Colm O'Regan discovered a lot he didn't know during a staycation in Cork
“I never knew this was here.” Have you found yourself saying that? There’s a good chance you’ve said it while on staycation. During the recession, it became fashionable and/or necessary, to holiday in Ireland and so thousands of people who would otherwise have gone off to South East Asia to find themselves, found themselves making the best of it on the Old Sod.
“I never knew this was here” is the refrain of people who watch too much Netflix and not enough Nationwide and John Creedon shows to find out.
We were staying in Cork City the last few days and I was “never-knewing” to bate the band. For example, the River Lee walkway from the old distillery out across the footbridge at Mardyke walk has been there for 10 years but nobody thought to specifically ring me up about it to see did I know. And it’s lovely, sneaking up on the Maltings through the trees as if you were planning to infiltrate the city. And I vaguely knew there was a Cork Gaol Thing somewhere but never bothered my backside to go looking for it. Well this time I did. I pushed the buggy up to have a look. In this case it was “I never knew Convent Road was so steep”.
“That’s not news to us” say residents as they casually flaunt their Olympic athlete-sized calves and nurse their big toes, bruised from being rammed into the front of shoes on the descent. The Gaol itself is fascinating. It’s comforting to know that they also used to have 50 or 60 convictions back then as well too, long before doors got revolve-y.
I saw the famous, now-grounded Sky-garden in Fitzgerald’s Park that no one can mention without doing a slight “oh shur” and raising eyes to heaven in the way you would do about the youngest child in a family of doctors who’s away studying “drama or something”.
I’d never looked at the Ogham stones in UCC in the four years I was there. Ogham is an ancient writing system using a system of ticks on a vertical line. Either that or it was an ancient advertisement for clothes pegs and we’ve been reading it sideways wrong all these years.
Walking around while on staycation is also a good way to jog memories. I have very few memories of college - or if I do they’re on a portable hard-drive in the bottom of a drawer that’s faced the wrong way in the attic of my brain.
Going up to Lennox’s’ chipper unlocked a few more kilobytes. I hadn’t been there in ages and had forgotten the feeling of flow that you experience in Lennox’s. It’s still the most efficient chipper I’ve been to. Although there was always a queue, it always moved. The memorising ability of all the order-takers down through the years continues to impress. There could be a queue of thirty people shouting out orders and the order-man would listen to all of them, parse them and then fire the relevant orders to the lads working in the back, leaving out details they didn’t need to know about like “cartnacurry” or “and chips”.
Asking for “and chips” in Lennoxes is like saying PIN Number or ATM machine. “And chips” is sort of implied in your order. I remembered also how one of the secrets of Lennox’s is that the customers also value their role. You don’t have anyone humming and hawing or fretting about gluten. Everyone is focussed on the prize. The road up to Lennox’s reminded me of the college afternoons where impromptu cans had necessitated “soakage”.
The staycation is over for another little while but I’ll definitely be back.
