Back in Cork for the first time in a while on Thursday, I heard again the distinctive call of the Evening Echo seller. “Echo-Ech-ooo!” it rang out onomatopoeically along Oliver Plunkett Street. But this time there was another part to it I didn’t remember hearing before.
Had the species mutated since my last visit? Although I couldn’t quite make out what the added three-syllable noise signified, it sounded something like “Tally-ho” or “Tally-boy”, attached to every second or third Echo, eg: “Echo-Ech-ooo! Tally-boy! Ech-ooo!”
After listening hard for a minute, I was still no wiser. So, feeling like a cross between an American tourist and David Attenborough, I approached the man. “Sorry for interrupting,” I said, “but what’s that thing you’re saying before the word ‘Echo’?”
He studied me a split second, as if trying to assess whether I was a Dublin jackeen out to make a feck of him. Or maybe it was just that my accent needed deciphering too.
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Then he pointed into his satchel at the copies of Holly Bough, the venerable Christmas annual beloved of generations of Cork people. “Ah, yes, of course,” I said, feeling suddenly as stupid as I must have looked.
Passing the Imperial Hotel, I noticed another new addition since my last visit, a bronze Michael Collins sitting on a bench. As I sought the best angle for a photograph, a passerby asked me in the singsong tones of Wilton or Bishopstown: “Will he smile for you?”
Indeed, the statue was smiling, faintly, which is poignant considering that it commemorates Collins’s stay at the hotel the night before he left for Béal na Bláth.
Inside, in the foyer, there’s a list of other famous guests, including William Makepeace Thackeray. During his 1842 visit, the novelist was treated to a dinner where the champagne flowed all too freely, so that next day he had “a slight headache” and “an extreme longing for soda water”.
Those who overindulge in alcohol in Cork today may face reproval from the statue of Fr Mathew on Patrick Street. A chastened Thackeray went down to breakfast next morning to find the actual Apostle of Temperance (1790-1856) there, drinking tea.
Speaking of the Civil War in Cork, my latest trip to Leeside coincided with the start of the city’s International Film Festival, the “opening gala” of which involved a screening of Saipan, a cinematic account of the 2002 conflict that turned brother against brother and featured many “atrocities” on both sides. Alas, I was on a train back to Dublin by the time the gala began, but I hope it passed off peacefully.
I was in Cork for an appearance on the Today show with Dáithí Ó Sé and Maura Derrane. The last time I had been on that programme, back in what must have been the good old days of RTÉ, they put me up in the Imperial the night before. Which wasn’t strictly necessary, but no less welcome, allowing my dour northern soul to acclimatise a little to the warmer ways of the deep south.
This was a more pressurised visit, partly because two months ago, in a weak moment, I had also agreed to launch a book for someone in Dublin on the evening of November 6th. By the time we noticed the clash, it was too late for either of us to change dates.
So I got up at 4.30am on Thursday, rough-wrote the next day’s column before breakfast, and en route to Cork belatedly read the book I would be launching later, assuming I caught the 4.25pm train back to Dublin and that it wasn’t delayed by leaves on the line or an ambush by Roy Keane-supporting Cork separatists or whatever.
The book, Fail Again Fail Even Better, written by former stand-up comedian Karl MacDermott, is the tragicomic story of an obscure Irish poet and his perennially doomed attempts to find a readership. And strange to say, I had somehow never met its author before Thursday, although his name was well known to me as long ago as 1990.
That we’d never met was a source of consolation as I considered the very real possibility that I wouldn’t make it back in time for his launch, so that he might have to get someone else at the last moment.
Then, near the end of his mock memoir, I read the chapter entitled “Book Launch”. This detailed the catalogue of disasters that had been the protagonist’s attempts to launch books over the years, a recurring feature of which was the failure of his official speaker to turn up.
I don’t know how autobiographical the chapter was. In any case, it conferred a crippling sense of responsibility on me not to become another treacherous no-show.
Then my slot with Dáithí and Maura overran a bit: we were still on air at 4.05pm. After that, there was a promotional picture and make-up removal, followed by a mad taxi dash to Kent station. But I somehow caught the train, which left and arrived on time. And I did make the launch, finally, a mere half-hour later than advertised.
