McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy Page A

floor with a hand on which a Band-Aid is well overdue for renewal.
    ‘Full breakfast, is it?’
    I nod, and she goes away. I can’t bring myself to make a fuss after the goodwill I’ve had this week. Suddenly the stereo crashes on, a traditional Irish medley that includes ‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’ and ‘Theme from Match of the Day’. Poteen and LSD would be less distressing. The heart-warming ping of a microwave—always a winner, wherever the restaurant indicates reheating is now complete.
    ‘Careful, the plate’s hot,’ she says, putting it down on my hand. Two rock-hard fried eggs stare up, rigid and unforgiving as tiny silicone breasts. They are turning purple from the heat of the plate, and threaten to explode at any moment. An overtly hostile sausage, and bacon raw as Parma ham, complete the spread. She plonks down a cup and saucer, and one of those stainless-steel teapots that pour tea down the side of the pot, before shooting off to the kitchen to take some more of whatever she’s on.
    I pick up the teapot, and pour tea into the cup, and on to the tablecloth. The tea in the cup turns a dark shade of khaki. Hang on, though. I haven’t put any milk in. There must have been something milky in it already. Dear God, no. She’s given me a cup of someone else’s dregs!
    Out at the reception desk I tell her friend I’ve decided to check out.
    ‘Ah, ya couldn’t have stayed anyway. We’re fully booked. There’s a wedding.’
    That’ll be nice for them.
    Prices start at £28, which includes breakfast.
    There may still be some soda bread in room 7, on top of the wardrobe.

    I saw a sign for a hostel yesterday, a couple of miles out of town on the road to Dominic’s, so I’ve reluctantly decided to give it a try. As I drive through the square, wedding guests in tail coats and wing collars stand poised on full alert, waiting for the pubs to open. One elderly man is holding a golden walking-stick.
    I suppose I never really got over my first experience of a hostel. We stayed in one on that school trip to Stuttgart. We were all in a dormitory together. On the second night, I was woken from a deep sleep by Mr Chisholm, our criminally insane German teacher, who told me to stop feigning sleep and pretending it hadn’t been me making the silly noises. He laid me across the top bunk and beat my pyjamaed bum with his slipper, in front of all the bigger boys. Two nights later Mengele showed up with the suppositories. Just not my week, I suppose.
    Since then I’ve always avoided hostels, telling myself they’d either be full of buck-toothed ramblers with well-polished apples and creases in their socks, or groovy young backpackers swapping addresses, drugs and girlfriends, either of which would be far too depressing. My years as a budget traveller were spent instead on the living-room floors of unfortunate strangers whose addresses had been passed on by indiscreet drunken Australians, if you can imagine such people.
    The Dunmanway hostel has only two other guests. One is a pear-shaped Englishman who looks, and I know one really shouldn’t generalise about these things, like a paedophile on the run; the other is a dark-haired German cyclist with an ill-considered toothbrush moustache. I’m shown round by a charming Frenchman called Eric. I admire the magnificent view, and pick my room—a converted gypsy caravan in the grounds, for a tenner a night. I sit in the caravan for a bit, because there isn’t room to do anything else in there, then set off to find Dominic.
    After driving to his house and finding him not in, and trying to find Danny’s house and getting lost up a mountain, I have a brainwave, and phone him on his cellphone. I’ve never really come to terms with the wretched things. It seems to me that life is much better if there are times in the day when no one can find you; though, of course, like most people, I’ve often wondered how businessmen used to cope before they were invented. How did they