Round Ireland With A Fridge

 

As we walked the bridge this morning, we met this concreter putting the finishing touches to the handrails. Of course, we stopped and talked to him! He turned out to be a young Irishman with a brogue thick enough to cut with a knife.

"We went to see Foster and Allen when they came to the Bay a few years back", we told him. "Who are Foster and Allen?" he wanted to know. WHAT? An Irishman who hasn't heard of Foster and Allen?

"Have you read the book about that Irishman who hitchhiked round Ireland with a fridge?" I kept testing him. "No, never! When was that?"

So I told him of the time in 2005 when, sitting on the Federal Hotel's verandah looking down on Thursday Island's beachfront - a setting Graham Greene would have revelled in and Somerset Maugham did - I was joined by Alan, an Irishman on a working holiday in Australia.

He was reading Bill Bryson's A SHORT HISTORY OF ALMOST EVERYTHING which I had read too; so we started talking about this book and some of the other big questions in life, such as 'Why is there a light in the fridge but not in the freezer?' and 'How come the Americans choose from just two people for President but fifty for Miss America?'

 

Alan, the Irishman, on the verandah of the Federal Hotel on Thursday Island. The chap on the left was Col the Pom, a man of few words, a lot of them 'bloody'. He drank like a fish. Which would have been okay if he'd drunk what the fish drinks. Despite having been almost everywhere, including a short stint in Saudi Arabia, he had learned nothing and associated culture with beer brewing and thought Plato was a metal polish.

 

He looked a bit like an extra out of the movie HAIR but was really quite a decent chap, well-read and of a serious turn of mind. He surprised me by having read George Orwell's "1984." As he was working on the island and would be staying for a while longer, I was happy to furnish him from my book-bag with another George Orwell volume, Camus' "The Plague", and a copy of Joseph Conrad's stories, and he gave me a copy of "Round Ireland with a Fridge" which has since been made into a movie.

 

 

www.archive.org have the audiobook in English, but the book is only available in its German edition as "Mit dem Kühlschrank durch Irland".

It's your choice: spend the next five years to learn German to be able to read it, or spend the next five minutes on ebay to order an English copy. Unfortunately, I have already promised my own English copy to the Irish concreter whose name, incidentally, is neither Liam nor Sean but Gary.

How prosaic!

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