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Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland

The first time I didn’t fast on a Good Friday I was on a train in North Wales.

I didn’t know I wasn’t fasting; after my first collation I had left Ireland by ferry and was planning on my one meal of the day being in Liverpool, probably just before church. That still left room somewhere in the 24 hours for another collation.

When I say 24 hours I don’t mean that literally; it’s just another way of saying a day. If you’re fasting for a day I don’t think fasting from midnight to midnight makes much sense - because you can gorge yourself just before midnight one day and then again 24 hours and a few seconds later without breaking the fast. That strikes me as kind of against the spirit of the thing.

So for me a day is defined by when you wake up to when you go to sleep - which is a lot less than 24 hours but if you add on 8 hours sleep at either end it’s really 32 hours.

And this pleasureable pain has always worked for me up until I stopped sleeping and the days began to lack definition.

On that train in North Wales somebody handed me a can of beer. A complete stranger. In the mid-1980s in Ireland cans of beer were things I saw only in fields among kids who couldn’t and shouldn’t drink, and in small numbers in people’s houses at Christmas. They weren’t something complete strangers, who hadn’t even spoken to you, gave you.

As I looked at this can of beer held out by a lightly tattooed arm over the aisle of a jerking train, I was thinking how I was brought up not to accept beer from strangers, and how I was brought up to not be rude to people. But mostly I was thinking, but it’s Good Friday.

And I could hear an Aunt’s voice say that you didn’t actually have to fast or abstain from meat, and other things you might really enjoy, if you were travelling. Over time I would hear of other exceptions, like the holy day of obligation that is the feast day of Saint Patrick, all the Sundays during lent, if you were sick, and if you were really really hungry.

The stranger was still holding his arm out so I decided to call that can my second collation and I would think about what it meant as I drank it with the British sun blasting through the windows.

He and his friends were Welsh and they had a lot of beer and a lot of generosity. On my 9th can I was thinking that the beer was dangerously close to being a main meal rather than a collation. And I was thinking, hey - isn’t that my stop?

That night the English, like ourselves with Good Friday and Easter Monday both being bank holidays, were celebrating the second biggest holiday of the year. And they were doing it by going to a pub. Early. Very early. God, even their Catholics are heathen, I realised.

Pubs in Ireland on Good Friday were closed. Drinking in pubs was not what we did on the holiest of holy days. I was going to have to file the travelling exception form.

So we all went out for a night of drinking, and we went so early that I didn’t have time for dinner. And horsing down pints of badly poured Guinness until after 3 in the morning on a Good Friday felt very wrong and very English.

And I never did set foot in a church that day. Unless you count the pub.

Have a peaceful day today.

See Also:
   • Turkeyed Out
   • Christmas, It Could Happen to a Bishop
   • What did the Easter Bunny bring you when you were a kid in Ireland?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under 1-eolai, Holidays, Nostalgia, Religion. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.