A toast to Joe, and some raddle on the cheeks in the fading light

MISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I LIKE TO celebrate New Year's Eve in the afternoon. For me the end of the year is when the light fades from the sky for the last time. And because the Joe Dolan statue was erected only recently at the Market Square, I thought I should go and wish him all the best for 2009. The statue is a very realistic work. It actually looks like Joe. So it's hard to pass him without saying hello at the best of times; and I certainly couldn't ignore him on New Year's Eve.

I was standing in front of him, just looking into his eyes, when a lady in her 60s, wearing white jeans beneath a black leather coat, came up and kissed him on the cheek, and asked me to take a picture.

“Make sure you get both of us,” she said.

I had a chat with her afterwards, and a hot whiskey, in the Greville Arms; slices of lemon perfectly studded with cloves, piping hot water in glasses with handles, and from the first sip it was clear that the barman had not spared the whiskey.

“There’s nothing as magical as a hot whiskey on a cold day,” I suggested.

My new acquaintance said, “You’re an educated man; will you please tell me what raddle means.”

I said, “I don’t know. I remember a phrase used in West Cavan years ago – to raddle the fire – meaning to shake out the ashes.”

“Oh I don’t think it’s anything to do with ashes,” she said, with a kind of sadness.

I guessed that she was Irish, living in England.

“When I lived in west Cavan,” I said, “we would often come from dances late at night, and someone would raddle the range, while the records of Hank Williams were being sorted out, and the tumblers of hot whiskey were being spiced with cinnamon sticks and hot water.”

Then I searched in my iPhone dictionary, and discovered that raddle is a pigment consisting of ochre. It was used to mark a ram’s chest or belly, so that the farmer would know which sheep was tupped.

“That’s disgusting,” my friend said, sipping her whiskey.

“I never heard the word used in relation to sheep,” I confessed. “But I often heard raddle used in relation to shaking the cinders out from the bottom of the range, which would make perfect sense, because raddle does sound a bit like redden, and the way to redden the fire is to shake out the ashes.”

She was suddenly excited.

“So raddle could mean redden?”

“Yes, I suppose so. The dictionary says it is the red mark you see on sheep. But when I shake out the ashes, the coals in the range are reddened.”

“Oh well that’s it!” she declared, joyfully. “It’s rouge!”

I didn’t follow her.

She said Joe Dolan used the word raddle years ago, in a song called The Bachelor From Westmeath.

“Not one of his better songs,” she admitted, and then she quoted the chorus: “‘. . . with red stuff on her fingernails/ and varnish on her toes/ raddle on her old face/ and whitewash on her nose.’

“It’s not a very nice song at all,” she said. “I think it must be only in Mullingar that they like it. I’m from Mayo. But I live in London.” “Have you lived in London a long time?” “Forty years in Slough,” she declared. “And we’re more sophisticated over there; but we still love Joe Dolan. I came over in December, to see the statue being unveiled. I was here for three days, and I went to his grave every morning, to talk to him.”

I asked her did she like the statue. She said she thought it was a bit small.

“They could have made it a little higher and they could have brightened up his face a bit. He looks like the black Elvis,” she said.

“Who is the black Elvis?” “Oh he’s a black man in London,” she said, “who does Elvis impersonations.” She looked out the window.

“In London,” she repeated.

“It’s getting dark,” I said, “this day is almost over.”

“They could have made him taller,” she said. “I know that’s the height he was; he was small enough. But they could have cheated a little bit. And he is a year dead this week. Isn’t it terrible how time just . . . passes.”