Darren Abroad: Down the Country (and Heathrow)

I wrote this on Sunday morning, but wasn’t able to post it until today. The Internet access in rural Ireland is predictably scant.

It is 5:45AM GMT, and I’m seated on a rock wall that lines a tiny cemetery in County Wexford. There’s a cacophony of birds–the rough coughs of the crows, the monastic mutterings of the pigeons, a hundred other calls I don’t recognize–punctuated occasionally by the occasional insistent crowing of the resident peacock. Though it’s overcast, the sky is brightening, and I’m confident the air is warming up. At the moment though, I have to blow on my hands after each paragraph.

At first I was sitting with my back to the graveyard, looking out across a field to the mouth of the river. However, it wasn’t quite bright enough to guarantee that no zombie named Paddy O’Neil wasn’t going to rise from his 200-year-old for a quick snack of Canadian back bacon. So, I turned around and am vigilant. Given the tall grass and rockery, I’d normally be worried about snakes as well. This is Ireland, however, and I have St. Patrick to thank for that.

I’ve left my warm bed because of jet lag. I’ve done well to sleep six hours, actually, but can no longer depend on my general exhaustion to ignore my long-standing membership in the Pacific Standard Tribe.

To recover from our jet lag and prepare for the busy week ahead, we’ve headed down to Ireland’s south-east coast, near the Hook Peninsula . We’re staying overnight at Kilmokea Guest House, one of many beautiful Victorian estates converted into charming accomodations around the country. After a couple of insanely-busy weeks at work and a lengthy flight, it’s a welcome respite. They have a large, splendid woodland garden near the house. It’s the sort of place where you wouldn’t be surprised if a mole or satyr sauntered up and invited you in for tea.

Despite my wife’s notoriously-lousy travel luck, we managed the trip without event. All of our planes departed and arrived on time, with all of our luggage. We did have a five hour lay-over at Heathrow, which was unfortunate. Heathrow is the worst airport I’ve ever flown into. Each time I arrive I see that nausea-inducing carpet and wonder ‘what fresh hell is this?’ And it is indeed hell. It’s always packed with unhappy people–it’s dirty, grim and torturous to do anything. All of the food is appalling, and, like hell, they’re always under construction. It’s rare that I board an Aer Lingus flight gratefully, but today we were pleased to see that shamrock-bearing Airbus pull up.

It’s particularly bad flying from Heathrow to Ireland, because they put you in what I refer to as ‘the tube’. It’s a length series of corrugated metal tubes that you walk through for miles, until you reach a slightly broader tube where you wait with all of the other sad, slightly-ashamed Irish folk. It’s like they assumed that every Irish person was a terrorist and had a bomb in their luggage, so they put them in some cheap enclosure miles from anybody else. It’s a bit like a scene from the famine emigration, in reverse.

I have photos of the journey, which I’ll post as soon as I get around to sorting them.