From piping in Newfoundland to biking in the desert

Displaced in Mullingar:Local music might not do the trick but skidooing works a charm, writes Michael Harding.

Last week I met a Dublin piper in Newfoundland. He brought his uilleann pipes across the ocean to play music for the Irish Newfoundland Association. The two of us had a few pints in a pub on Duckworth Street in St John's. The snow outside was beginning to melt, but it still banked up to six feet on the side of the highway, and in the softly lit bar, woolly hats and big anoraks lay in a pile, as the customers sipped beer and Guinness.

I told the piper that I was living in Mullingar. He wasn't impressed.

I said the music in Mullingar is very good. "Ah, is that right?" he said, visibly wincing.

Two beautiful young women came in from the cold, and sat at the far end of the lounge. Someone alerted the piper to the fact that they were singers, and so when one of them approached the bar for a drink, the piper requested a song.

She refused. "Ahhh, go-wan," he said.

His Dublin accent was utterly beguiling. The young woman was charmed. Her friend came up to join her. And in no time at all the singer threw her dark curls back, and closed her dark eyes, and released a haunting sound from her throat. The piper may have been expecting a sean-nós keen, in a Wexford accent, but what he got was the sharp twang of a country song. A forlorn music vibrating to a rhythm as tight as the singer's little black skirt. She tapped out the phrases of her ballad with a fingernail on the gnarled wood of the old bar counter. "That," I said, triumphantly, when she finished, "reminded me of sweet Westmeath."

The piper, being 50 if a day, and the girls, being hardly more than 21, did not see cause for flirtatious chat. We could have been their daddies, as they say. So instead we all had a long conversation about moose. Moose, apparently are big fat animals with spindly legs, and antlers, who wander the snowy highways of Newfoundland, oblivious to the dangers of traffic. Occasionally they smash through car windscreens, killing everybody, including themselves.

Fortunately I made it home to Mullingar in safety, in time for the St Patrick's Day Parade, where the rain lashed down on a sad looking elephant, a dancing colleen on the back of a lorry, and a group of Iranian Kurds, who seemed slightly unfocused as they smiled and battled up the street through rain and wind.

On the apartment blocks beside the canal, the wind was rattling the satellite dishes and the tiny tricolours, which hung from a few balconies.

I saw a woman tying a Polish flag over her bannister. She was finding it difficult to prevent the flag from flying away into the big grey clouds. When she had it settled she plucked a few loose threads off with her fingers. She was young and blonde, and her attention to the work was intense.

For me the highlight of the parade was a motorcade of 14 leprechauns, vrooming down Austin Friar Street on Harley Davidsons.

I asked the barman later, had he ever seen anyone skidooing? "What's skidooing?" he asked.

I said: "It's what you do, on a Ski-Doo. A Ski-Doo is a kind of Harley Davidson, designed for snow."

"Was that in the parade?" he wondered. "No," I said, "But I saw an uilleann piper fly across a frozen lake on a Ski-Doo last Wednesday afternoon. That was some sight." The barman said that he rode pillion on a Harley Davidson across a desert in New Mexico, with a giant of a man called Treetops at the clutch. A man seven feet tall, with a long knife strapped to the side of his leg.

"He was me cousin," the barman explained. "Was he dangerous?" I wondered. "A pussycat," the barman said. "A pussycat."

Long ago people used to leave Mullingar on a steamer called the Granard, which would come up the Royal Canal to collect passengers for America. A piper would sit on the quay and play plaintive airs as the poor embarked.

As I walked home after the parade, there were girls from Kilbeggan dancing to the twang of country music in a public house. But the canal was deserted. The train station was empty. The woman who wrestled with the Polish flag had gone inside, and the satellite dishes on the apartment balconies were still intact. Still gathering signals from outer space.

mharding@irish-times.ie