As an Atlantic storm rages outside and the wind rattles the windows, inside it’s waltzing and whiskey. MALACHI O'DOHERTY reports from Donegal
I WAS sitting in the bar of a Donegal coastal holiday hotel with my wife the other day. It was approaching midnight and I was sipping a little whiskey as the wind howled round us. This was in the west of the county, in a place we visit every year, and in recent years we have been lucky with the weather, lucky enough to spend long days on the beach, reading and taking occasional swims, dodging the jelly fish.
Those were like Mediterranean holidays. This is not how we usually think of the Atlantic coast. Last week’s storms seemed more in character and we asked ourselves, “How could we have been so foolish as to expect long sunny days yet again? Don’t we know what Ireland is really like?”
We are not unique in our delusions. It is often observed of the English that snow in winter always takes them by surprise.
Well, Atlantic storms rattling the windows through the night are so familiar to us that we really have no right to be disappointed. We should adapt our attitude to find them awesome and thrilling as they bend the trees and churn the sea.
And reflections like this prompt me to ask myself, what is Ireland that we are so perplexed by its normalities?
So I downed the last of my whiskey and then, on the way to the lift and to bed, we stopped to look into the main hall where a band was playing and people were dancing, oblivious to the raging wind.
Picture the scene yourself.
You might expect a little céií band on the stage, a fiddler and an accordion player. Perhaps there is a singer pouring her heart into a sean nós song evoking the wildness of the wind-stripped hills around us.
Ireland has music that touches the lonely soul.
Actually the band was playing, How Much Is That Doggie In The Window? and the dancers were all old people, a bit like myself, and they were waltzing.
We may have a reservoir of music and culture that challenges the heart to feel more deeply but that night they were happy with what they were feeling already.
You are probably aware of a television show called Strictly Come Dancing, or a variant of it franchised out to your part of the world, like Dancing with the Stars, on Irish television.
We all know a bit more about how to critique a waltz from watching these shows, but I don’t think the waltz there has ever been danced to How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?
But why was I surprised and bemused? I know Donegal. I know rural Ireland. I have been to weddings and other celebrations across Derry, Donegal and Tyrone and I know how the people dance and what music they like.
It just always comes as a bit of a surprise to me, as unwarranted as surprise at English snow, because it conflicts with another Ireland in my imagination, nurtured through education, literature and cinema.
Imagine a film director coming to Donegal. He wants to shoot a scene in a seaside hotel, close to midnight at the height of summer. Discount for now whether the film is to be a soft romantic love story - featuring that popular rarity, a red-haired Irish girl - or a thriller about an IRA man on the run from his former comrades.
Just try suggesting to the director that the music in the dancehall is a waltz and not a jig or a square dance, and that the song they are dancing to centres on a query about how much dosh you’d need for a dog. Indeed, has anyone ever seen a dog in a shop window?
That idea falls flat, of course. It’s too bizarre. So what else might they be dancing? A jive.
If you don’t know that jiving to country music in rural Ireland - always country music - is as fundamental to local culture as wearing wool, then I don’t believe you have had a night out in Killybegs or Cookstown.
I would commend to the notional director that I am trying to impress here, that he pay particular attention to the jiving.
The first rule of a country jive is that the man hardly moves at all. He does a wee flip sideways as if to suggest to the gullible that he is actually spinning the woman who gyrates around him.
The unkind and the cynical will wonder if he is just taking care not to spill his drink. No, that’s on the table waiting for him. He’ll not be long. But he owes his wife this one turn around the floor.
When we talk about Irish culture we think of traditional céilí dancing, folk songs and harps and tin whistles. And you won’t have far to go to find them, usually as sessions in a pub, often put on to cater for the tourists who expect that sort of thing.
And there is ardour behind the promotion of the traditional ways, but there has to be because culture isn’t a prescription for what people ought to be doing. It is a description of what they actually do.
And last week in my holiday hotel by the sea, they were waltzing at midnight to How Much Is That Doggie In The Window? because that’s what they do up there.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book
How To Fix Northern Ireland
is published by Atlantic Books
