End of the world? Pick up a hitch-hiker

The Badger says Colmcille predicted the number of popes before the world ends – and the Polish fellow should have been the last!

I WAS WALKING into town last Saturday, admiring the yellow irises on the banks of the canal, when three little boys shouted at me from the ditch.

“Hey Mister! Howiya?” I stopped and shouted back. “I’m grand!” They were delighted that I acknowledged them. “Look at our pup, Mister,” they said. A little brown ball of fur with floppy ears and black eyes was sitting in the grass beside them. “What does he eat?” I asked. “Burgers!” they said, “and Cheerios.” I wished them well and walked on, because I wanted to get into town before it rained.

Nearer town, where the railway tracks skirt the canal, three teenage boys were sitting on a wall, and a teenage girl, barefoot, was skipping on the tarmac in front of them, and the boys were trying to pretend they were not interested in her, as they gazed at her lovely little toes.

I found an empty bar and was enjoying a quiet afternoon pint when the Badger saw me through the open door, and decided to come in and give me a bit of his mind. The Badger has an exceptional mind. He concocts theories of alarming ingenuity and loves nothing more than to corner someone in a quiet bar and share his wisdom.

To paraphrase Sherwood Anderson, when the Badger gets astride an idea, his personality becomes gigantic; it overrides the person to whom he is talking and anyone else who stands within the sound of his voice. “Are you familiar with Colmcille’s prophesies?” the Badger asked.

“No.”

“Well,” he said, “Colmcille predicted how many popes there would be, before the end of the world. And according to his figures the Polish fellow should have been the last. So the question is – was Colmcille correct?”

I said, “Clearly he made a mistake.” “Wrong,” said the Badger. “The saint was right.”

“But,” I protested, “the world hasn’t ended.”

“That,” said the Badger, “is missing the point. Colmcille could not conceive of the world lasting beyond the time of the popes. It would be like thinking of the Earth outlasting the Sun. So when he predicted how many popes there would be, he incorrectly assumed that the world would then end. It didn’t. But his basic point, about the exact number of popes, was spot on.”

“But,” I said, “there has been another pope since the Polish man.”

“Incorrect!” the Badger declared, now rounding on me with the core of his thesis.

“The Polish fellow was an actor in a drama that still worked. He embodied something. He was a walking icon, a living metaphor of the heavenly Father.” The Badger wiped a froth of Guinness from his lips and in one gulp devoured the remains of his first pint.

“But this new fellow, the German, is only an administrator, with clay feet. He’s not a functioning icon.” “Are you saying that the present pope is not a real pope!” “Precisely! Colmcille had the numbers right! Isn’t that amazing?”

England was gearing up to play its first match in South Africa, and Eamonn Dunphy was on the television. The barman, a Fine Gael devotee, turned the sound down and whispered in my ear that Armageddon was not far away.

I couldn’t figure out what the barman was hinting at, and the Badger was wrapped up in himself, gazing at the little bubbles in the next pint that was being readied for him, and it occurred to me that it was high time I got away somewhere, for a holiday; I need a break from the intellectual milieu of Mullingar.

So I might just head for Leitrim and visit the wife. I could stand again beneath the hard- wood trees in the garden, and sip wine on the patio overlooking Lough Allen, and hold her hand on a balmy midsummer evening, while the house brims with music: that’s the way Leitrim always is, in my imagination.

Or on the other hand I might buy a caravan on Done Deal. I could whizz around the country, and call on old friends who live in housing estates and park my caravan in their driveways, or maybe go to some of the wilder festivals in the West, and pick up beautiful young hitch-hikers, and say things like, “Hey if you’re stuck for a place to stay, friend, you can always crash out in the caravan. It’s cool with me.”