Fifty Shades of White by Gary Edwards

Author:Gary Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Trevor’s Ireland

AFTER our jaunt to Liberec, I had developed a serious taste for Bloody Marys and as we were travelling to Galway for a pre-season game the following year our coach passed through a small town and Big Mick suggested we stay there for an hour. Amazingly, there was a pub called Dracula’s, and I thought it would be fun to order a Bloody Mary as a tribute to the Count himself. Unbelievably the bar staff were completely unaware of what one was. They didn’t even have any tomato juice! So, instead of savouring the atmosphere of the world’s most famous vampire, we all settled down with a Guinness and watched The Simpsons on the pub telly.

A girl sat alone at the bar reading a newspaper heard our accents and asked, ‘Are you from Leeds by any chance?’ It turned out that she had left her Leeds home to move in with her Irish boyfriend just last year. ‘It’s a small world,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but I wouldn’t want to paint it.’

Galway Bay with its winding, descending streets is an idyllic seaside resort nestled on the mid-west coast of Ireland and street music and entertainment emanates from almost every corner you turn. As we walked past the countless street entertainers, one chap wearing a large white trilby hat and snazzy waistcoat caught everyone’s eye. I seem to stand out like a sore thumb at many an event and I have been plucked out of a packed circus audience and subsequently run over by a pick-up truck loaded with laughing clowns, with only a piece of wood to protect me under the truck wheels. And out of a 10,000 crowd at Benidorm in 1979, I was selected to face a baby bull in a mock bullfight while stood on a 3ft high wooden box in the centre of the ring.

During a family birthday event many years ago, I found myself volunteered to take part in a morris dance. There I was, prancing about in a hat, ribbons and bells and involved in a half-hearted stick fight with half a dozen professional morris dancers – and I was completely sober! On a holiday in Dubai I was walking through a large shopping mall when I suddenly found myself designated as an assistant to help an Argentinian mime artist on a foot-high bicycle with a balloon on the end of a fishing rod. So, there I was watching this chap in the white trilby hat on the streets of Galway. He was playing a cut-out cardboard guitar with no strings using a cardboard plectrum while he shouted out, ‘Plink’, ‘Plink’ and ‘Plonk’ at the appropriate time. Beside him he had a cardboard cut-out dog and he was selling blank cardboard CDs for a Euro each (and they were selling like hot cakes). It wasn’t long before he signalled to me and handed me a cardboard cut-out banjo out of his cardboard box and we did a duet. I was pretty good too, I have to say.

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