You get up, it's unseasonably cold, you sit around in your arctic kitchen somewhere on the Beara peninsula in west Cork and you stare into a cup of black tea. The basic situation is this: your C-83 Cortina has just failed the National Car Test, you haven't the price of rectifying its supposed faults and the nearest pint of milk is 14 miles away.
This scenario is real as it is bleak and there are hundreds of people on Beara who could soon find themselves spectacularly isolated. The problem is, the vehicles on this peninsula amount to a vastly imperfect fleet, with many ragged Beetles and rust-kissed 2CVs, cars held together with twine and Bostick and prayer. A fair proportion would be a country mile removed from the gleam and precision dictated by the newly imposed EU directives. Over the past couple of months, with the NCT notifications fluttering ominously onto cottage mats, the talk around Beara has been of little else.
The NCT is, of course, a fait accompli and most will grudgingly accept that it had to come sooner or later. It may help to reduce road deaths, it may in time lead to a reduction in insurance costs. But in places like Beara, there is a suspicion too that it is part of a broader agenda, an agenda that says "conform or perish".
Beara offers in microcosm a view of the free-spirited enclave struggling to maintain its own way of things at the beginning of an uninvitingly officious new century. It's a place somewhat out of tune with the wage slave prosperity of Y2K Ireland and it facsimiles the feel and outlook of several other maverick communities dotted along the western seaboard.
A rocky spindle of land dominated by the Miskish and Caha mountains, Beara attracts a fair share of tourists in summer though it's not yet totally encumbered with holiday homes. Whole chunks remain unspoilt and you can walk for miles without meeting a sinner, bar the occasional noted poet staring at some rocks. Most people down this way work two or three jobs in an effort to make ends meet, many are creatives, or craftsy, they go in for the holistic, organic end of things and lately, they feel under threat. When a tiger economy purrs, those at the margins feel a shiver at the spine.
On Beara, the NCT for some seems to have taken on an almost symbolic significance. It is seen as more than just a nuisance, almost an attack on a way of life.
"You could almost see it as outright contempt for people who are out of step with the whole tiger economy thing," says Anne O'Carroll, a writer and teacher who lives near Eyeries at the far tip of the peninsula. "And that's just an absolute joke down here, the line is that the Celtic Tiger must have got shot in Glengariff because he certainly never made it out this way."
Anne drives a 2CV and expects to be called for her test in this month or next.
"I've a 10-mile round trip for the post office and the shop, so if my car doesn't pass the test, which it won't, what am I supposed to do? The way my personal economy works, this is the absolute low point of the year and as this is also when the test is due, it's going to be an impossible situation."
She admits to feeling pretty vexed.
"It's such a flagrant disregard for people who are at the margins," she says. "And anyway, my theory is that most accidents are caused by people going mad in high-powered new cars. People who drive bangers tend to be very careful because if they're not, the cars will fall apart."
The statistics show, in fact, that the car itself is infrequently a factor in road accidents: four in five are caused by the driver.
"What really bugs me are all these ads you get on the radio," says Anne. "The smarmy little voice telling you to borrow £9,000 and get your new car. £9,000 would be a good annual salary on Beara."
Denis Regan of Beara Action Group confirms that many are now in fear of losing their four-wheel lifelines to the towns and villages.
"You'd be talking about a lot of C86 regs and C87s down here," he says, "and they might belong to elderly people who are driving just once or twice a week, to get to the post office or to Mass.
"These are people who will genuinely be left stranded. And you must also take into account the fact that there's practically no public transport out here."
Brown envelopes notifying the car inspections went out around the end of last year. Already called to face the music is Jim O'Connor, a garlic supplier who lives near Hungry Hill and a man who confesses a great emotional attachment to his 1987 Volkswagen Passat.
"I've got this checklist from the NCT and the amount of detail on it is frightening," he says. "There are 57 items on there and we're trying to get everything in order but to be honest, it's going to be touch and go.
"But it's a wonderful car structurally, it has served us very well and I really don't know what we'll do if it fails the test."
Behind the NCT, Jim detects a whiff of social engineering. He suspects the emergence of a two-tier society.
"It's when you go to the cities, when you drive to Dublin or Cork, that the reactions are astounding," he says. "Just because you're driving a 1987 car, it's as if you're a total headbanger. `Look at your man, has he no respect for himself?"'
P.J. Sheehan, a west Cork TD from Goleen, is as apoplectic as his constituents.
"What we have here is pure hypocrisy," he says. "It's ludicrous for the Government to bring in this test with the roads in the state they are, particularly around the likes of west Cork. If you take a brand new car and drive it around Beara for six months, you have an absolute banger on your hands. So I appealed to the minister (Bobby Molloy) to postpone the NCT for five years until the roads were sorted out but I was ignored."
Even getting to the test centres is a problem for those on Beara.
`I was talking to one woman in Allihies who got notice to take her car to Little Island in Cork," says Deputy Sheehan. "Do these people not realise you're talking about a journey of 120 miles and then back again?"
Most people on Beara have been summoned to Skibbereen, which, if you live in Eyeries, is the guts of a 70-mile jaunt. Sheehan has called for a mobile testing unit as has been provided for Donegal, Connemara and west Kerry but as yet there is no word.
A problem peculiar to car owners in places such as Beara is the sea spray that's whipped in off the Atlantic by year-round westerly winds. Even a relatively new car can develop bodywork problems (enough to fail the test) due to the density of salt in the air.
Paul O'Shea, a mechanic in Castletown, whose garage is a stone's throw from the water, says this is a key problem.
"Beara is a fairly damp place generally and that'll bring the rust out very quickly," he says. "The other big problems you'd have out here would be with suspension and steering, and they'd be mainly down to the condition of the roads."
The roads can indeed be almost comical in their dereliction and coupled with this is the fact that many homes on Beara are set half a mile and more back from the blacktop and have to be reached down rough hewn tracks. Most of these tracks contain potholes that would house a good size dog.
On Bere Island, off Castletown, the terrain can be trickier still and some of the native cars are dramatically the worse for wear. You see them emerge from the misty ether, with neither doors nor bonnets, the basic form being that you drive the things into the ground and then turn them into chicken coops. Because there is a roll on, roll off ferry to Bere Island, these cars must in theory brave the NCT.
Right along the extremities of west Cork, down all the far peninsulas, the panic is spreading. Whether you live in Allihies or in Ahakista out on the Kilcrohane peninsula, or down within sight of Mizen Head, the test is a phenomenon that can prompt sleepless nights.
For some, it might even be the last straw. Maybe, as you stare into that cup of black tea, you'll think, well, I could move to the town, get a job in that factory . . .
Last summer, I got a lift out the sea road from Castletown towards Dursey from an ancient farmer in an elderly Escort. The left headlamp was gone. The back left brake light was gone. It was no secret that the passenger door was more or less hanging off.
"You see the way she's gone all down the one side?" he said. "I think she must be after having a class of a stroke on me."
Still, she got us from A to B, eventually. But the days are numbered for such miracles of faith and perseverance.