Housepainting Around Ireland
Tomorrow morning I head off to Galway for a housepainting job.
I’m leaving at 6:30am, as I came to know it in America, or half-six as it is here. In fact half-six on a Saturday morning, is a time that didn’t even exist in Dublin until recent years, being something brought in by former Taoiseach, the ever pragmatic, Berti Ahern.
The job is only for a couple of days so I won’t get up to too much damage over there, beyond imposing magnolia on Irish students, but the last time the client saw me they said I looked like an advert for Guinness. I should say that I was drinking a pint at the time, rather than performing some over-elaborate one-man history of civilisation, and I do quite fancy another audition.
Last Saturday I went down to Wexford to size up another housepainting job, and it was the hottest weather I’ve experience since leaving Kansas City. Of course I’ve no idea what the temperature actually was, but everybody said it was hot.
Wexford being the Sunny Southeast meant it looked beautiful. As the prospective client said to me, “If the weather was like this all the time, shur you’d never leave the place”. And then he went to Turkey for a holiday.
I would leave the place. I couldn’t see a thing with the blasted sunshine blasting in my eyes all day.
Squinting of course makes you thirsty, so I took care of that with some magnificent pints of stout. Aahhhh. And a traditional Irish grill of onion rings, chicken goujons, spring-rolls, somosas, cocktail sausages, and chips.
I mention this because I may be heading back down to rural Wexford for a couple of weeks to do that job, and it may well be necessary for me to seek out such magnificent pints purely so I can get myself online to serve the loyal Irish KC readers.
But until then, Galway will be a nice dry run, though hopefully not too dry. And through the magic of technology I’ll keep posting today and through the weekend. You know, all those posts I’ve been talking about for weeks.
We’ll worry about the Irish countryside next week.
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
