My Perfect Zombie

My Perfect Zombie

9 September 2025, Tuesday

I promise you, it wasn’t for the want of a free roast chicken that we returned to the free roast chicken shop town (Irish: Baile an tSiopa Sicín Rósta Saor in Aisce, meaning ‘Town of the free roast chicken shop’) which was really called Carrickart. We were there because it was our best nearby town for a bit of shopping and a natter with the nice local people who were nicer than the nicest people you ever could wish to meet. Should any of them ever happen to read this, though I doubt that they will because they’re always too busy being nice to visitors, I hope we got the Irish translation right and it doesn’t contain any embarrassing faux pas. We were trying so hard to master the local language and we felt we had to make our own mark on it, but we only had words we had read on pizza takeaway menu leaflets, and timetables in bus shelters as our points of reference.

Along the road to Carrickart, and not very far from our musty dwelling place, in the townland of Kindrum we stopped and had a look at a Celtic cross erected to commemorate the Three Fanad Patriots who assassinated the tyrannical landlord William Clements, Third Earl of Leitrim, in Cratlagh Wood in 1878. It stood as a testament to their heroism which ended the brutal oppression of landlordism and sparked celebrations across his estates that weren’t really his anyway but land stolen from the Irish people. Beside the cross stood a flagpole, atop which fluttered a Palestinian flag. We paid our respects to all who deserved respect, but momentarily had free Gaza and free roast chicken simultaneously on our minds. In Carrickart there was an even grander Celtic cross, an incredibly beautiful piece of stone sculpting that I struggled to enjoy because it was a memorial to the Fourth Earl of Leitrim (son of the dastardly Third Earl of Leitrim) who was an altogether unpleasant man, though not as bad as his father. Later members of the family insisted he’d been a good soul and put up the cross anyway. I was surprised it had stood there so long. 

Free roast chickens weren’t free today in the free roast chicken shop. This had happened before and perhaps I should point out that the shop was actually a branch of the Centra supermarket chain. Inaccuracies galore in my writing, but I like to think they add to the craic. So we parted with a few euro to get our hands on one of those hot birds that hungry shoppers were expected to pay for, as we had expected we would have to do all along. With our domestic chore complete we locked the result in the boot of Fionnuala the Fiat so we couldn’t eat it from the bag there and then with a fat wedge of soda bread on a bench in the lovely public gardens just across the road from the shop.

In glorious sunshine we then walked down to the beach (the ninety-seventh best beach in County Donegal) to view the salt waters and take in the salt air. There, for a good while, we took pleasure from watching the oystercatchers catching oysters on the mudflats. Oysters, I’d noticed, didn’t run very fast so they didn’t take much catching. The birds’ name overstated their profession in my opinion and I came to the conclusion that oysterbotherers would be a more suitable title for their genus. 

John, who stood by the jetty in Carrickart, was ninety years old and had lost count of how many times he had been to Australia. He had three daughters living in various parts of the world but he mostly visited the one who lived in Tasmania because he said ‘She was voted Australian Nurse of the Year in 2006, or maybe 2016, or… well it was one of those years they had back then.’ He had loved to travel but probably wouldn’t do it anymore because his wife was ‘getting on a bit’. He’d never been to Bulgaria so we told him a little about the place we lived in and loved. After a minute’s thought he said we’d convinced him it was a part of the world he’d enjoy and asked if Ryanair went anywhere near to it.

Travelling back the back way, we motored up a picturesque valley, passing through a lovely village called Glen (Irish: An Gleann, meaning ‘valley or glen’, but we knew that already and had proudly added it to our vocabulary). The sun continued to shine as we crossed the hills passing bog land, loughs and forests of tremendous expanse and beauty before descending to Mulroy Bay (Irish: Cuan na Mhaoil Ruaidh, meaning 'Bay of the Red Current' which made it very popular with people who enjoy a nice piece of roast lamb of a Sunday dinnertime). From there we followed familiar roads that skirted the sea lough for many a mile, taking us back to Portsalon for teatime pints of Guinness and pots of tea.

We were disappointed that Portsalon’s Pier Bar, our regular haunt, was closed because the lounge was being cleaned. We’d been in there for refreshment before and it had always seemed spotless, which perhaps suggested that our standards weren’t on the high side. The public bar, that had looked from a distance like it needed a good scrub, was open but there were no seats to be had and it was packed with scarred and whiskered men speaking in Irish and the only words we understood from their conversation were ‘West Ham United’ and ‘fuck’. So we went to the golf club just down the road where we had also been before so we were instantly recognised by the staff, and where there was a better class of Irish conversation from which the only words we understood were ‘Rory McIlroy’ and ‘fuck’. But the cool dark richness of the Guinness, the purity of the Barry’s tea in a perfectly functioning teapot, and the view across the golf course to the second best beach in the world made it one of my favourite places in the world to have a pint.

10 September 2025, Wednesday

In the seventeenth century Letterkenny had been a market town renowned for its fish. Prátaí, (pronounced as ‘praw-tee’ and meaning ‘potatoes’) were still a novelty at that point in Irish culinary history so we couldn’t understand how haddock had survived on its own as a food item for such a lengthy span of time. The area around Letterkenny had become a great place for the production of potatoes, despite them having been forcibly removed from millions of Irish menus during the 1840’s. So it was even harder to understand why dodgy takeaway pizza shops outnumbered fish and chip shops on a ratio of approximately infinity to one.

We wished we’d gone there in the seventeenth century because on 10 September 2025, with its countless roundabouts, sprawling retail parks, ugly modern buildings and roads so blighted by traffic congestion that the town resembled a seething pit of giant metal serpents, Letterkenny appeared to have become Ireland’s very own Milton Keynes. We went there because we’d convinced ourselves that on a rainy day a town can be a good place to visit as you’d find more places to nip into to keep dry than you would if you were tramping across a peat bog or rubbing shoulders with sheep on a beach.

However, we only managed to get out of the car briefly to have a punctured tyre repaired. The lads at A Gibbons Tyres (not to be confused with a gibbon’s tyres… you know those things on a length of rope that the simian types swing from in zoo enclosures) were great craic and probably the highlight of our day out. Mr Gibbons himself suggested we leave the suffering wheel with him for an hour and go off to entertain ourselves in the town. But there’s more to a holiday than sitting in a Spar shop with a cup of rank coffee and a packet of Jaffa Cakes while your Panda’s hole’s being plugged, so I’m sorry to say I couldn’t describe the day as one of the best I’d known for travel adventures.

Our post-operative journey required driving through the town in sideways rain in search of an escape route. It was then that we noticed several establishments that might have made it a lively place to visit more recently than the seventeenth century, but certainly not in the last five years during which time they had acquired corrugated iron shutters and/or broken windows. Letterkenny’s name had always conjured dreams of rainbows, shamrock leaves and faerie shoemakers for me but in reality it was a town a bit lacking in Irish charm. But nevertheless, I was still glad we’d chosen it rather than Milton Keynes for our holidays.

In Letterkenny’s defence, the big Tesco they had there was alright and kept us amused for half an hour. The Indian man operating the checkout was another one with a smile on his face and had sufficient craic in him to make him a suitable candidate should there ever be a vacant job at A Gibbons Tyres, though Tesco was a warmer place to be working on a cold winter’s day in early September. As we were leaving he seemed a little crestfallen; before us he’d never met anyone who didn’t own a Tesco Clubcard.    

Some people take their favourite teabags away on holiday with them. Some people can’t live without their cornflakes from home and pack an emergency supply in their travel bag. Unfortunately for us, the Ryanair cabin baggage policy didn’t provide for passengers carrying on cast-iron wood burners, so I spent the evening feeling cold and damp whilst faffing about with the second worst stove in the world and at the same time dreaming of the second best stove in the world back at home in our Bulgarian farmhouse. It’s a terrible way to be when you find yourself struck down by homesickness and pleurisy at the same time.

11 September 2025, Thursday

On a soft day in the summer of ’81, as I patiently waited for the Tuesday bus to take me from Tuam to Oughterard, a wrinkly-faced old man sitting by the water pump in the town’s Diamond shared some wise words with me. Sucking on an old briar pipe he said, ‘I’ll tell you young fella, you should never visit an Iron Age ring fort in the sideways rain.’ His advice had stayed with me ever since, especially today as Priyatelkata and I drove by Grianán Ailigh which, dating back to the year 1700 BCE, was the only remaining terraced ring fort in Ireland. There the rain was more sideways than any of the sideways rain I’d ever seen in all of my life.

So we stayed in the car and continued on along the N13 (which is the A2 in English) crossing the soft border near to a branch of DDR Tyre Repairs. Our brainwashed Soviet Bloc heads instantly recognised DDR as the acronym of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (the old East Germany), but the absence of trusty Trabants in the forecourt made us suspect we were wrong. On closer inspection we discovered that in this instance it meant Donegal and Derry Road Assistance, and  fumed that if they’d more accurately labelled it DADRA Tyre Repairs we’d have saved an hour of our precious holiday time. Our curiosity satisfied and a bit of fresh air inhaled, we motored on into the historic City of Derry with its United Kingdom style drizzle, road signs and money.

We’d been to Derry before so we had a shared mental list of which sights and sites we’d already seen or not seen, and which ones to go back to or avoid completely. A walk around the walls that encircle the old city centre is always a must because they bleed history dating from the time they were built in the early seventeenth century right up until relatively recently. The views from up there are wonderful, especially for those aware of some of the finer detail of that history.

We weren’t surprised to find the city an interesting old place, and its folk very friendly, but it had an air of sadness hanging over it. A particularly poignant moment for me was when the track Zombie by the Cranberries played in an almost empty pub as we sat patiently waiting for our order of stew and nettle champ to be brought to our table. The song was written by band member Dolores O' Riordan, its title being a reference to the mindless violence that took place during a desperately dark period of ethno-nationalist conflict in the North of Ireland’s history that was, in my opinion, understated as ‘the Troubles’.

Wandering the streets, we came to the conclusion that the reputation of the place seemed to have dampened any serious attempt at tourism as nail bars and charity shops greatly outnumbered fridge magnet outlets, and there wasn’t a sniff of a lucky leprechaun anywhere. Earthy punk music by local boys, the Undertones, provided an even more suitable soundtrack for the day as I sang Teenage Kicks and My Perfect Cousin to myself during our walk beneath a leaden sky. I was sure that if I’d sung them out loud there’d have been people around me who were eager to join in, but I didn’t because the city had already had its fair share of misery without my vocal cords twisting the tuning fork further.

The Poundland shop in Waterloo Place was where I was sure the old Littlewoods store used to be, outside of which, in December 1969, I encountered an incident that had continued to traumatise me throughout my life whenever my mind drifted back there. Converting the building into a branch of Poundland which, although shabby and grim, had uncannily scrubbed away some of that memory, making it a better place as far as I was concerned. The removal of the armoured cars and barbed wire had been an even greater step in this respect. But that experience would always stay with me as one that had terrified me as a child and for which I was grateful later in life as it had solidified my previously fluid nationality.

A dash to shelter from the fluid weather took us into the Guildhall, an architectural jewel that had been built, destroyed and rebuilt far more times than once in the three hundred or so years that it had stood there in various states of repair. The most recent in the sad series of attempts at its destruction had been in the form of a couple of I.R.A. bombs detonated in 1972, but it had been fully restored by 1977. Inside we found a spot dedicated to John Hume, a local man and Nationalist politician who in 1998 became a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his part in negotiations that led to acceptance of the Good Friday Agreement by the people of the North of Ireland. Apparently he once said, ‘If the word 'No!' was removed from the English language, Ian Paisley would be speechless.’ The fact that there isn’t a word for no (or yes) in the Irish language was probably one of the stumbling blocks for Paisley while the peace negotiating was going on.

Colourfully painted murals of Irish musical artists such as Fontaines DC and the aforementioned Undertones, the Derry Girls from the powerfully funny television series, and events from Derry’s eventful past did a lot to brighten the place up but in a city where all but the pubs close their doors at 5:30 p.m., it seemed like a good idea to set off back through the sideways rain across the soft border into Éire and home to our rusty mustic cottage near Portsalon.    

The words of a man who sheltered from the rain with us in Derry would stay with me a long time, just as the words of the man in Tuam in 1981 had. He said, ‘In August it was a terrible dry month. We wondered if we’d ever see a drop of rain again.’ I was tempted to ask him if they’d had sideways sunshine during their unexpected drought but our rain suddenly stopped and we had to dash off while the going was good.

Image:

The Undertones mural in the City of Derry. My own photograph.

Part Nine:

It's on its way.

The Soundtrack: