My Holidays

David Monagan, Author

What’s your earliest holiday memory?

Aged six, being mortified by my pretty playmate. We were at the Connecticut shore and all the adults were in party mode. My nefarious siblings urged her to give me my first kiss, I fled and she chased me round and round the cottage.  Finally, I fell in the front door and through the crowd and made for the stairs, where I slipped and, in public view, she caught me!

What was your worst holiday?

Being imprisoned! When I was 17 in 1970, I hitch-hiked across North America with a friend.  At the Las Vegas strip, we got thrown into that hellhole’s jail with the more upstanding swindlers and prostitutes, for the crime of being apparent vagabonds with no room reserved.

Worse happened in Columbus, Ohio, where cops busted us for hitch-hiking and decided that our sugar for making campfire coffee was LSD, leading to another night in the nick!

What was your best holiday?

The honeymoon with my wife Jamie in Ireland in 1984 was sublime. From Dingle to a Blackstairs Mountains pub with crooning customers whose trousers were covered in sheep faeces and fleece: as demented a place as Flann O’Brien ever dreamed of!

Also, South Africa blew me away in 1991. I went thousands of feet underground in a gold and diamond mine, I travelled around in a cartel businessman’s jet from Botswana to Johannesburg while the geopolitics on the ground was riveting.

If budget or work were not a restriction, what would be your dream holiday?

To Namibia’s Skeleton Coast and Sperrgebiet (the diamond controlled forbidden area that fascinated Ian Fleming). The Atlantic surf furiously hits the coast and is timeless, stunning, and dangerous. Adjacent Angola also fascinates me.

If you had your pick, who would you bring on holiday?

I’d bring Jamie to snake- and lion-infested Namibia. But a mortal enemy might be a better choice for the blood diamond area and scarred Angola, or else a fallen aristocrat Swiss friend who used to work there for the UN.

What is your favourite place in Ireland?

Donegal with the elemental sea and stone, the air, the light with the intonations of people and here-and-now human warmth where the ancients and saints are somehow closer.

Your recommended holiday reading?

I am itching to read half-Irish John Perrot’s Quaker journals about heading for Byzantium and Rome to convert the sultan and pope in the 1650s. If I go to Africa, I’d revisit A Bend in the River by V S Naipaul.

Where will you go to next?

Perhaps a week in Paris soon, with its many secret worlds, but realistically I may first hole up in Dublin and let the garrulous of Grogan’s tell where they have been. As Niko Kazantzakis said: “Why should I go anywhere when the whole world will come to me in time?”

David Monagan is the author of Ireland Unhinged, Transworld Ireland, €12,99, and Jaywalking with the Irish Lonely Planet, £7.99.

In conversation with GENEVIEVE CARBERY