Not everyone appreciated the staccato insight offered by Marnie Mueller’s poem in the previous entry. For some true doggerel, how about:
Toucans in their nests agree
Guinness is good for you
Open some today and see
What one or Toucan do
I gazed for some minutes at this original Guinness poster in Dolan’s Bar, down the Dock Road in Limerick, last Tuesday evening, trying to force it to scan. I never made it. I wondered how Dorothy L. Sayers, reputed to have written the verse when she worked as a copywriter for Guinness’s advertising agency back in the 1930s, had imagined it to sound.
The best beer slogan I ever saw appeared in Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim”: Bowen’s Beer Makes You Drunk.
I’ve not felt particularly lucky of late, something of which my brief stop in Dolan’s made me profoundly aware. For an hour or so I was unspeakably happy. The Guinness was like black syrup, sucked through a dense dab of whipped cream. Oh Jesus. As perfect a pint of this elixir as you could ever hope to meet. In the far corner, the traditional music was striking up as I reached the halfway point of my second pint. Mother of Mary. The high water mark of my month, no question.
Bugger it, perhaps of my life.
This year I become fifty, the sort of milestone that produces questions and thoughts once considered way out of bounds. Is it time to give up alcohol completely? Contrary to the impression you may get from reading these pages, I don’t actually drink much. The trouble is, when I do, I tend to enjoy myself way too much. Sublime episodes like Dolan’s Bar in Limerick are just priceless. But I suppose the cynic in me says yeah, some moments are priceless, but usually they’re merely very expensive — in all senses of the word — and these are the ones I’d be happy to leave behind for good.
But it’s the other, knock-on stuff.
I’m increasingly aware of the negative impact that booze has on my running. I’m not talking about getting blathered (which very rarely happens these days). No, I’m talking about just a couple of glasses of wine with a meal. It’s enough for me to wake the next morning with the sense that a tiny but critical wire’s been disconnected somewhere, or a screw has worked loose. Not enough to immobilise me, but just enough to produce a rattle. Just enough to put me off. Pathetic.
And there’s a further, worse implication. When I don’t run, I don’t write. Here’s the evidence. Check out the last few dates I posted entries on this site.
It becomes ever clearer that running is a pivotal activity for me — pivotal in its effect on my general sense of health and wellbeing and optimism; and on getting stuff that needs to be…. written written.
I was horribly ill over the weekend: the natural culmination of a petrified fortnight of comfort food and pessimism. The illness, I’m beginning to see, was a good thing. Cathartic.
This afternoon, from my little home-office eyrie, I looked out over the neighbouring gardens and for the first time in a year, and had that utterly thrilling sensation. As the sunshine slowly brightened, like the lights gradually coming up over a darkened stage, it suddenly hit me.
Spring is here, boys. Spring is here.
Leaves are appearing on the shrubs. The daffs and tulips are out. The starlings are building their nests in the eaves again. All it needed was that twiddly D chord and George Harrison, and the scene would have been complete. This was almost as good as that second pint of Guinness in Dolan’s Bar.
Tomorrow morning, people. Tomorrow morning.
Winter is gone. Tomorrow, like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the mountain one more time… tomorrow, I start again.
