A long time ago - well, in 2005 - when I revisited my old "home" Thursday Island, I put up at the island's Federal Hotel ('put up' are the operative words as my lodgings were decidedly sub-standard: the bed was lumpy, the television didn't work, the fridge was rumbling, and a single light-bulb hung from the high ceiling).
Sitting on the Federal's verandah looking down on T.I.'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 who looked a bit like an extra from the movie HAIR but was really quite a decent chap.
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?', 'Why are there no gingerbread women?', and 'How come the Americans choose from just two people for President but fifty for Miss America?'
He was well-read and of a serious turn of mind, having also read George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm". 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, and Camus' "The Plague", and a copy of Joseph Conrad's stories.
In return, he gave me a book he'd just finished reading, Round Ireland with a Fridge", a slightly surreal tale of a stand-up comedian who, for a bet, resolves to hitchhike around the circumference of Ireland with a fridge. As it says in the prologue to the book, "Everything you read from this moment forth is a tribute to what can be achieved as a result of a shabby night of booze."
Luckily, the writer undertook his voyage in a country which understands and empathises with the average idiotic quest, so much so that the book has since been made into a movie. Watch it if you must but, please, don't send me any hate-mail!
P.S. If you want to read about that trip to Thursday Island, click here.
