, after which she took a right into Parnell Street and started all over again.

‘You’ve chosen a grand day for it,’ an old geezer about the same age as me said as, reunited at last, we were crossing the Sarsfield Bridge. He let out an insane kind of ‘Heh, heh, heh!’ cackle as an afterthought.

He was wearing a white beard with lovely yellow stains in it that looked like the principal ingredient in a prescription for birds’ nest soup; an ankle-length oilskin coat to match the stains in his beard and a sou’wester ditto, an ensemble that made him resemble the fisherman on a tin of Norwegian-type sardines. I would have hated to live next door to him, in Limerick or anywhere else. ‘Wise guy, eh?’ I shouted after him, but he didn’t get it, probably because his sou’wester was fitted with flaps.

We were pushing our bikes along the footpath, not even riding them, but still being deluged with un-recycled Irish rainwater that was being thrown up by the west-bound trucks whose drivers, deprived of the pleasure of actually ‘kilting’ us, were now doing their best to drown us, and were damn nearly succeeding – the very same men who, reunited with their wives and eight children all under the age of fifteen at weekends, wear subfusc suits and take the collection bags round on the ends of long sticks at Mass, eventually leaving a bundle, and generous bequests to the Society of the Holy Name.