Going potty somewhere under the rainbow

BY far the shortest way for me to reach Cork city from my idyllic West Cork redoubt is via the road from Timoleague to Bandon.

However, having travelled it yesterday, I am not sure if my ageing automobile will be able to stand the holes and hollows of another trip.

It must be even worse for those with recent models who are conscious of the depreciation in value that broken shocks or springs will entail. The potholes to be encountered on this and many Irish by-roads are awesome. A friend arriving off the ferry from Britain blew a tyre within an hour of arriving on Irish (sub) soil.

If the vaunted initiative to attract more British tourists is to be successful, something must be done. Scenic Ireland must be accessible. Visitors do not come here to wreck their undercarriages or blow their tyres. It is ironic that when we had the wealth to repair roads, tarmac-wrecking frosts were few and far between. Now, when we have no money, the winter weather wreaks havoc on our B-roads — and the IMF, our financial masters, will hardly be sympathetic to budgeting millions on repairing the road from Bandon to Timoleague.

Meanwhile, Portugal’s Prime Minister, Senhor Socrates, has denied that his country, unlike ours, will require EU/IMF assistance. Last Thursday, following the country’s bond sale, an interviewer for Morning Ireland on RTÉ radio got a Portuguese economist on the line.

“Well, are you out of the woods, now?” he asked the Portuguese. There was silence at the other end of the line.

The woods? — one can imagine the poor man thinking — but I am not in the woods ... Am I on a wildlife programme? Has there been a mistake?

Happily, the interviewer changed his question and enquired if the bond sales had eased Portugal’s economic ills.

Idiom has infinite comic possibilities. One’s overseas interlocutor may speak passable English but what if you starts the telephone conversation by asking “Are you over the moon?” Or “Can you see the light at the end of the tunnel?”

These days, on the bay, rafts of gulls, flotillas of duck, lifts of lapwing and lofts of golden plover go about their business regardless, while I try to find a window for a walk (another idiom sure to fill a speaker of uncertain English with alarm). I begin to wonder if it will ever stop raining. Is the Deluge imminent and should I consider building an ark? Wildlife is scarcer than it was in Noah’s time and my ark wouldn’t have to be as large as his. However, the tonnage of insects can hardly have reduced.

Despite chemical attack, bugs of all kinds still thrive and we are told that cockroaches would survive even a nuclear holocaust. Insects number millions of species, inspiring biologist JBS Haldane’s jokey comment that God must have had “an inordinate fondness” for them.

While virtually every type of animal comes in multiple varieties — dozens of species of monkeys, cats, mice, whales and finches walk, swim or fly — we are singular in that only one species of human survives. Earlier ‘experiments’ failed: we alone are capable of interbreeding with one another whatever our ethnic background or state of evolution. Language, civilisation and technology divides us from our fellow creatures, so we were the ones, legend tells us, charged with building the biodiversity-saving ark.

Is this legend symbolic? With current climatic cataclysms we certainly seem capable of causing catastrophic deluges and floods: are we capable of rescuing ourselves and our fellow creatures from their consequences? My conviction is that, if we can make a sincere global effort, we are smart enough to find a way. But, despite our homogeneity, unifying Mankind to one purpose? !Rainbows predict more rain between the showers. Last week, I saw a man walking his dog on the sandbanks standing at the foot of one of them. I think the dog-walker wasn’t aware of the spectrum so close to which he stood. Had he looked around, he might have spotted a leprechaun and had the opportunity to discuss some mutually-profitable promotion.

If the leprechaun agreed to stop disappearing, his attendance at overseas promotions of Irish tourism initiatives might well persuade foreign visitors to forego the potholes and bent wheels for the privilege of close encounters with the supernatural.