The first time I heard of the book "Round Ireland with a Fridge" was on Thursday Island. That was in April 2005. I'd given way to a sudden impulse to revisit one of the many odd and fascinating places I used to live and work in - and they don't come any odder than Thursday Island!
As I sat there 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 'How come the Americans choose from just two people for President but fifty for Miss America?' and 'Why is there a light in the fridge but not in the freezer?'
He looked a bit like an extra out of the movie HAIR but was really quite a decent chap, well-read - he had read George Orwell's "1984" and could even quote from it! - and of a serious turn of mind which made his next question all the more surprising: "Have you read Tim Hawks' book 'Round Ireland with a Fridge'?" Round Ireland with a what? Of course, I had not and so we promptly swapped books: I gave him George Orwell's "Burmese Days", Camus' "The Plague", and a copy of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", and he gave me "Round Ireland with a Fridge".
(For the audiobook - which is in English - click here)
I've been waiting ever since to pass it on to some unsuspecting reader as it doesn't quite fit the category of books I keep in my library, and since the village is absolutely crawling now with Irishmen working on the new sewerage line (if you can see the connection, please let me know), I've handed it to their foreman, together with a copy of Christopher Koch's "The Many-Coloured Land: A Return to Ireland" which I had bought after I had read Koch's better-known book, "The Year of Living Dangerously", which is set in Indonesia during the overthrow of President Sukarno.
I told him not to take the second part of the book's title too literally as we're all hoping they'll stay long enough to finish off the sewerage line.
