“Because we need each other
We believe in one another
I know we’re going to uncover
What’s sleepin’ in our soul
What’s sleepin’ in our soul”
Gallagher
When we first became friends there was no such thing as mobile phones, the cinema on Glaslough St. was showing Bruce Lee’s ‘Enter The Dragon’…or simply hadn’t taken down the posters. And Johnny Rotten was still being kept out of the charts by The Wombles.
I remember meeting Ronan first , or , more accurately, I remember becoming aware of Ronan first. It was 1976 and we had just moved to Monaghan from Dundalk. I’d been attending the Christian Brothers School there, so Mam thought it would be easier for me to start school here in the CBS in town rather than the Urbleshany school in Scotstown.
Brother McCabe was our teacher and one day , for P.E. , physical education, instead of our usual 17 a-side football jamboree, he marched us down to the gym in the secondary school and had us do some circuits, climbing ropes, bendy exercises on rubber mats and at the end, Brother McCabe set up the horse bench and placed a small , angled, trampoline in front of it and we were to take turns running at it , bouncing on the trampoline and over the horse. We were only 9, so most of us simply bounced on to the top of the horse and then jumped down. Ahead of Ronan in the queue were the McEnaney twins. The first one ran at the trampoline and cleared the horse in a single bound to ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aaahs’ from the rest of us. The second twin ran at it with gusto and did a handspring somersault over the horse. We whooped and cheered.
Ronan was next. He asked a few of us behind him in the queue to move back so he could have a longer run up, and then he tore off. We were giddy with anticipation , how was he going to top the McEnaneys ?
He launched himself at the trampoline, grunting like a Russian gymnast , his foot caught in the springs of the trampoline and he slammed into the side of the horse, breaking his arm…and the horse. We never got to do gymnastics again.
Micky wandered into our lives later , when we were 14 or 15, when he joined us in St.Macartan’s College. We were doing evening study and had nothing to do for an hour or so when the boarders had their tea, so Micky and his brother Paul started to invite me to their house in town during the break.
We cycled to school, Phoenix Athletic training, Hollywood lake, and everywhere else together, our Mums’ cut our hair, we made mix tapes, we had yet to discover deodorant, and we had no girlfriends. Those last two things may have been related.
We would tell each other everything. There were long rambling stories, interrupted by longer tangential rambling stories, and fart jokes, mostly by Ronan…actually all by Ronan.
Our first ever gig together was Queen’s ‘The Works’ tour in Dublin’s Simmonscourt at the RDS in 1985.
Our latest gig was last weekend in London. We went to see The The play in the Alexandra Palace. We’d all bought the ‘Infected ‘ album back in ’86 ad have been firm fans ever since. Micky and I flew over on Thursday evening, arriving in Ronan’s house around 8pm. We met his new cat, Angus, and his first wife , Stephanie, his soon to be Irish Olympian kayaker , Conor, and his sooner to be Evil Genius daughter, Erin. We swapped stories, had a mighty fine bolognaise and swapped even more stories. Ronan’s eldest daughter Teagen arrived home later from swimming practice and was eager to know more stories about Ronan’s misspent youth.
Eventually the family drifted off to bed and we carried on with recent tales of daring do, taking turns to play tunes on the massive surround sound system, and opened another bottle of Rioja.
We went to bed at 3am.
On Friday we had a late breakfast, Micky headed off to his brother John’s house, and Ronan and I headed into town to see the Silk Roads exhibition in the British Museum. I have been intrigued by the Three Hares symbol and the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang forever, so I was dying to see some of the silks and manuscripts in the exhibition. When we got to the museum we had to wait a bit for our time slot for the exhibition, so I said to Ronan that I wanted to see the Rosetta Stone, he said fine, and we wandered through the Egyptology hall. Well, I wandered through it, absorbed in various statues, Ronan had marched straight through the hall , ignoring everything else until he got to the Rosetta Stone, and then rang me to see where I was. I caught up with him and he immediately said that we needed to go to the exhibition to make our slot and to hurry so we could meet Micky at 4pm.
Again he made straight for the other side of the building and rang me again to see where I was. I was still in the Egyptian room staring at the left arm of Amenhotep III. He told me to hurry up.
We went into the Silk Roads exhibition and I breezed past the Tang Chinese sculptures, the early Buddhist scrolls, maritime maps of Indian sea routes until I arrived at the panel for the Dunhuang Library cave. The discovery of this cave and its cache of 70,000 scrolls changed perspectives on the interactions and influences on world religions and on each other. It features in a story I’m writing , I turned to whisper my excitement to Ronan, but was instead greeted by a lovely elderly Chinese lady who smiled and nodded and said ‘Very good ! Very good!’ to me and then looked worried and shuffled away. I spotted Ronan through the crowds sitting beside the exit.
I spent a few more minutes staring at an ancient drawing of the bodhisattva Jesus and left reluctantly.
Between the exhibition exit and the front door Ronan rang me twice to see where I was. I was taking it all in. He said that it was less stressful looking after his kids years ago in Disneyland than it was looking after me in the British Museum. I told him that Robyn and Elliott had said the same thing to Eileen when we got home from the Electric Picnic. I’m easily distracted.
We met up with Micky, strolled through Soho and Chinatown, had ramen for tea, and strolled around The Strand and back to Waterloo to get the train home. Stephanie had packed the fridge with Guinness and Peroni. We just wanted a cup of tea. We were in bed by 10pm.
I got up with great intentions of doing the Parkrun in Bushy Park on Saturday morning. Most Saturday mornings I set up our own Parkrun, getting all the route signs and start area set up before the run at 9.30am. Bushy Park was just 10 minutes walk from Ronan’s , and was where the inaugural Parkrun took place. I was really looking forward to it, and had even brought over my limited edition ‘Monaghan – True Centre of The Universe’ Parkrun tee shirt. I was having a cup of tea in the kitchen at 9 when Stephanie came down and said “Oh, I thought you were doing the Parkrun this morning ?”
“I am” I replied “Just having a quick cup of tea before I head over.”
“It starts at 9.”
“Oh”.
After our breakfast Ronan and I went for a three hour walk around Bushy Park. Micky didn’t. He’s more of a ‘sit on the front steps and watch the world go by’ kind of guy. So he did that, and Ronan and I stalked deer in Bushy Park and talked about how Micky is always looking after everyone except himself, especially us, and agreed that that was why he didn’t come for the walk, he needed time to recharge, so he could look after us for the rest of the weekend.
We headed into town after lunch and wandered through Covent Garden, ending up in the Coach and Horses, which Ronan assured us was a great spot for Guinness. He was right. We had a couple of delicious pints and then headed for the Hawksmoor Steakhouse, which Ronan had been drooling over every time he mentioned the name. It was splendid. Perfect ribeyes with beef dripping fried chips…I’m drooling now remembering it.
We had a good heart to heart over dinner and argued over which of us was the luckiest to know the other two.
” You two are the lucky ones !”
“Me ? Lucky to know you two ? Hardly !”
“Seriously though, we all know in our hearts, that you two are the lucky ones, having me in your lives.”
It was a score draw.
We then journeyed out to Alexandra Palace to see The The.
We got merch, we got pints, and we found a spot in the middle of the hall, just to the right of the sound desk. We swayed along to the music, nodding sagely to each other at the new tracks, and then made our way to the front for the last 40 minutes when we knew all our vintage classics would be played. We sang softly along with ‘August to September’, we roared out all the words to ‘Heartland’, and then we went mental, and cried to Uncertain Smile.
It was glorious.
It always is with Micky and Ronan.
On my way home to Monaghan from the airport on Sunday evening I listened to an old episode of Desert Island Discs featuring Donald Sutherland. The interviewer Sue Lawley asked him how he got his big break into acting.
“Pure luck.” He answered.
He said that he and six other Canadians had got non-speaking parts in The Dirty Dozen movie, filmed in England. They wanted Canadians, so they’d sound Yankee/North American, if they ultimately had to say Yes, or No in a scene. In the movie one of the Dozen, a character called Posey, played by Clint Walker, has to impersonate a general and when it came to it, Walker didn’t feel it was something his charcter would do. The movie’s director, Bob Aldridge argued with him for a bit and then pointing at Sutherland said “ You, with the big ears, you do it.”
It was a very memorable scene and on the back of it Sutherland was offered the role of Hawkeye in MASH, which was the biggest grossing movie of the 70’s until Star Wars came out. It made Sutherland a star.
Pure luck is a magnificent thing.
It was pure luck that made us friends.
And I am all the better for it.
Toodles,
Paul
P.S. I bet you’re expecting a link to Oasis’ ‘Acquiesce’, or The The’s ‘Uncertain Smile’ ? But you can look them up yourself. For Micky and Ronan, this is boy genius and Ye Vagabonds’ version of ‘The Parting Glass’
