Thursday, 18th August, 2005

The Gluepot

The summer of 1990 was a particularly fab one for me. I'd just turned 18, had my car, and was about to head off to the Lake District to start teacher training college. There were no worries, no hassles, and the world was filled with untold possibilities and excitement.

It was with this care-free spirit that me and a couple of friends decided to head off to the middle of Ireland for a bit of an adventure. A few weeks beforehand, I'd been on our usual family holiday to County Clare where I'd hooked up with a girl (a girl whose name eludes me, I'm sorry to say). Her family lived in Tipperary, not too far away from another friend of mine, so the three of us threw a large tent in the boot of my mini, and set off over the border.

From what I recall (my memory is sketchy at the best of times) there's not a lot to Ballingarry, Tipperary. A few farms and the odd pub.

We set our tent up in one of my girlfriend's fields, and spent a couple of days having a bit of a laugh — the sort of laugh that three young Northern-Irish men tend to have. Booze, fags, raucus ... that sort of thing.

I think we even went to a disco

I think, just to stray from the point a little, that this was the moment in my life where I officially stopped liking lager. Being young, and a bit skint, we'd bought a whole crate of cheap beer — and it only took one whiff of the stuff to convince me forever that lager is a drink best avoided.

But anyway, for some reason my girlfriend's mother didn't want us to stay any more, so we upped sticks and headed a bit north to the farm of my other friend.

Straying from the point again, there were two things that really stood out about my friend's farm. Firstly, was the fly-paper that hung in the kitchen — for some reason they didn't seem to ever replace the thing, so it was encrusted with flies that had long since died. And it was hanging over the breakfast table...

Secondly, the culture down there was so different to that what we were used to. You know how usually, when people pop round to visit, you offer them a brew? Not my mid-Ireland friends. Oh no. The conversations usually went like this:

"How'yer doing there lad?"

"Ack grand — will you have a spud?"

Seriously — there was no constantly on-the-boil kettle, there was a big bowl of potatoes.

Anyway. We'd managed to find a rather fab pub not too far down the road. Far enough to drive though. It was called "The Gluepot" and was everything that a mid-Irish pub should be: sawdust, constant stream of Guinness, bloke with a guitar — that sort of thing.

It was here, for example, that we were to discover the correct way to pour Guinness — none of your hanging around at the bar for ten minutes while the barman tries to compensate for shitty English Guinness, oh no. The correct way to server Guinness is to pour fifteen pints at once, and have them arranged on the bar at various stages of settling, knowing full well that no matter who comes in, that's what they'll want.

So, it was probably about late afternoon when we got there. We dumped the car outside, and started on the drink.

Five hours later, we were quite sloshed, and had made friends with everyone in there — the regulars, the landlord, the landlord's rather attractive daughters...

The landlord, in fact, had taken us through to the locals bit and we were getting on like wildfire. It was all going so well that we completely forgot the time, the car, and ourselves.

At four in the morning, it started to occur to us that we probably should be heading back to the farm. But then the Garda came in. Two of them — great big stonking policemen in hats and everything.

God, we panicked. There were cautious looks between ourselves, wondering what story we could give them that would explain what the hell we were doing drinking in a pub at 4am. And then they started to come over to us...

"Yous aren't from round here are yous lads?"

Panic. Sweat pouring from our heads. General nervousness...

"No, we're um, from the North"

OMG OMG OMG

"Ack great — would yous like a pint?"

And so began a further two or three rounds of Guinness, in the company of two really friendly policemen .

...

Now, this is the point in the story where I have to insert some kind of caveat. This all happened fifteen years ago, when I was a lot younger and a lot less responsible. I wouldn't want anyone to think that I'm remotely proud of certain aspects of where this story goes, and if you were to place it in the present-day context, then I think everyone would absolutely right in slamming me for it. But at the time — and more importantly, in the place — it seemed OK.

...

At five am, we left the pub, and set off back for home. In the car. OK, so I hadn't been drinking quite as hard as the other two — one was asleep in the back, the other was yakking out of the passenger window — but it's true, I was drunk.

I don't know why I thought I was OK to drive, but I did. At 5 in the morning, the only thing your likely to meet on a Tipperary road is a cow — or a pissed Irishman in his tractor doing 5 miles per hour.

But that doesn't excuse it — I know.

Anyway, we were pottling along the country roads, when suddenly I saw a white light waving up and down in the middle of the road.

Now, being of Northern Irish origin, I'm well aware what a red light waving up and down in the middle of the road means — it means "This is the army — stop the car NOW and do exactly as they say". But a white light?

I thought it must be a bike on a bumpy bit of road, so I slowed down a bit and drove past it.

It was only after I drove past it that I realised that it wasn't a bike at all — it was a policeman.

A voice from the back seat said "Keep going!", but I'm an obedient soul at heart, so I slammed on the brakes, reversed back to the Garda, and wound my window down.

"All right there ladsh?" said the policeman as he leaned in the window — and at that point I realised something rather shocking.

The stench of whiskey was impossible to miss. The policeman was more drunk than I was.

"Could yoush tell me your numberplate there?"

And as I rattled off the numbers, I realised another thing. He didn't have a little notebook and pencil. He had — swear to God — a blank A4 pad of paper and a crayon, and he was writing my number plate down in huge letters.

"Shure that's great. Off yoush go!"

And so we did, with a slightly stunned (and shocked-into-soberness) me at the wheel, and my not-asleep friend still chucking his guts up out the window. We drove all the way back to the farm and crawled into the caravan we were staying in ... a caravan that a day later we nearly set on fire, and had to make a hasty escape back to Belfast.

...

Two pieces of advice from all of this. (1) Don't drink and drive. Not even in the middle of rural Ireland. It's Bad and Wrong™. (2) If you're ever there, and you get stuck behind a tractor that's transporting peat around, make sure you stop every five minutes and gather up the clods that fall off the back of the trailer every time it hits a bump. You can keep yourself in fuel for your fire for weeks, for free

Want!

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

...and a garage, and some tools...

A sunbeam alpine? I dunno

Macro-Bodging

I love macro photography. I love how you can abstract objects to just textures — you can reduce them to shapes, you can obscure their origins.

I used to do a lot of really really close-up photography — especially when I was a student. Back then I was using a Minolta X300 — a rather basic manual-everything camera, with a 28-200 Vivitar lens, and five (that's five) macro extension tubes. The exposures all had to be enormous, but I used to get some pretty good results...

Anyway, now that I've got the Canon 300D, I really wanted to get some extension tubes for that. I borrowed some from work a while back, and had a lot of fun with them, but I'd like to have my own.

The problem I've found though, is that it doesn't seem to be too easy to track them down. I've tried scouring Ebay, to pretty much no avail I've found a few for sale, but they're all so expensive — not a bit like the Minolta ones I picked up for a few pounds each.

I've also been trawling through the web, trying to find if anyone makes a Minolta -> Canon mount adaptor, but I can't find one (after about half an hour Googling).

So, anyway, I figured "fuck it" and just held the extension tubes up to the camera body. And this is what I got:

Not perfect, but not bad eh?

"joanna_tvuk"?!

Nick Cave

OK, now tell us about Nick Cave.

Not much to tell really...

...it was on my way back from Paris — I'd been there with the course I was on for a few days (including many spent sitting underneath the Eiffel Tower guzzing super-cheap wine — 8 Francs for a bottle — that's 80p kids — and it was yummy) and we were coming back to Leeds on the Eurostar.

Naturally, being a bunch of reprobate art studets, we were in economy. But there was a strange announcement on the loudspeakers — something about "tunnel ... airconditioning ... broken ... suffocate ... die ... move to first class" (In French, naturalment)

So we did what any self-respecting bunch of liggers like we were would do when confronted with a free upgrade — we upgraded.

So, I found myself sitting at a table with a bunch of guys, who for some reason seemed keen to discuss art with us. One of them, in particular, a rather long-faced guy in sunglasses and dark hair, was quite verbal on the subject.

I thought I recognised him from somewhere, but I couldn't place him, so I just launched into one of my rantings about photography and abstraction and stuff.

It was later on, back in Leeds in the pub that I found out:

"Siobhan Graham, Nick Cave said you were cool"

Ah, I'm having Cookie Issues™ at the moment. I might redo that whole thing from scratch sometime