Blowin' In The Wind

So, Ireland, then...

It all seemed like such a daft but doable idea at the time: Eamon wanted to go and watch the last Finn Harps match of the season and if anyone wanted to come along, they could.

Nine others, including me, said it might be fun. So arrangements were made, flights were booked and money handed over.

I think the original idea, by the way, was that the Harps might have been in contention for promotion from League 2, as it was, they were in contention for fifth place rather than sixth. Nobody cared much about this, but perhaps it was a premonition.

The journey to Ireland was almost entirely without incident. Everyone turned up on-time and there were no roadworks or other delays —no shipwrecks and nobody drownded, nothing to laugh at at all— and we were in Stansted before we knew it. The couple of breakfast beers in Salzburg Airport helped here, as I think I read about two lines of my book before dropping off.

At Salzburg I had noted how one or two of our fellow travellers had a funny idea about hand luggage, and exactly what was needed for a weekend of Guinness drinking, but the Airport staff had been quite accomodating and not too inclined to fuss if one or two of the group had packed for a month in the Antarctic. Apparently a laptop computer is an absolute essential for both an Antarctic expedition and a weekend on the piss in Ireland. Who knew?

I also noted that Harmony from Angel was in this month's Playboy and it would go very well with my Cordelia edition...

The staff at Stansted were not so accomodating. The whole idea of just hand luggage was that we could breeze through the airport and leave the time that would normally be used waiting for your luggage to turn up for the more important things. Like drinking. Stansted employees were deaf to our alcoholism. Still, it wasn't too bad, only a couple of us needed to check in our bags and Derry airport, we just knew, was going to be a Nissen hut by the side of a runway. That just left 5 hours in Stansted and not much else to to besides drink Guinness and eat as many things containing bacon as possible. It was all so easy...

More later.