The Honda Kid still rides at the Summerhill Culchie festival
The future of rural Ireland is safe for another while, against all the odds.
The strongest of its wiry, resilient sinews survives.
I thought they were all dead and gone, like so much else of the Ireland of the past decades but, dammit, I was wrong.
As I passed through the airy lands known as The Hand, on the brow of Co Clare last Tuesday, I was absolutely charmed to see him puttering along the road in front of me heading for Miltownmalbay.
Surely, one of the last chapters of the mighty Honda Kids.
The little old Honda 50 under him was boring bravely into the wind from the ocean and the occasional skifts of rain.
The bulk of him atop it, as always, made you wonder how it managed to bear the weight and keep going.
It always did, under a Honda Kid.
He looked the same as all the rest of the breed that has garnished my lifetime.
He had a red helmet, was wearing wellingtons and a navy anorak, was broad-shouldered and bulky, and certainly near enough pensionable age.
He was not wearing gloves. He was travelling at about 25 miles an hour.
He did not salute me as I passed, just kept steadily going on his way.
I admired him for seconds in my rear view mirror after I passed.
Down the road a few miles, there was a shop on the edge of town.
He would have been heading there for sure for, probably, a packet of cigarettes, sundry groceries, a copy of the Clare Champion.
A genuine Honda Kid, a sight to delight the eye and brighten the mind.
Maybe he is one of the last of them, but they still survive.
They were progressive and brave in their era, when there were very few cars in the townlands apart from those of the doctor and the parish priest.
It took courage for them back then, already not in the first flush of youth, to abandon the High Nellie and buy a Honda 50.
It was good that they did not then need to apply for a driving test to get their licences.
They were a novelty on the narrow roads for a long time, but then the Honda Kids became a part of the landscape, scores and hundreds and even thousands of them. And that is the pure truth.
I knew many of them down the years, in all the provinces. Invariably, they were the salt of the earth, and they usually farmed that earth.
Typically, they were the sons who stayed at home and inherited aging parents just as surely as the few acres, and no more than six or seven cows and their followers.
Few enough of the ones I knew back then had the opportunity to marry.
The girls of their era were quick to head for the civil service in Dublin, and slow to marry farmers.
The most of them liked a pint or two in the pub on certain evenings, as much for the company and the craic as the porter.
With rare exceptions, they were everybody’s friend, and magnificent neighbours.
They were also, in an oblique way, the eyes and ears of the parish. The Honda Kids knew everything on the local grapevine.
I have seen Christmas trees and turkeys being brought home on the little bikes.
I have seen a Connemara calf being brought somewhere, and lambs too.
I have seen all sizes of pillion passengers being freighted with ease. I have seen the barrels of shotguns and .22s being transported in the general direction of foxes and rabbits and wildfowl.
There were special late nights in bygone Christmas seasons in Connemara when, already abed, I would hear the gentle putter of a Honda Kid on the road outside.
In the morning, magically, in a Lucozade bottle, covered by a paper bag, a clear liquid that was not Lucozade but tasted like the essence of the illicit side of Christmas.
There was a time when the lines of parked little Hondas outside country playing fields signalled the attendance of the Kids at football and hurling matches between neighbouring parishes.
You could be certain too there was an occasional accordion or concertina or fiddle being borne in the panniers for any subsequent celebrations.
I knew Honda Kids who won All Ireland Fleadh medals for both music and singing.
None of them ever gave any trouble to the local Gardaí except, once in a blue moon, over remote rights of way on mountainsides that mattered to them.
They were... and thankfully are... the strong salt of our earth.
The sight of that Honda Kid near The Hand this week signalled to me that, despite all the pressures and stresses, there is a resilience and real strength still in the townlands that will overcome all the odds in the end. It is a good feeling.
God bless them all as they putter gently along.
