FURTHERMORE
By Gerry Moran
And so, my good wife and I headed off to sunny Spain on a long, overdue break, taking with us too many clothes, no mosquito repellent and my ex-girlfriend! That’s right – my ex-girlfriend, Anne, who I went out with for about three years when we were students in Dublin.
Anne was studying English in Trinity while yours truly was studying English and Latin in UCD in Earlsfort Terrace just up the road. In fact we Arts students were the last to grace Earlsfort Terrace before being ‘shipped off’, for want of a better expression, to Belfield, the new Arts campus. Belfield was a brand new, concrete complex devoid of atmosphere and the chumminess of Earlsfort Terrace. Plus it was miles away. I lived a short bus journey from Earlsfort Terrace but now I had to take two buses, infrequent ones, to get to Belfield which accounted for me missing lectures (oh dear) and regular meet-ups with Anne in the Buttery in Trinity.
But I’ve digressed. Anne, I should add was, is, a Tipperary woman which didn’t interfere one whit with our relationship as she was, is, a very attractive woman. Indeed I had a drink many moons ago with a fellow teacher from the same town as Anne and when I told him that I had gone out with her, he took a gulp from his pint, leaned closer and whispered: “Gerry, I’d have given my left…..” – which I cannot repeat here – “to have gone out with her.”
Now I doubt if he’d had given his left, you-know-what, to date Anne but you never know, these Tipperary boys they’re not like us – they’re mad, bad and dangerous to know. But I’ve digressed. Again.
So, how did it all work out – the three of us together in the sun, sea and sand of Southern Spain? Actually it was very harmonious. We were quite the happy threesome and yes, in case you were wondering there were nights when, after a pleasant bottle of Rioja, the three of us ended up in bed together! That’s right, three in a bed! A grand King-size bed that could accommodate, not just three, but four – two up, two down, just like the sleeping arrangements in many an Irish family back in the day except back-in-the-day the bed was far from Kingsize. So, time methinks to explain this ‘decadent’ carry on.
Damn right you had better explain, Gerry Moran, and you a former altar boy, proud wearer of the Green Scapular and considered the priesthood once.
Anne Haverty, for that is her name, and I parted company in 1974. I returned to Kilkenny to a secure, pensionable job as a Primary school teacher while Anne remained in the capital and became a successful author. Her works include: The Beauty Of The Moon, The Far Side Of A Kiss, Free And Easy, a biography of Countess Markievicz. and One Day As A Tiger published back in 1997. I purchased that novel but never got round to reading until now – in Spain. And why, Gerry Moran, did it take you 28 long years to read it? Well, that, as they, is another story plus it has to do with something I constantly suffer from: LFS – Long Finger Syndrome, a problem I’ve had all my life. But 28 years, Gerry! I know. I know. I need therapy. A lot of therapy.
In the meantime is Anne’s book One Day As A Tiger any good? Well, it won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1997. And here’s what our esteemed writer Colm Toibín, author of Brooklyn (turned into the heart-breaking movie with Saoirse Ronan, to mention but one of his highly regarded novels) had to say: “A novel written with enormous confidence and flair. It has a lightness and a sense of comic timing which is absent from most contemporary Irish fiction but it also has a real sense of darkness and grotesque.”
And this from one from the Sunday Telegraph: “A work of rare enchantment….to that long list of Irish writers who write better English than the English, a new name can be added.”
See now, how Anne Haverty ended up in bed with the wife and myself in Spain…
