Friday, September 01, 2006

Liverpool to Dublin (1987)

This going to be a story telling blog for a few weeks. I am feeling reflective and finding it cool to get some of this stuff out of my head and onto my blog.

Leonard Sweet once said “The future belongs to story tellers and the connectors” well I’ll tell my stories and hope you connect with me through them. You can still check out Ibiza happenings at www.24-7ibiza.blogspot.com

So we got on the train, Joe and myself, we smoked a few spliffs, got to London then caught another train to Liverpool. We arrived very late and got straight to the port but there were no ferries to Ireland until the following evening. We found an all night cafĂ© full of rough drunken people down by the docks, scary at first but they were very warm to us. We sat up all night with two prostitutes playing pool and drinking tea. They obviously weren’t very busy, they had both seen better days, they were old, rough and heroin addicted obviously not the most physically attractive people you’d want to spend £20 on, but very friendly. Probably would have made better counsellors than prostitutes.

The next morning we headed into Liverpool town centre, Joe had a sleep on some steps and I went and had all my hair shaved off. This was a first for me, my hair has now remained in that same style for 19 years, call me adventurous. I remember waking Joe up he screamed as he thought he was about to be mugged by a skinhead to this day I have never understood why people think I look threatening.

We used the cheque book bought some camping gear and then went and watched superman! Whilst walking about Liverpool we bumped into a street evangelist who invited us back to his house for a sleep but we were a bit freaked about staying with someone we didn’t know, we both had a homophobic moment.

Oh forgot to mention, phoned my work, left an answering phone message telling them I would never be back.

That night we caught the ferry, for some reason it was cheaper for us to get on a ferry in a car, so we talked to some bloke in a car, he was British heart surgeon who had a house in Ireland, nice chap, he gave us a lift on to the boat.

What do you do when you get an all night ferry to Ireland? Obviously you go straight to the bar and buy Guinness, which we did. As we looked like quite a weird couple we soon ended up attracting other strangers and loners and soon we were sitting with a group of Irish people, one had a guitar and we all just sat around singing songs for hours.

By now we were on the whiskey another first for me!

I remember one of the guys a drunken Irish wine salesman saying to me, “you must get down to the west coast, sit on the rocks and listen to the waves as they break, you can hear the angels playing their harps in the waves”. The melancholic, romantic Irishman in me loved that, plus I was very drunk and those statements always sound great with a guitar playing in the background on top of 6 Guinness’s and 4 whiskies! Maybe we could introduce this into some of our church services? By the way the whole Irish Celtic thing is over romanticised, most of the time it’s drink that makes us happy and hangovers that make us mellow.

Well we slept in the corridor on the boat and when we woke up it was empty, we walked off, and there were no customs men, which was relief to Joe as he had brought some dope. We then caught the bus into Dublin.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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