J O H N ' S    J O U R N A L I S M O N E    L A S T    G O    O N    T H E    B U M P E R S by John Connolly It is, to be scrupulously honest, a bit chilly for July. At a rough count, there are six people on Ballybunion's North Strand, and I am one of only two of them not wearing a wetsuit while paddling a canoe. A more sensible person might take as some kind of sign, but I have not set foot in this water since I was a child and at the sight of it I have been overcome by a desire to swim in it once again. The only other unprotected bather is walking towards me, away from the sea. He has actually managed to get a little colour into him while in the water. Unfortunately that colour is blue. His body is puce at the shoulders, fading to raw red at his legs, and his face has the set, stunned look of the recently bereaved. I am reminded of one of my closest friends who went swimming off the Sligo coast some years ago and experienced such profound shock at the temperature that one of his testicles retreated into his body and, like a startled snail, refused to come back out for half an hour. "Cold?" I ask. He looks at me like I'm an idiot and keeps walking. I reach the edge of the water. A wave laps at my toes, and my foot instantly goes numb. "Bloody hell," I think. Still, I have come this far. I walk slowly into the sea and, as the water reaches my waist, I am tempted to weep. It might be nostalgia, but I suspect that it's something more profound. I think it's pain. Ballybunion, County Kerry, was where I spent most of my seaside holidays as a child. Technically, we stayed with my grandmother in Ballylongford, about ten miles further east at the mouth of the Shannon estuary, but Ballylongford didn't have much sea and sand. To be honest, Ballylongford—and I bow to nobody in my affection for the place—was a little on the quiet side generally. There were no bright lights in Ballylongford. In fact, once you passed the Garda station there were no lights at all: if somebody struck a match on the road from the village to Ballyline it was as though a disco had suddenly opened. Ballybunion was like Las Vegas by comparison. It had gambling and arcades and restaurants. International acts graced its cabarets. Boney M once played Ballybunion, although the group was kind of on its uppers by that point, and I think some inner turmoil had split its members so that north Kerry got one or two of them while Bogota or Sierra Leone got the rest. (And if it seems strange that an internationally renowned act, albeit an irritating one that had seen better days, should be playing the ballroom on Main Street, it is worth recalling that Meat Loaf once did a gig in Moate when his career was in the doldrums. Moate! At least Ballybunion has a beach.) Occasionally, my father would force us to take a break from Ballybunion and try instead to convince my brother and me of the merits of Ballyheigue (very pretty but not as many amusements, and rather spoiled by a vague memory of large numbers of dead seabirds being buried under the dunes following an oil slick) or, infinitely worse, Beal. Beal had a reputation for treacherous currents, and the prospect of sudden drowning has the tendency to rather spoil a nice day out. Beal was also, to put it charitably, somewhat underdeveloped; or, to put it another way, there was nothing there at all. A trip to Beal took on the trappings of an expedition to the desert as our family was forced to load up with buns, sandwiches and flasks to survive the ordeal, like the doomed nuclear survivors in On the Beach. Finally, I had once returned from Beal to find small dark insects merrily burrowing their way into my skin, their rear legs kicking while their heads were lost in my pale flesh, and was subsequently traumatised to such a degree that even the mention of the place induced mild hysteria. For years after, whenever I read medical horror stories of chaps who had returned from the Amazon with nests of spiders occupying tumours in their legs, I would be reminded of Beal. I half expected little bugs to come flying out of my mouth every time I coughed, released at last from the prison of my insides. So Ballybunion it was. We would sit on the beach, or take the cliff walk and see, in the distance, the ruins of the old fortresses that once dotted the coastline. Up on Sandhill Road was the Marconi Stone, marking the spot where the first ever telephonic message was sent from east to west across the Atlantic in 1919. At that time the Lartigue monorail used to run between Ballybunion and Listowel, the train awkwardly straddling the tracks so that every journey involved a great deal of careful balancing in case it tipped over. I brought two of my closest friends down here a few years ago. I think they rather enjoyed it, despite being forced to share a room in the B&B. I wandered in on them that first morning to find accusations of snoring being levelled in one direction, and accusations of excessive nocturnal breaking of wind being thrown in the other, justified, a little dubiously, on the grounds of an unspecified "medical condition". We took seaweed baths down in Collins's bathhouse to cure our hangovers, only spoiled for me by the sounds of general disgust coming from the tub next to mine. Seaweed turns the water viscous, so that the whole experience is a little like sharing bathwater with someone who has a very bad cold. It's a bit mucoid, frankly, and afterwards the towel tends to slide off your skin without actually drying it. Still, it felt great. We drank tea from battered pots and tried to push one another into the sea. That night, we got a reception cooler than the Atlantic after we wandered into the wrong bar to order a drink. Apparently, the locals thought we were trying to steal their women, a more frequent source of resentment in rural areas than one might imagine. Frankly, they'd have been hard pressed to give some of these ones away, but we decided not to point that out. All told, it was a good weekend. Now, three years later, and almost recovered from my swim—my extremities are starting to tingle, but not in a nice way—I am walking along Main Street in Ballybunion once again, trying to figure out what has changed and what remains the same. It's drizzling slightly, and Ballybunion remains the kind of place that cries out for a leisure centre, somewhere to take the kids on rainy days that doesn't involve gambling, booze or annoying me while I'm trying to have a cup of warming coffee and a piece of apple crumble in Hanratty's café. The little cinema that used to stand behind the bingo hall is now gone, which is unfortunate as it had a very liberal age policy for its time. In 1982, my brother and I saw First Blood, Sylvester Stallone's violent, X-rated Vietnam revenge saga in that cinema. I was fourteen. My brother was eight, and he wasn't even the youngest person there. There was another little kid who had to stand up just to see the screen. Around the same time in the early eighties I had a profound crush on a girl who lived near me, and during the summer holidays I would take my dog on repeated walks past her house. In fact, I was passing her house so often that her parents must have been tempted to call the police, and eventually the dog got so bored that he refused to come out with me any more. Nevertheless, I felt that it was only a matter of time before my persistence wore her down, or a social worker intervened, and so I was reluctant to make the annual two week trip to north Kerry that year. I was afraid that her memory of my sensitive and somewhat underdeveloped charm would fade in my absence, and I would return to find that she had shacked up with a welder. In a souvenir shop on Main Street, I tried to find some token of my regard for her. I eventually settled—unwisely, as it turned out—on a wooden sign with the words "I like you. You're different." written above a small piece of tree bark upon which two round eyes had been glued. The eyes rolled around in an amusing manner. Well, I thought it was amusing. Unfortunately, while I intended "I like you. You're different." to communicate the fact that I admired my beloved because she was a free spirit, untramelled by the expectations of adolescent society, she interpreted it to mean that she had skin like a tree trunk and eyes that could peer in two different directions at once. Her response was to offer me the kind of despairing look that teachers give to the slower kids in class, the ones who always misjudge the time it takes to get to the toilet, before abandoning me to my hormones. I stopped walking by her house after that. It was probably a good thing. After all, it's a very thin line between walking and stalking. The little souvenir shop is still there, though, although it offers fewer possibilities now for dashing the hopes of young lovers by foisting inappropriate gifts upon them. I am tempted to buy something for old time's sake, but I've already splashed out on a model Panther tank kit that I spotted earlier in the day in Jackie McGillicudy's in Listowel, plastic tanks and aeroplanes being one of the ways that I passed rainy days on holidays as a child. I won't put the model together, though, as that would be kind of sad. I'll just keep it, as a memento. It's eight o'clock, and I've almost finished putting the tank together. It didn't have quite as many guns as I'd hoped—you can never have too many guns—and the tracks were a bit tricky, but it's done. I have glue on my fingers, though, and it won't come off. I wander out to the Pavilion amusement arcade. It still has bumper cars and there are still burly blokes hanging on to the backs of them, trying to help the more hapless kids to steer properly. It was always a badge of shame to have one of the helpers on the back of your car, an admission that you had not yet managed to pass one of the initiation rites of adolescence. An inability to drive a bumper car made you less of a man. You would never get a job, or a girlfriend, and you would spend the rest of your life making Airfix models in the bedroom of your mum's house and never have a sexual experience that involved more than one person. There are rows of arcade games in the Pavilion, but they're all a little more sophisticated now than the ones I used to play, and don't seem to last as long. I put one euro into a shooting game called House of the Dead 2, and am preparing to kill zombies when a small irritating person appears at my left elbow. "D'ya want me to show you how to shoot?" No. "I can show ya!" Go away, small person. I point the gun at him. It's clearly not the first time someone has threatened to kill him with a plastic gun, or possibly even a real one. He backs off. I watch him go. By the time the little sod is out of range, House of the Dead 2 is already counting down the last ten seconds of my time. As a child, I was addicted to one Pavilion shooting game that consisted solely of a big machine gun that blasted beams of light at model tanks and went on for weeks, like fighting the Battle of the Bulge at five pence a time, but when I go to look for it it's gone. Strangely, though, the old fortune teller machine is still working. I use the metal calendar to enter my date of birth, then stick in 50 cents. The sinister plastic woman trapped inside makes some swift hand gestures, and out pops a piece of paper. I am, apparently, "thoughtful for others" (sic), "show very strong forces of affection", and my "appeal to members of the opposite sex is pronounced." I always suspected as much. I should have got my fortune told here years ago, and handed out the results as business cards. I feel a bit sad as I leave the Pavilion. The ghost of my father drifts through these places: paying for chips, steering bumpers, playing air hockey, buying soft drinks that only seemed to exist outside the Pale. I mean, where did Bubble-Up come from? The only place I ever saw it was in Kerry. It was a complete mystery. I head down to what was once Kiely's, but is now called The Cashen Bar. A man called Johnny Barrett used to have a residency at Kiely's. He would play the organ, and my mum and dad would dance. Johnny Barrett had one song about "the wigwams wiggin', way in the Indian land", which he would accompany with the kind of hand-against-mouth Indian calls beloved of small boys the world over, except perhaps for small Native American boys who can probably do them properly. I loved that song. Sadly, Johnny Barrett doesn't seem to be here tonight. I hope he's still alive. I always thought it would be a bit of a blow for him if he died and it turned out that there really was a Happy Hunting Ground in the next world. I reckoned the Indians would be well cheesed-off with him. Music and entertainment is a big part of the holiday experience here. I pass an advertisement for Westlike, the—God help us all—Westlife tribute band, who are due to play Ballybunion in July at a mind-boggling twelve Euro per ticket. (As if it wasn't bad enough that Ballybunion is poisoned with golfers, who figure pretty highly on my personal list of People To Be Dealt With After The Revolution, now there are imitation boy bands too. I'm worried that there won't be enough lampposts for the hangings, because Main Street isn't very long . . .) I have just missed Brush Shiels, and Liam Reilly, both of whom were here for the Bachelor Festival last month. Maple Sugar (from Canada!) are due in August. Even on this rainy Tuesday night there is live music in a lot of the bars, and a circus is taking place in the car park, but I'm not really in the mood. I choose instead to wander back down to the high cliffs that overlook Ballybunion's twin beaches. A small outcrop sepearates them, topped by the remains of Ballybunion Castle. It dates back to the 14th century and used to be a popular spot for clay pigeon shooting, and for falling from. Now the OPW has erected a fence, so people have to fall off someplace else. I sit on the edge of the cliff and let my toes dangle. I can almost feel them again. I was going to spend another night here but I think I'll go home instead, or maybe just spend a night back in Ballylongford. That's really where my fondest memories lie. Ballybunion is just, well, too much. It's not like it's Marbella, or Blackpool. It's not even Bray, and Boney M must have been a bit puzzled by it when they came to play here. Maybe they went on the bumpers to pass the time, and one of the big blokes had to help them because they were from Germany and the wheel was on the wrong side. I like the thought of Bobby Farian, their Afro-headed male singer, sulking because he needed someone to steer for him, but for me Ballybunion will always be a place that my family visited in order to get just a little excitement before returning to the peace of Ballylongford, and that's the way it will stay. I stroll back up to the B&B, and the phantom of my father strolls along with me, smoking a cigarette and, as I pop into the Pavilion for one last go on the bumpers, he wonders when his elder son will ever get any sense before putting out his cigarette and joining him. Secretly, he always did like those bumpers.