Cowboy Hat in Derry
Anyone who thinks Ireland to be a small island has never been to Derry. From Cork, you must train first to Dublin (3 hours), light rail and wait and wait to Connelly Station (1 hour min.), train to Belfas (almost 3 hrs), wait, train to Derry (almost 3 hrs) and after 12 hours you have reached – A Strange Place.
The murals about death and sacrifice and mayhem rivet the soul and the setting beside the mighty and broad River Foyle can be awe inspiring. And in Creggan– former No Go Zone for the Brit army – I became an overnight fan of an unabashably pro IRA bar, mainly because of the depths of passion and pain therein… The Telstar.
The Telstar is unique. The lower half of its entrance door is steel cladded to prevent kicking in by a long list of guess who’s — the British Army, their friends in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Proddy thugs from the UVF, and the biggest group of them all in Derry … THE UNKNOWN THIRSTS (TUTS).
In the Telstar, your soul may cry out as you examine the walls full of tributes and posters concerning young men who snuffed out their own lives through starvation to protest against the jackboot of subjegation they saw. And a haunting photographic mural of massed street protestors after the latest atrocity also sombers the mood.
But when you drink up here above formerly bombed out Derry in the Fort Apache of the Telstar, you begin to understand that your new IRA friends are stranger than you thought. A fact first to be reported here is that the closer in affection the mostly former IRA fellows draw to you, the more times they will order you a free “shot” of Sambucca. If they then begun to truly admire you for a moment longer, you will receive next a “shot” of Tia Maria.
You could say this is Quare but so is Ian Painsley.
Also unreported here to fore is the particularly sensitivity Derry people have about both their feet and their heads. They take care of the former appendages by never walking. In Derry you can walk down any major thoroughfare at night and find it as eerily empty as if it had been closed for a Holywood set. Is this a vestige of fear from the past?
But I am a scientist myself. I am what you call an epistemoligist.
I noticed that the place is pre-hat. I mean to say that if you go there wearing a hat crowds will part in awe at the sight of a man wearing a hat, because there seems to be a tacit agreement across both sides of the “Peace Bridge” that no one, no man that means, should ever appear with a provocative hat.
People just do not wear hats, much less swell cowboy style hats like mine. Must be in the Peace Agreement. But wear a good one and people will never stop talking to you because they too still want to be free and in some ways are the friendliest people I have ever seen, especially over a tri-some of Sambuccas.
