Loops

I find myself in a small bar in the port of Rosslare, Ireland. I have a show with the band up in Dún Laoghaire the next day and have come over via Pembroke from Cardiff, where I’d had a solo show – I thought it may be romantic to take the ferry and avoid the stress of flying. The barmaid is telling me how she hates it here, how the constant influx of tourists and travellers using the port makes for messy evenings and obnoxious customers. She tells me she used to run a bar in Kerry, but moved over here for the money, was going to see out her contract and hot-foot it back home. There’s a table of guys acting like monkeys, literally, in the corner. Idiot-dancing on the tables, grunting, the lot. Hmm. One of the guys comes over and starts talking to me in an ambiguous English accent – asking what I’m doing here and such. I lie, of course, telling him I’m on my way to Cork where I’ve taken a job. He asks why I’ve come from Scotland via Wales, the long way – to avoid drunk Englishmen, I reply, with much whisky bravado and little wit. His accent changes to thick Welsh and he offers me a drink, looking a bit embarrassed about his jovial chums as they sing some song about a Maid Called Mary-Jane. He seems OK, actually. Just a guy on his way somewhere – We’ve just had Bill’s stag weekend, he tells me, pointing him out. Ah. Good old Bill. I wonder who’s marrying Bill, currently displaying himself as the oxen slumped at the back, wearing a stained Irish rugby shirt and fake orange ears. Good luck to them both though, I say. I decline my Welsh pal’s drink and leave the bar, looking for some food. There’s a nasty-looking pizza place I walk straight past but find myself returning to twenty minutes later, having walked around Rosslare getting colder and colder in the November wind and found nowhere else open. No cheese? I ask, and wait outside. It’s around 11 p.m., I guess, and the massive ferry I disembarked from is around 100 yards in front of me, lights ablaze and filthy white, looking like floating polystyrene Christmas debris, its oil trail rainbowing slightly under the port-illuminating flood lights. The smell here is sea and diesel and the noises mostly industrial – cranes loading stock, guys shouting in the distance, unidentified bangs and clangs, lorries and coaches passing.


– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.