WANTED: Seven women willing to sit on wooden benches 15 miles from the nearest toilet. Must possess own coat(s) and unparalleled sense of humour. No experience necessary -- tea-making skills an advantage.
Apply JWH Thomson, Mystics and Magicians Irish Tour 1992.
Let's face it, fellow spectators, if he'd put it like that, we'd never have gone, am I right? I can't have been the only one who anticipated a week spent lying on my back in lush green meadows, coyly resisting the charms of flop-haired Irishmen with lilting voices and farms the size of Wales. The reality was somewhat different: no sun and -- pardon the indelicacy -- very little in the way of sin either. (The blame for this last may, in my own case, be laid firmly at the door of the Youth Hostel Association for selling me and my beloved a tent which, when fully erect, stands about as high as a shallow grave. But I digress.)
To resume then: our girlish dreams of weaving shamrock chains in the long grass and telling a sorrowing Liam Neeson that we would always like him As A Friend were revealed as so much piffle in the wind. Were we downhearted? The surprising -- nay, positively unlikely answer is "No". But "No" it is. I think we spectators would all agree that the week made up in snort-inducing laughs what it lacked in lyrical beauty, and I for one look forward to gathering my golden-haired children round my knee and telling them about the day Mummy shoved The Female Eunuch behind the pot plant and set off to cheer the chaps on the Great Irish Tour of '92.
On the first day, the rain fell in double sheets and it looked as though the only thing we would be called upon to watch would be cirrhosis of the liver. However, we had underestimated the gallant souls of Kilrane. We sat in the bar sucking down yet another drink and watching a distracted Prof Thomson raging Lear-like at the storm outside, unaware that our cricketing fates lay in the capable hands of three men, a small boy and a dog. While we drank to forget, these manly fellows prepared the wicket, blissfully unaware that prevailing conditions rendered a diving competition a better bet than a game of cricket. And their patient toil was rewarded: at the eleventh hour the wind dropped, the torrent ceased and we tottered from the pub.
It is not for me to describe the match that followed. Suffice it to say that the sun came out and with it Nicky's Bluffer's Guide to Cricket and that, aided by the latter, we spectators bellowed appropriate messages of support and commiseration to our soggy heroes. All that was needed to make our happiness complete was for someone (preferably a member of the opposition) to cut an arser in the mud. The wicket was wet, their hearts stout. We did not have to wait long.
How to recapture the atmosphere of those stolen hours as we sat watching our respective loved ones and suffering in turn the agony of taking our eye off the game just as the loved one in question was performing the catch/throw/run-out of his career? How to describe the way we laughed when Jim made his one-handed catch, cried when Deke was caught out for nought, and talked amongst ourselves whenever Richard did anything? How in so few words, to do justice to the long days spent shivering in pavilion or pavilion equivalent and the unseemly brawling to reserve a place in the car heading for pub and toilet? It is all behind us now. But I at least, have a constant comfort in the Player of the Tour, who to set the seal on his triumph, gamely drank six pints of Guinness on the ferry and fell into a peaceful sleep, leaving yours truly to navigate for the entire journey from Fishguard to Wapping.
Now, safe at home in Cambridge, I am reminiscing with my feet up and he is back in the kitchen where he belongs. But we often talk of the tour and we are still regaling our hapless friends with tales of the great Thomastown lock-in.
So what is left to say? Simply that the view from the boundary was a splendid one and that we spectators cherish many mystic moments from a glorious tour which was Very Heaven -- as well as being one in the eye for those who claim that reinforcing traditional gender roles can't be fun.
-- Now, what did I do with that book?
AJ Hall (Ms)
Mystics and Magicians Supporters Club