Welcome to the west: hail and complicated sheep | Hilary Fannin

We went west for 48 hours, drove out of Dublin under a blue sky dotted with bulbous clouds and graced with a big yellow sun. “Oh,” we said. “Sunshine. Maybe we should have packed our togs.”

For someone who didn’t have a summer holiday this year, I’ve been doing all right. I went to London for a couple of days to attend a friend’s memorial: great speeches, warm friends and the only fag I’ve smoked all year, under a parched magnolia. And then this, an unexpected jaunt over the Shannon.

There was barely time for a dribbling snooze (I wasn’t driving) before I was awoken by a hailstoning squall over Ballinasloe. Temper-tantrum weather, the ice-stones hitting the windshield like spurned diamonds.

“Take them back, you adulterous bastard, give them to your fancy woman, see how long she’ll hand-wash your silken socks and endure your unsavoury relationship with the pugs.”

Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, a lot of roundabouts, and next minute we were walking down Shop Street in Galway.

Galway, rolling out her wares under a damp sun, vapours lifting from the cobblestones. It was beautiful. Shop Street was awash with visitors, wheeling in and out of the sweater shops and bars and the madly camp tea room, like map-wielding flotsam on great big touristic waves.

We went into an old haunt and found an empty table in a patch of dusty sun. I had a gin; I was on my holidays.

“You drove across?” asked the girl who brought the sandwich to our table.

“We did.”

“I suppose it rained over Ballinasloe?”

“Hailstoned.”

“Welcome to the west,” she said, smiling.

Yellow gorse

Twenty-four hours later we were basking on flat rocks on the shores of what might have been Mannin Bay, near Ballyconneely. It’s hard to tell where one bay begins and another one ends in Connemara. It’s hard to tell, and unimportant to tell. The landscape has its own ideas; it meanders on, over yellow gorse and black rock and madeira sponge-coloured sand, and you’re better off meandering along with it, rather than trying to figure out where you are, and anyway, time and place have a different way of unravelling in Connemara, I think.

And sheep. Sheep have become very complicated. Whatever about recognising your location, it’s also hard to tell (given that the yokes I observed looked like eccentric ballroom dancers) if those furry things with black-stockinged legs, their wild pelts dyed red and blue all over, staring at you in glum amazement from their shaley crag, are actually sheep. I thought sheep were, by and large, sheepskin-coloured.

Hallucinogenic flock

We lay down on the flat rocks, under the suspicious gaze of the hallucinogenic flock, grateful for the peace. It had been a long few months. I held my hand up to the momentary sun, the skin on my arms crumpling like crepe paper.

Change is subtle for a while, when it’s in its quietly-creeping-up-on-you phase, and then it roars in your ears like a damn siren.

I was almost asleep again when I heard the peevish buzz of the water-ski boat, coming closer and closer until it drowned out everything else.

“Hold on, Conor! Emma! Emma, tell Conor to hold on . . . No, no, Conor, not like that . . . Oh, he’s down again. Okay, Conor, I’m coming back around again. Hold on, Conor, hold on. No, no, not like . . . Emma, tell Conor to hold on . . . Hold on!”

I sat up and joined the sheep in watching the spectacle. Well-heeled Ireland at play. A small cohort, a wetsuited, ski-boat-driving cohort, a loudly confident, hyperactive cohort, drawing figures of eight on the choppy bay, slicing open the ragged symmetry of the wavelets with their important, hard-earned, scalpelled blades, with their engines that pumped and coughed and spurted and snorted.

Conor fell in the water another couple of times, righted himself again, fell again, righted himself, eventually hanging on long enough for his father’s encouraging narrative to zoom off with him beyond our earshot.

We stood up and slowly picked our way back over the rocks. We drove back to our lodgings, through a landscape of famine walls and buried ghosts, through festive villages strangely bedecked with people carriers and crab sandwiches. We passed jewellery makers and potters, and lovely bars with fecund windowboxes, falling over themselves in welcome. And somewhere out there, in our wake, the sheep turned their long, black faces away from the now quiet bay and went back to reading their books on ballroom etiquette.

I’m coming back in winter, to retrace my steps in the gloom.