What’s Not to Love?

The forecast said yesterday would be the finest day of the year, and it wasn’t — but it was. We traveled to the vibrant little West Cork town of Clonakilty, which has an ambience all it own, a nexus of blow-ins seeking dreams of renewal and creativity by the sea, mixed with locals who take their days in stride, knowing theirs is a special place full of pride and openness, a gem of the transformed Ireland. Bright shops and restaurants, hole-in-the-wall pubs ,and music venues abound — most famous being the step-child of Noel Redding, R.I.P, bass guitarist for Jimmi Hendrix, R.I.P., De Barra’s. Paul McCartney loves it, and so does Chicken George who does impromptu dances in a pin-striped zoot suit outside the door.

What a marvelous lunch we all had in ye olde An Sugan (the little chair) — mouth watering fish and chips, knock-you-over-rich crab casseroles, succulent roast of rib. Then it was time for the local St. Patrick’s Day parade. After a tough winter, I was feeling put off by Ireland’s excesses sometimes, and we deliberately avoided the potential bacchanal in Cork City.

But ah, what a parade of quirky easiness and ebullient local pride ensued on the long street in Clon, led by a St. Patrick for the day holding a blacksmith-bent plumbing pipe for his staff and grinning over a fake beard. The mayor had his gold medallions, a gorgeous young thing on stilts she couldn’t manage slowed progess to next to nothing. You had your marvelously costumed debauchees from some Elibeathean drawing room, the black ghosts of the famine, and, among others, endless beaming school children soaked in innocence.

The town is so appealing hordes of new people moved in and some of the surrounding developments are yet another monument to the atrocity of non-existent civic planning in the gone-amuck excesses of the build, build, build without thinking Irish boom. A good few of these sit now as pathetic, half-finished shells, as can be seen all around Ireland, now that the orgy has gone bust. But the town, which should be on any visitor’s itinerary in the region, also managed to build a bright and beautiful new school beside its ever fascinating lagoon at whose far end the light glistens on magical headlands.

You’d never fret much on this yesterday, not when seeing the Alice in Wonderland tea party float inching past with its little smiles of wonder (above). I marvelled once again at the creativity and resilence that permeates so much of Irish life, at least in all the brighter towns. I thought yesterday it was a privelege to be here, and had no doubts that this day was finer right here in Clonakilty than anywhere we — Jamie and me and the boys — might have been afar. Life can be an adventure any day you choose in Ireland — maybe it can be any day anywhere, when the spirit moves… ah, Jamie was taking pictures that had nothing to do with the paraders, just the richness of character in local faces.

Tags: Clonakilty, De Barra's, Noel Redding, West Cork