“Ye’ll be wantin to come home and stay then….”
A great bear of an arm thrown warmly around my shoulders was my introduction to Eugene from Malahide Marine.
It was an Irish boating company and I think it might have been benefiting from the same pot of government money that was fuelling John DeLorean, inventor of stainless steel sports cars. Pity about the Renault engine, but they sure made good time machines, those DMC’s.
Anyway, back to Malahide. I flew to Dublin to trial a range of Starcraft tinnies and report on the experience for a London-based magazine. The boats were actually made in New Zealand at the time and Eugene was importing the range of boats. Because I was from NZ, I got the job to go review them – you have to understand that magazine editors have a habit of making that kind of weird association. (The same editor once sent me to interview Shane Acton, who had set off from the UK in a boat somewhat less seaworthy than a Hartley 16 trailer sailer, absolutely no experience at all and sailed it round the world. I got that job because my name was Shane and I lived in the London suburb of Acton. That made me, apparently, the ideal candidate for the interview because we had something in common.)
So reader, you can understand that working with editors, whose minds tend to behave like that, is bound to create bizarre moments.
Again back to Malahide. They had arranged a test session on a river system called the Shannon. The Shannon is a huge series of interconnected lakes, marshes and a river which is a major transport network through Southern Ireland. It’s incredibly beautiful.
We met Eugene at Athlone and headed up the Shannon. Errr, perhaps I should explain that a bit further. We walked into a tiny, smoky little pub whose ceiling appeared to be about 3 inches above my head and the floor level was as pissed as most of the regulars.
The barman poured a Guinness just as soon as my shadow darkened his wonky doorstep.
I reached for the creamy pint and committed an almost-treasonable sin of trying to pick it up before it had properly settled. I was forgiven, but only after promising to leave future pints for at least five minutes, if I accompanied him home to dine and stay with his family, and to destroy zillions of brain cells while discussing rugby in great detail.
Ah the Irish, you’d never meet a more hospitable person anywhere.
So we got onto the boats. The only glitch was that it was December (Northern Hemisphere remember, pre global warming) it was snowing, and the boats were all open.
You have to hand it to those Irish. Blasting through the falling snow in the open tinnies was, shall we say, “bracing.”
Their solution to this was to haul up at a pub, which seemed to be about every two miles, lurch inside and order a Hot Paddy, which was the Irish version of a hot whisky toddy.
It’s true that drinking alcohol in the cold is the worst thing you can do because it brings the blood vessels to the skin and cools you down further.
But it sure felt like the right thing to be doing, motoring from pub to pub, walking in with icicles hanging off our eyebrows, then sipping away on a hot toddy while enjoying the Irish hospitality.
These are the things memories are made of. And as I headed towards the departure lounge in Dublin, Eugene was imploring me to come back and spend Christmas with them.
The conclusion to this story was getting a bollocking from the resident technical engineer for not writing a long enough story about the Starcraft. How was he to know that the entire episode had consisted of trying to freeze ourselves to death, while using a wicked mixture of whisky, hot water and sugar as antifreeze? In the madness I hadn’t bothered to make any notes and for some reason my memory was flawed… it was a lesson I never again repeated.
And you know what, I reckon if I turned up on Eugene’s doorstep, nearly 30 years later, he’d clap that great arm around me, shove a Guinness in my hand, and ask “to be sure what took you so long…”
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