Reset The Clock

Sleeping Beauty (the Irish version)

I woke up to someone hammering with a rivet gun. Trouble was, they were hammering inside my head. I staggered to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.
I looked again…. I’d disappeared.
I mean, I simply wasn’t there. I stared at the space I should have occupied but it remained stubbornly empty. I had a hangover but nowhere to hang it. I was lost in a mist.
In desperation I wiped the glass…. Relief.
It was just steamed up. My sister, Eileen, must have been in before me, probably shaving, (don’t tell her I said that).
My mother’s sweet voice drifted up the stairs. “Declan, are you up, you little shite?”
Somehow I got dressed.
Downstairs, Ma was clearing up. “Oh, if it isn’t the Sleeping Beauty.”
“Good morning Mammy,” I said, keeping a civil tongue.
“Morning is it?... Good is it?... What’s left of it! You disappear for months then come home as if butter wouldn’t melt. You can’t just reset the clock and start from where you left off. This isn’t a hotel. And if you think I’m making you breakfast, think again.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Oh, my breakfast not good enough for you, is it?”
“I thought you said you weren’t making me breakfast.”
“Then you’d be right…. What time did you get in last night?”
“I don’t know, Mammy. It was dark. And if you could possibly keep the volume down, I’d appreciate it.”
“I’ll tell you what time it was. It was twelve minutes past three.”
“So, why ask?” I didn’t want to argue but I couldn’t see the relevance of what time it was sometime last night when it was this time in the morning now. “I’m sorry Mammy.”
“Oh, sorry is it? Well let me tell you………..”


Last night I’d been out with my mates comparing the Guinness at McConnell’s with the Guinness at Finnegan’s, till somebody said, “What about The Hole in the Wall? Surely we should include that?”
The rest agreed and off we went.
To get to the Wall you have to go past Mulligan’s which is renowned for its Guinness. So we called in there for the sake of accurate comparison.
There was Billy McGovern, Patrick Rafferty, Burt somebody, and me. While we were in Mulligan’s we met up with Michael Doyle and his brother, Liam. A discussion ensued about the way draught Guinness performs in the glass, from the initial pouring to the final settling of the head.
Pat said, "If you look really closely it’s like a million tiny silk balloons, slowly rising, pale into a midnight sky. Poetry in motion. Obviously, the glass is important too. You’d not be drinking Guinness out of any old receptacle."
We decided to examine the time it took from the pouring to the moment it was ripe for drinking, the hypothesis being that the longer it took to separate, the better the taste. Billy had a stopwatch facility on his watch, so he timed it. We gathered round and slammed our hands down on the bar to mark the moment we saw a sharp line between dark body and creamy head. Billy kept resetting his watch and we repeated the procedure a number of times for the sake of scientific accuracy and worked out the average.
Then Liam stood up, waited for quiet and said, “The glory of Guinness is teaching human beings the virtue of patience.” He sat down again.
“I’ll drink to that,” said Billy and we all followed suit and then ordered another round.
Round followed round and the next profound statement came from Burt.
“I can’t feel my face,” said Burt. “Will somebody help me to the gents?”
I offered to assist but wasn’t feeling too steady myself so I let Pat do the honours.
After repeating the pouring experiment once more for extra verification, a discussion followed regarding the colour and the taste. Michael said Guinness isn’t really black but has a tinge of ruby and to prove it he undid his trousers and held his glass against his underpants, which we all agreed were black, as the label in the waistband confirmed. We leaned in and scrutinised it closely, our eyes flicking from the glass to the underpants and back again. “You see what I mean?” said Michael.
“How do we know your underpants have not changed colour in the wash?” asked Billy.
“They’re new on,” said Michael. “Would I expose myself in grubby Y-fronts?”
“I propose,” said Billy, “that the colour of Mick’s underpants and the colour of Guinness is fundamentally the same. The ruby is an illusion.”
“It certainly is not,” retorted Michael.
“Exposure to daylight will provide a definitive answer,” said Pat rising to his feet.
“Hang on,” said Michael. “It’s getting dark and not the weather for dropping trousers in the street. And, anyway, holding a pint glass at my groin with my breeches down, I’ll either get arrested or hospitalised.”
So we stayed put and the rest of the evening became a blur.


We never made it to The Hole in the Wall. As I remember, we all piled into Michael’s Morris Minor and went to the Golden Chopsticks takeaway. I think there was seven of us, unless I was seeing double, in which case there was three and a half. Anyway, I was rammed in the middle of the back seat. The little car seemed to be constantly going over the brow of steep hill, even when we stopped.
Someone said, “Declan, what are you having?”
“Make mine a pint.”
“No you balm-pot. What are you having from the Chinese?”
“Oh,” I says, “I’ve a liking for the sweet and sour. Chicken, prawns, I’m not choosey. With egg fried rice and chips. Can’t beat a few chips with the sweet and sour. Oh, and a pot of curry sauce and a bag of prawn crackers for dipping in. And don’t forget the soft noodles. And what are those things wrapped in filo?”
“Spring rolls?”
“Yes, spring rolls.”
“Are you sure now? That’s an awful lot and a terrible richness on top of a belly full of Black.”
“Sure I’m sure.
“Your funeral.”
We ate our Chinese at Pat’s parents’ place because they were away. Midnight found us listening to Engelbert Humperdinck on their radiogram because it was either that or Des O’Connor, Val Doonican having broken when we used him for a frisby.
After the fifteenth, ‘Am I That Easy to Forget’, I decided I’d had enough and walked back home.


Anyway, back to this morning and Mammy giving me the third degree…….

“……..So, where were you until three in the morning?”
“I was listening to Engelbert Humperdinck at Pat’s.”
She hit me round the head with a wet dishcloth, which is not what you want with a hangover, especially when you were being truthful for once.

I don’t know if it was the Guinness, the Chinese, or the indelible memory of Michael Doyle’s underpants that did it, but, in the end, I decided it was good to be home again with the clock reset and, as long as Mammy refrained from killing me, the rest of my life was still available.