A Journey to the Stars.

One morning my beautiful German flatmate Rada invited me to a party in County Cork in a place called Castle Freke the name of the place in itself was enticing enough for me to come along. Of course we had to hitch hike there. Hitch-hiking in Ireland was normal, I mean the kind of normal that when you set out to go somewhere you had to contend with the queue of fifteen or so other really rather ordinary people (in contrast to those who hitch in England) at the side of the road also trying to hitch a lift somewhere. There was a definite etiquette, which went something like, walk down the queue until you find the last person to arrive in it and stand somewhere a bit further down the road from them, or risk their fury usually in the form of a string of expletives and a shaking fist near your face, or perhaps just a sour look of disdain!

Drivers didn’t necessarily pick you up in order from the queue but there was a good chance that they would. We rarely had to wait long for a lift, as hitch-hiking was so normal that it was also considered normal to pick up hitchers, and most people that did so would start the conversation by carrying on as if they had been chatting with you the day before. It was quite a long way to Cork but when we arrived in Cork city we knew because firstly it was a big city in the middle of nowhere and secondly the whole place smelled like the huge brewery that was there.

Castle Freke was a bit further on into the countryside and our hitch-hike finished with a very long walk down a very long and beautiful lane with swallows swooping down over the blackberry laden hedgerows as we walked into the wonderful pink sunset.

We stayed that night in a ramshackle farmhouse, like so many of the old houses in Ireland at the time it still had a hard packed dirt floor, this totally amazed me, I had never come across anything like this before in my whole life! Later that year I met quite a few more people living in single room cottages with dirt floors and just a smoky old peat fire for warmth! This house was something of a communal house, one of those ones where it’s hard to tell who actually lives there, where it is difficult to get a cup of tea, there is no toilet paper and certainly nothing to eat except perhaps if you are lucky rather tasteless watery lentil/cabbage stew, which came to be known as hippy stew, not to be confused with a man I met later also called Hippy Stu, both of these could cause a bad case of galactic wind, but that is another story.

Communal homes such as these might be a novelty for some people, I came across a few too many of these in my late teens and developed a bit of an aversion to them, which I am sad to say has lasted right to this day, I feel on edge in them as if expecting a plate of hippy stew or someone with galactic wind to appear around every corner.

I don’t remember where we slept, but I was relieved to leave there the next day to go to the place where the party was to be. It turned out to be quite a small party in the delightfully rugged grounds of a ruined castle, or so I was led to believe but I couldn’t find the castle anywhere.

What I did find was a lovely big hot fire and plenty of magic mushrooms. It was a long night, perhaps on a full moon, it was pretty uneventful really as parties go, apart from my voyage to the stars!

The night sky was full of stars, thousands and thousands, millions and millions the like of which I had never seen before, this was one of those magical places where it gets dark enough (due I suppose to the lack of light pollution) to actually see all the stars. As I came up on the magical brew I laughed and giggled and the stars laughed with me, they drew me into their warm embrace, pulling me faster and faster, the wind whistling in my ears, further and further away from the Earth. It was a very interesting experience, I could feel my body far away on planet Earth, sitting cosily near the fire in the field. Sometimes I could hear the voices and the music of the folk on the Earth, but my heart and my head were high up in the stars, millions of miles from Castle Freke, and all I could see was galaxy after unbelievable galaxy flying merrily past my wide open eyes.

It felt like forever, and then, all at once it was over. I was back in my body beside the fire laughing and singing with everyone else until it got light. As we didn’t bring any bedding with us, or a tent of any description Rada and I decided that staying up for the rest of the night, or at least the last few moments before the dawn, and then hitching home made the most sense. In reality it made the least sense! I can’t imagine now, twenty-five years later, how one decides that when going on an expedition to a ruined castle over night not to take any bedding or even a tent! I suppose I had my big black trench coat with which must have been almost as good as a blanket, it was certainly waterproof, a great necessity in Ireland. I remember when I first arrived there somebody said to me it only rains twice a year in Ireland, once in the autumn for five months and once in the spring for six months. It’s that fine sort of rain that looks deceptively magical, sort of light and pretty, but it gets you completely drenched really quickly and without you even noticing, it’s a bit like having a bucket of water thrown over you in another dimension, whilst feeling the affects in this one.

At some point during the next day, penniless, foodless and disastrously tobacco-less we found ourselves stuck in some small town in God knows where, waiting for a lift which eventually came in the form of an old Cork farmer with a stutter. Rada insisted that I got into the front of the car as my English was clearly better than hers, as she was in fact German, this didn’t seem at all fair to me, and I’m not sure that he was even speaking in English, but Rada was my very good friend and I probably would have sat on his lap had she asked! Admirably his extreme stutter did not deter him in the least from communicating with us for a full couple of hours, we weren’t even sure where he was taking us as much of it was down the tiniest single-track roads with grass growing down the centre of them. The bits of the conversation that I did manage to understand mostly consisted of him trying to convince Rada or I to marry at least one of his many sons. He seemed incredulous at our refusals and continued for some time telling us of their virtues which were things like having all their teeth, strong arms, a big repertoire of songs and a full head of hair. If only I had taken up his kind offer, I could have had my pick of them and perhaps my life would have taken an entirely different course, or maybe a similar one with all those folk songs!

At that time I didn’t really see myself as the marrying kind, especially to complete strangers and Rada was having none of it, so rather reluctantly, and to our great delight, the farmer kindly dropped us off near a sign that said Galway five miles, and we had a thankfully uneventful final leg of our journey back to our tiny flat. I sank into my little bed, as if it were the most luxurious four-poster in the world, with the great joy that only comes from staying up all night in a field communing with the stars.

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