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June 11, 2005

The Saddest Starfish The World Has Ever Known

“The Sea is a very big place.” A famous oceanographer once said that. He was right too. Myself and Winters decided that we needed to see the Sea immediately. Spending too much time in Kildare can turn you into a regular land lubber, as an old pirate mate of mine use to say. So off we go in what has now become famously known as the GW (Geraghty and Winters) Mobile. In other words “that little red Ford Fiesta swerving all over the road.” Our expedition begins on the motorway. This is an immediate cause for concern to me as I’ve never taken a drive with Paul where the law actually commanded him to drive faster. Motorways are like that though. Also a worry is that Paul has a thing about trucks - mainly that they’re big and scary. This in turn scares me as the motorway is full of them. The GW Mobile is without radio. Literally where there once was a radio is now a gaping hole into the cars inner workings. I’m not exactly sure where this vehicle came from but I imagine it’s previous owner was the kind of guy who’d give you some magic beans in exchange for your cow.

We have to make our own music to compensate so at regular intervals we sing “They’re may be trouble ahead/But while there’s music and dancing and love and romance/Let’s face the music and dance.” It’s kind of a general theme tune on life really and has a soothing quality when you’re a passenger of the GW Mobile. Especially when on the motorway. Our destination is Bray, that bastion beside the Irish Sea. It’s not as easy to get too as one might imagine. I give my reading of the map as accurately as I can which isn’t terribly accurate at all. Mix my navigation with Paul’s regular bouts of “We should definitely take the next left” and you’ll find yourself on a road that suspiciously has an awfully lot of signs pointing to Wexford. We somehow manage to overcome adversity and find ourselves in Bray. We’ve survived getting to the Sea without actually driving into it which was my main concern for the entire journey.

Stepping out of the car, we’re hit by the invigorating smell of Sea air. There is not a cloud in the sky. We walk down onto the beach and stare out into the beautiful blue abyss. On the sandy stretch of beach we come across two Crab shells, a piece of sea weed and the body of the saddest starfish the world has ever known. Not content with a beach that doesn’t seem to have any whales we head over to the Bray Aquarium where all manner of sea life is in waiting. There’s a tank full of piranhas that stare hungrily back out at us. We sea an oddly blue lobster who, tired of being looked at all the time, tries to retreat into the corner of his little tank and close his eyes in the hope that he’ll wake up and this will have all been a bad dream.

We move on to the Shark exhibit where they have a few small but suitably menacing looking sharks that swim close to the surface knowing that someday someone will make the fatal mistake of wanting to put their hand in. And Paul does exactly that. Not in the shark tank but in the stingray one. He tries to touch the stingray who seems friendly enough until I notice a sign saying “Stingray can sting!” and advise Paul of his options. We leave the aquarium and return to the pebbled shore of Bray bay where the words of a famous oceanographer come to mind.

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

Posted by LiamG at June 11, 2005 01:39 AM