October, 2004

A sheep's skull.

The most westerly outpost of Europe, slipping crumb by crumb into the Atlantic on the Irish coast, is the island of Achill. Graham Green started writing The End Of The Affair on Achill, and Heinrich Boll settled there after he was more or less ostracized in his native Germany. J M Synge took much inspiration for Playboy Of The Western World and other works from this neck of the woods. It's a place of supernatural beauty and romance. We took the savages to the island at the end of summer and were all spellbound. No Disney parks, no pink-painted fat-salt-sugar palaces, no boutiques of meaninglessness, in fact nothing that wanted to spy on your demographic menas. The savages voted it their best holiday ever.

We stayed in a house on the beach at the foot of Mount Slievemore. The mountain peak is permanently capped by a saturn-like ring of brooding cloud, its slopes a peat bog. The beaches on Achill are amongst the best you'll ever see, sparkling with quartz-sand, and the Atlantic light calls to painters. So why isn't the place thrashed within an inch of its life by mass-tourism? Rain. And thank God for it.

Actually there's a secret to the rain on Achill. Unlike much of the Irish west coast, which has more than its share, Achill has an almost micro-climate. The Gulf Stream washes up on Achill, and the headland bends the prevailing winds, so that although you do get rain it often gets blown away very quickly. Leaving us to play. And to meet the natives who were like wonderful characters from a Synge play. Very fine folk, and on some days I even understood what they were saying to me. Though there was a sherry-crazed Catholic priest from distant Maynooth "on holiday to take the airs". I think that's what he said, though I was mesmerised by his sherry-blasted teeth. I'm suspicious of Catholic priests everywhere. If I see one I always hurl myself in front of my children, arms spread protectively wide. It makes the priests react oddly.

There was an enormous, deserted famine village on the slopes of the mountain. Abandoned about 1850, the ruins of the village are a sad sight. "This village doesn't want us to be here," Ella said to me as we poked about the mouldering buildings. Then there was Grace O'Malley's castle to see. Grace was an Elizabethan pirate queen who controlled the seas around Galway, and by the way I'm not making this up, though Ella thought I was. There was pony trekking, surfing, dolphins in the bay, a cave-dwelling colony of seals. I also taught the savages the essential art of bog-trotting. Walking on the mountain slopes you inevitably come across patches of wet bog and the solution is to step nimbly through the tufts of springy grass, never letting your foot fall heavily in one place. With this technique you stay dry. After carefully listening to a bit of coaching from me Joe demonstrated his Irish DNA by mastering the art beautifully. You should see him go. I'm never going to tell him I made up this technique on the spot.

Maybe it's my DNA. Blarney and all that. Heck, make a living from it, why don't ye?

The savages found a bleached sheep's skull on the mountain slopes. So impressive were its set of horns that they insisted on bringing it back, bog trotting through the peat and holding it aloft like a football trophy. I had hoped we could smuggle it into the house unseen, but damned if we didn't walk into the sherry-crazed Maynooth priest, who glowered darkly as we passed. 'Hello. Just bringing a skull back from the peat bog.' Worse, the savages demanded we smuggle it back home, too, wrapped in a bag and buried under clothes in the suitcase. (Airport security Officer: what's this thing sir? Me: It's a sheep's skull. Airport Security officer: Okay, hurry along sir.) It's in Joe's room at the moment being whispered to by a plastic Gollum. I'm thinking of mounting it over the front door. Keep the priests away, sort of thing.

I'm not a great one for fishing but was told that the shoals of mackerel and pollock were so abundant that they needed to be thinned out a bit. Not knowing one end of a rod from another, I ended up shore fishing from a tiny pier, with help from a lovely local family, who disengaged the hooks and who showed the kids how to tap the fish on the head with a heavy stick. Joe got a bit carried away in the excitement of the catch. 'Steady,' said his fishing mentor, 'or all we'll have tonight is fish paste.'

Onto other things. Well I suppose I achieved some kind of fame by being mentioned in Private Eye, who taunted me for having written: "a deeply penetrating 140,000 word study of his own novel". Now I hope these boys are more accurate with their own accounting figures than they with their journalism, because what I wrote was a 14,000 afterword about technical issues in the construction of Smoking Poppy and Leningrad Nights. But what's an extra zero between me and the talented Ian Hislop the Eye's editor. In the same edition was a tribute to the recently demised Paul Foot, a brilliant social campaigner who never needed to make up facts to make his point. I've written back to the little vixens but I understand they only like to publish their own jokes. And to think I used to believe everything they said.

TWOC, my young adult novel will be published by Faber in the summer of 2005. So that's all right then: no new novel this year, but two next year, what with The Limits Of Enchantment coming out in January (UK) and March (US).

Oh, if anyone emailed me over the last two months who expected an answer let me say that those clever people at AOL have designed a spam filter that lets the spam through and bounces back all friendly emails. Please write to me again and I will ignore you officially this time.

I recently got invited to a book launch party - not by my own publisher I should add - where something very interesting happened. I was in the Gents and about to emerge from a hidden stall when two young publishers swaggered in. One was clearly the author's editor, the other a colleague of his. Perhaps they'd sampled too much grape juice that evening but, taking the place to be empty, they proceeded to slag off the very author whose book they were launching and lauding. Two minutes earlier I'd seen them doing the cha-cha-cha-we-love-you with their author, and here they were saying the most jaw-dropping things! Dear reader, I hung in there, torn between making that polite cough or eavesdropping shamelessly. I even asked myself if I wanted to define myself as someone who would callously listen in on such a private conversation.

Well I'm a writer dammit. It was the rich dialogue I was after, not the content. After all I might one day want to write such a scene. Errr. Okay. What do you expect? Eventually, but only at length, I kicked the door and the conversation stopped immediately. The two publishers actually jammed themselves in the doorway in an Olympian scramble to get out of the Gents unseen. They failed. The editor looked back at me, trying to guess whether I was a big pal of the author or not. I'll never forget his face. It was like a pale sheep's skull sunk in an Irish peat bog.

Scared the b'jesus out of 'em, as they might say on Achill.

Graham Joyce can be contacted by emailing graham@grahamjoyce.net