I promised Paddy I'd put this on paper for him the last time we parted. Outside the arrivals hall in Dublin Airport as, flushed with drink, he clambered into the back of a taxi, I mouthed it at his receding back - you couldn't say it out in front of him, he'd be mortified. Paddy and I have been criss-crossing across each other's lives and the Irish Sea for as long as I can remember.
You see, I owe it to him and all the other Paddies who made that journey.
Our paths crossed earlier that day in the departures lounge in Heathrow, each of us clutching Aer Lingus tickets to Dublin. Heathrow on a summer Friday afternoon means heat and delays and for us the sweet mercy of cold pints of Carlsberg. I spotted him across the bar, ordering and buying drinks for anyone who'd listen to him. He was in his fifties, wearing a nice suit and dark tie, but not looking totally comfortable in it. Those shoulders were made for a McAlpine builder's donkey jacket.
He was saying something about his uncle. He caught my glance and held up his glass questioningly. I shook my head and pointed to my own, three-quarters full.
Same tribe
We knew each other, and we didn't . We belonged to the same tribe. That's enough. Most Irishmen in England are Paddies at some time.
Paddy and the lads on the building site and the gangers on the M25 job and the regulars in the bookies on the Harrow Road - we're all the one, really.
I thought of earlier times we'd been together. The regular pilgrimage of the Irish in Britain before cheap air fares. The mail train to Holyhead from Euston, embarking on the Hibernia or Cambria or Leinster in the early hours, and the first blessed sighting of Dun Laoghaire or the North Wall +++as dawn broke.
Home. That was the good trip. Going back stony broke to another 11 months and two weeks of Ballykilburn, or Harlesden, and strange accents ringing in your ear - that was tough.
But we were travelling home, so that was all right.
I remembered a day sailing to Dun Laoghaire, and a Paddy who had been hitting the gargle on the train from Euston. Then he bought a bottle of his namesake whiskey in the duty-free and got stuck into that.
He had the wife and kids with him. They were all wearing their best clothes - like they had to make a good impression back home, and not let on they were living in a scabby, back-street terraced house in North London. The little girl was dressed in her First Communion outfit .
The wife asked Paddy for money for a cup of tea and sandwiches for herself and the kids. A row followed over the price of the tea.
"Bloody robbers," he said and a lot more. Snacks were always expensive when travelling, but not compared with what Paddy had spent on gargle - and to what he would have to spend buying rounds at home in Culhane's and Kenny's, what with the great money he said he had "on the building" in London. His wife caught me watching and I looked away. I knew it wasn't going to be an easy holiday for any of them.
The Crown
If it wasn't the same Paddy it was someone very like him I'd seen in the Crown in Cricklewood on a weekday morning, the dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight hitting the wooden floor. The building trade had gone flat, and he was studying the form in the Daily Mirror, looking to make another day's drinking money. He looked shook, thin, and his clothes were shabby. "The Mirror never made little of the Irish the way the other papers did," he said.
Another time there was a mill outside a pub in Clapham High Street. Was it that Paddy in the thick of it? A Dundalk brickie took exception to the way a West Indian hod-carrier had looked at him and said so. Soon there were 20 or so Irish and West Indians beating the hell out of each other. The Met stood by waiting to arrest the victors while an ambulance crew tried to salvage the losers. "They won't try that lark again with us," said Paddy, holding his half-severed ear in place as he was led away to a waiting ambulance.
But that was then. Now times were better.
On the plane this Paddy returned to the subject of his uncle. "I'm going home to bury me Uncle Billy," he confided in me across the aisle. "He was the best, the dacentest man that ever lived." Then his head fell on h is chest and he slept.
Drinks trolley
I was a light sleep, because the drinks trolley woke him. He wanted to buy drinks for all and sundry, but the air hostess gently dissuaded him. "Me Uncle Billy was a great man," he told her tearfully. "He was never a man to give you two shillings when he had half-a-crown." I don't suppose she knew the importance of the difference between 10 pence and 121/2 pence in Uncle Billy's heyday, but I did. So I raised my glass to this munificence and this pleased Paddy no end.
By now Paddy was convinced that (1), I was "one of the lads" and (2) I was on my way to Uncle Billy's obsequies. It took two pints and a chaser apiece in Dublin to clear up that misunderstanding in terms which did not lead to the giving or taking offence.
My part of this liquid pilgrimage was now over and I helped him into his taxi. As the cab sped away, he raised his hand in farewell. I don't know what happened after that.
Did Paddy stay at home? I doubt it. It wasn't really home any more. For him, and for many more like him, home was suspended - not Ireland, not England, but where he happened to be. And by and large he made the best fist he could of it.