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June 11, 2005

Reversing Out of Trees

So there we are. The bonnet of the car has now made contact with the bark of the tree. Silence. What do you say when you crash into a tree? “Bloody Hell!” says Paul in the thickest Liverpool accent ever heard this side of Lullymore. I hop out of the car to examine the damage. It’s totalled. The tree, that is. The car has miraculously survived without injury. As have me and Winters, thank God. I hop back into the car. “I was going to tell you we were headed towards the tree but I didn’t want to be a back seat driver,” I say. Paul, a little shaken, remains quiet, concentrating hard on reversing out of the tree without hitting something else. Hitting a tree is probably good for learner drivers. Shakes them up a bit. It must do because as we turned around and headed back towards the Bog of Allen museum we had missed, the car rattled along at 10mph. A safe speed.

So we eventually pull up to the museum in the middle of nowhere. All this time I couldn’t help thinking that whoever works there must get fairly bored at times waiting for people to flock to a museum that’s hidden amongst the labyrinth of roads that weave throughout the Bog. And sure enough there was the museum guy at the door locking up. An hour before they were supposed to close. I imagine that man must have cursed the arrival of Liam Geraghty and Paul Winters as they pulled up outside. Doing what any decent museum employee would do, he opened the door up, switched on the lights and welcomed us in. I’ll bet he wasn’t the happiest when we strolled through the entire museum in around fifteen minutes. Not that we didn’t enjoy it. I got to see the skull of a 5000 year old Great Irish Elk there that had been discovered on the very Bog of Allen. I have a thing about the Great Irish Elk so I was mightily impressed that they used to live in Kildare too.

At the end of our mosey through the building we made our way back to the guy who let us in and had a chat with him about the Bog. One thing I couldn’t help noticing though was that as we stood there yapping in the museum’s shop, not only did they sell some very nice paintings of the Bog but they also had on offer the complete series of Star Trek Voyager on VHS! We finally thanked the man and went out to the car. The museum guy begun to lock up again but as soon as he did another car pulled up outside. “Excuse me, sir,” the driver said. “Is this ze Bog of Alan museum?” Sounded French to me. I’m certain that at that very moment the museum guy was cursing Charles de Gaulle as he opened the doors once again. With a wave, we were off again on our misadventures across the unknown Kildare countryside. Rathangan was our next port of call.

We needed to find a DIY shop as a matter of urgency. I won’t go into details sufficed to say the car needed some emergency repair work. We happened upon a chippers simply and boldly named “TAKE AWAY” where we had some well-earned food. Now at this point I needed to relieve myself in the loo. Only problem was I couldn’t find the light switch and there were no windows so the whole place was enveloped in darkness. How did I manage? With great, great difficulty. Moving on, we found our DIY store a bit down the road. We walk in. “I need the cheapest hammer you’ve got,” Paul says to the man behind the counter. “I’m killing someone tonight you see.” The DIY man barely raises an eyebrow and points us in the direction of the hammers. “Now,” continues Paul, “I also need two short lengths of wood.” So in a matter of minutes we were on our way back to the car with a hammer and a few bits of timber. Everything qualified mechanics would use to fix a car. Bloody Hell.

Trains, Buses & Automobiles by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist.

Posted by LiamG at June 11, 2005 01:36 AM