Travel – Page 33 – Ian Louis Harris

China Trip – From Nanjing On To Wuxi, 19 November 1993

Janie really got the hang of the early morning tai chi…

…whereas I look somewhat “other”, compared with the regulars

This is what I wrote:

19th – Nanjing -> Wuxi – early morning tai chi after breakfast. Mausoleum of Dr Sun Yat-sen…

I recall being quite taken with the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. Good exercise climbing all those steps too. So much so, Janie and I both wanted photographic evidence that we made the climb:

…then on to museum (real) and art gallery (shop).

A real museum exhibit being observed by a real Janie

I was starting to get a little vexed by the fact that so many items on our itinerary sounded like sites of touring interest but actually were shopping visits. Some people in our group seemed far more interested in shopping than in actually seeing China, so not only were those shopping legs dull, they also tended to be protracted.

I especially remember one woman, Heather, who was a shopaholic and was almost always last back on the coach after a shopping stop. She bought a huge consignment of tacky-looking laughing Buddhas to take home as gifts, so I honoured her with:

The Dali Lama Award for laughing Buddhas.

To be fair, though, Janie actually really liked that “art gallery” stop as there were some interesting artists with their own art works on show. She bought this small work there, which still has pride of place in the bedroom.

Late lunch in Nanjing, followed by Yangtse River Bridge & then on to railway station for train (shop) to Wuxi.

“Not only will this train take you to Wuxi, Sir, but you’ll have all manner of shopping opportunities on board…”

The number of vendors and the extent of goods – or to be more specific, gimcrack – tendered to the captive audience that was the rail passenger community – had to be seen to be believed.

…Straight to hotel for dinner followed by karaoke.

I remember the visit to a karaoke bar in Wuxi well. Chris, one of our tour guides, arranged the evening and only a few of us (mostly the younger folks from the tour) went. The locals clearly took their karaoke very seriously and mostly sang ballads and love songs – some Chinese pop, some western pop in extraordinary accents.

In keeping with the musical style that seemed popular there, I decided to deliver The Ultimate Love Song, which is one of my early parodies which works to the tune of Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You:

The Ultimate Love Song, Whoops Vicar, NewsRevue, Ben Murphy…, 29 February 1992

The subtlety of the piece was probably wasted on most of the audience, but karaoke is surely more about the karaoker than the karaokees.

Janie and I both remember our little group having quite a lot to drink. I recall Janie doing a duet with Chris the guide, but neither of us can remember exactly which song they sang. I think it was something along the lines of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”, sung melodramatically and very badly indeed.

For sure we had lots of fun that evening.

All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 29 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:

China Trip – From Beijing On To Nanjing, 18 November 1993

We did a little bit more sightseeing in Beijing before dashing to the airport for an internal flight to Nanjing.

18th – Beijing to Nanjing – went to Lama Temple & briefly Confuzi Temple. Then on to airport for flight to Nanjing*…

*amazing business moving us from Gate 16 to Gate 19 & then back across the tarmac

I think this is the Confuzi Temple but this photo was not labelled at the time, so I might be getting “confuzied”

I remember the business at the airport, because we were solemnly told we needed to relocate to another gate in order to be in close proximity to our plane, then ended up wandering rather haphazardly across the tarmac to our plane, which was close to the original gate. Frankly that was one of my lesser health and safety concerns about the internal flights back then – more on that topic anon.

…straight on to coaches for trip to amazing bird market and then on to hotel – 5-star Jinling Hotel.

As yes, the bird market.

Janie and I found it fascinating and I’m sure these days Janie would have taken dozens and dozens of photographs there. Still, enough above to give you an idea. Some of our fellow tourists found the place unsettling; it certainly didn’t smell like a place where you’d want to try the street food. It’s probably highly regulated and much safer hygeine-wise now.

As for the 5-star Jinling Hotel – so famous and having had so many high-falutin’ guests it gets a Wikipedia entry – it was a strange sort of 5-star. My guess is that there were different grades of room and our tour group was in last grade:

Dig the rabbit-skin hat and rattan slippers. I still have that short- sleeved shirt in my “holiday collection” 25 years later.

My memory had Janie’s hairdryer debacle happening in this hotel, but my notes have now sent me to the Holiday Inn Beijing for the electrical debacle and I now recall that the incident occurred before our peking duck dinner, not before the music concert, so I have moved that anecdote to the previous day’s write up – click here or below:

Squeezing A Heck Of A Lot Into One Day In Beijing – Including Making The Holiday Inn Beijing Go Pop, 17 November 1993

What the “awards” notes do remind me is that the elevators in the Jinling Hotel were somewhat below five star standard. I awarded that hotel:

The London Regional Transport Efficient Elevator Service Award

On reflection, I think our departures from that hotel were always delayed by people unable to lifts get down from their rooms.

Dinner in town – not bad meal – good ribs. Music concert at which we didn’t fall asleep (but almost everyone else did).

So that will have been our very first encounter with Chinese traditional instruments, including the pipa – an instrument that has fascinated us since and which Janie has subsequently likened to a theorbo with predictably hilarious results in the early music world:

William Carter, Theorbist Extraordinaire’s Mystery Punter Outed, 24 September 2010

But I digress.

All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 18 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:

Squeezing A Heck Of A Lot Into One Day In Beijing – Including Making The Holiday Inn Beijing Go Pop, 17 November 1993

As a result of a “fog-bound Beijing” 24 hour delay leaving London…

An Anticlimactic Start To My & Janie’s First Big Travel Adventure Together, 14 to 16 November 1993

…we only had one of the two scheduled days in Beijing, at the start of our 1993 China tour.

Never mind. Kuoni would try to squeeze as much into one day as is humanly possible…possibly more than that.

No time to hang around in the throne room

17th – Beijing – went to Tianenmen Square and Forbidden City in morning – then closonet factory – then lunch on the way to Great Wall – food slightly spicy this time but still more Cantonese style than Beijingese. Great Wall in afternoon – walked up a bit bought a rabbit skin hat on the way up for ¥10.7 (£1.30) – straight back for Peking Duck dinner. [indecipherable added note]. Mr Poll Tax explained how to complain about anything.

Ah, so the Peking Duck was the second night, not the first night…still, everything I wrote about the Peking Duck meal (and the Park Inn) still applies.

My abiding memory of getting ready to go out for that meal was Janie’s hairdryer moment. I don’t mean her chewing me out Alex Ferguson style – that sort of hairdryer moment would be more predictable than memorable – no, I mean the moment when Janie, who insisted on schlepping her own hairdryer half way around the world, plugged in said hairdryer and made an entire Holiday Inn’s electricity go “pop”.

OK, it is JUST possible that something else in the hotel made the electricity go pop at the precise moment that Janie flicked her hairdryer switch…but what are the chances of that happening?

I don’t think Janie dared try to use her hairdryer again until we got to Hong Kong.

The Thomas Edison Award for electrical cabling – the Holiday Inn Beijing

I don’t remember much about Mr Poll Tax but I suspect he was a seasoned, semi-professional complainer.

All the photos we took on that big day – just 17 between the two of us would you believe – in those days it was rolls of film and rationing our supplies – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:

An Anticlimactic Start To My & Janie’s First Big Travel Adventure Together, 14 to 16 November 1993

Janie and I embarked on our first big holiday together, to China, Hong Kong & Bali, 25 years ago as I write (in November 2018).

A long while in the planning, I got permission from Binder Hamlyn in August 1993 to take an exceptionally long vacation – four weeks, having accumulated a large backlog of leave, at which point Janie and I promptly booked the holiday and spent the next three months looking forward to it.

We booked this holiday through Kuoni Travel. Being somewhat unseasoned and relatively impecunious travellers at that time, the China portion of the trip was a group tour. In any case, in 1993 it would have been difficult to travel around China independently; it was fairly difficult even on a group tour.

Our excitement was curtailed when we got to the airport to discover that our flight had been delayed by 24 hours due to fog in Beijing.

My tour journal (see as written above, transcribed below) begins:

Excelsior Hotel 24 hour delay of flight – Beijing fog bound. We ate, swam, worked out in gym, ate, swam and ate…

What was the Excelsior Heathrow is now (November 2018) the Park Inn by Radisson Heathrow – if this link still works when you read this, you can decide for yourself whether you’d prefer 24 hours in that place or in Beijing.

I do also remember the tour group leaders, Sally and Chris, arranging a couple of briefing sessions at the hotel, to try to keep us all upbeat, to introduce us to each other and to explain how they were going to salvage what they could of our Beijing site-seeing, which was going to be reduced from two days to one very busy day. I took very few notes.

Departed for Beijing 9pm on 15th – arrived afternoon of 16th – straight to Holiday inn Beijing and out to dinner at rather ordinary restaurant next door.

I have one abiding memory of the flight. When we boarded, one gentleman, very red in the face, who looked like a travelling businessman rather than a holiday maker, elbowing people out of the way – flamboyantly ensuring that he got as much hand-luggage space as possible. He was probably an expert at manspreading too, although we were mercifully sitting a couple of rows away from him. Clearly he was a seasoned traveller and equally clearly not a very nice or polite bloke. Since that flight, Janie and I have always described that type of traveller’s behaviour as “like the man on the Beijing plane”.

Beijing Capital International Airport in 1993 was nothing like the place it is now or even like the place we experienced on our next visit, in 2010. In the early 1990’s, if I recall correctly, the runways and indeed the passenger walkways were more like the top of a great big outdoor wall…

…or perhaps I am getting my photographs muddled up. Perhaps that picture is from our visit to the great wall the next day.

Joking apart, the airport back then seemed very developing world and basic for a major international city. Also, it was extremely cold when we arrived in Beijing – an early season wave of arctic weather – hence snow on the wall.

My comment about the food at a “rather ordinary restaurant” next door to the Holiday Inn was an abiding theme on this holiday. The food was mostly not good and was very samey. There was an assumption that a British tour group would not be very interested in Chinese food beyond a few staple dishes of the pseudo-Chinese, sweet and sour balls variety. Every meal included copious plates of chips, just in case the “Chinese” food didn’t please people. To be fair, most of our fellow travellers were not particularly interested in the food and (unsurprisingly given the quality of food served) were not going to cultivate an interest in Asian cuisine on that touring holiday.

We were given some peking duck in Beijing – the next day it transpires…

Squeezing A Heck Of A Lot Into One Day In Beijing – Including Making The Holiday Inn Beijing Go Pop, 17 November 1993

…but that peking duck was of a far lesser quality than the stuff we were used to in good London Chinese restaurants – for example, the Park Inn – by which I mean May’s wonderful Chinese restaurant on Wellington Terrace, around the corner from my flat – not the Radisson hotel chain known as Park Inn. In the fullness of time shall write up May’s Park Inn for Ogblog. Strangely, though, on Googling it, I found one page – click here for link…

…or here for my 2018 scrape of that page… still listing May’s restaurant some 15-18 years after it closed. I wonder how many other restaurants on that listing still exist?

So it’s not just Beijing and China that have changed in the last 25 years – but I do think the changes there are more dramatic.

Anyway, the point is, evening of 16th November 1993, Janie and I had arrived in China and the touring was about to begin the next day.

China Tour, Pre Briefing Notes, 14 November 1993

While we were fog bound at Heathrow on 14 November…

An Anticlimactic Start To My & Janie’s First Big Travel Adventure Together, 14 to 16 November 1993

…our Kuoni guides, Chris Lucas and Sally Ward, briefed us ahead of our trip.

I’m not going to try and translate this page

A Very Short Break In Cornwall, 25 to 28 April 1993

The diaries give very few clues about this short break to Cornwall. I think we both simply agreed to book out the first three days working days of that week and drive off to Cornwall.

We went in Red Noddy – at that time my company car – a souped-up automatic Honda Civic. In those days Janie had Blue Noddy – a slightly older, souped-down automatic Honda Civic.

The only clue as to our destination in either diary is the slightly misleading note in Janie’s:

“Rossiney” [sic] – meaning “Bossiney” House Hotel Tintagel

The hotel is still there in 2019 – click here for details.

I think we stayed there two nights – dining at the hotel on one night and “commuting” to Rick Stein’s Padstow Restaurant the other night. That Rick Stein meal was an excellent one and I think in those days Rick Stein himself was still hanging around that place when we dined there.

From memory, I think we then drove on to St Ives and stayed somewhere around there for a couple of nights – exploring St Ives, Lands End itself and whatever else was worth seeing at that very south-western tip of Great Britain.

Janie had written down…

…”Gyllyndune Manor” (Falmouth)…

…but crossed it out. I don’t think there was room at the inn or perhaps she decided she didn’t like the sound of it. I vaguely recall just allowing enough time on arrival at St Ives to check places out and plug for something. Midweek in April this was not a tough ask.

The only thing I wrote down in my diary for the whole trip was…

…*Ben Murphy…

…and I do recall trying to call my west-country comedy customer Ben Murphy ahead of our journey home, with a view to possibly stopping off for a quick face-to-face on his home turf in Somerset. Ben made himself scarce for that idea…or possibly simply was, as he said later, otherwise engaged. Hard to pin down, was Ben.

I don’t think we took any photos on that break – at least I cannot find any and neither of us, at the moment, remembers taking any. Yet it seems strange that we didn’t. Possibly a mislaid batch of photos will emerge in the fullness of time – don’t hold your breath, though.

For now, feast your eyes on a couple of pictures that good folk put in the public domain.

Tintagel:

St Ives:

Thanks to those good people who took nice photos.

Hope Springs Eternal – A Long Weekend At Underleigh In Hope, Derbyshire, 26 February To 1 March 1993

Janie had originally intended to visit Phillie, Tony & Charlie in Germany that long weekend, but for reasons long since lost in the mists of time that idea fell through and I suggested, instead, a visit to Hope, in the Dark Peaks of Derbyshire.

Similar place.

The night before we set off reads “Lars Piss Up” in my diary, which I assume was the night of Lars Schiphorst‘s informal leaving do after work.

So I don’t suppose Janie and I set off for Derbyshire at the crack of dawn 26th.

I have/had long loved the Dark Peaks – one of the better kept secrets (amongst many) in the UK as places for stunning countryside, walking and away from the more touristic “usual suspect” places in the North.

In truth, the search for peace away from tourists in the beautiful parts of The North can be satisfied pretty much anywhere in February, but I didn’t know that back then.

Two or three years earlier, I had stumbled across a lovely place to stay, in Hope; Underleigh, when taking a brief sojourn out that way with Wendy Jacobi. We went at a more sensible time of year during 1990.

Lighter looking peaks, plus Wendy Jacobi, no doubt on the way to Hope

Anyway, I suggested Underleigh to Janie and booked it. My diary helped me to identify the place and TripAdvior lets me know that, 26 years later, it is still highly regarded.

The one thing that Janie didn’t like about the place was the communal dining. Dinner, bed and breakfast was the deal in those days (no more, it seems). One big table with an expectation that whoever is staying makes up an informal dinner party for that evening.

We live and learn. Janie has such an aversion to such notions she/we positively avoid such places these days. In the UK they are much rarer now in any case, as the more individualistic culture has swept away the communal, dinner party chic.

The food was good there, albeit a bit rich, I recall. The owner/patrons were very friendly and helpful; a different family now, more than quarter of a century later, I should imagine but rave reviews still.

I remember Janie and I kitting ourselves out for this winter walking trip, with a visit to Millets in Kensington, I think the weekend before when we were at mine.

I also recall the icy walking being really quite difficult and treacherous for us, despite our new clobber. All the gear, but no idea.

Darker peak view from the 1990 trip – no photos from the February 1993 with Janie

Somehow we survived – thrived even – nonetheless, resolving to persevere with hill walking but probably to choose less challenging routes and seasons in future.

The only other specific thing I remember about this trip was a drink in a pub at a suitable stopping point on one of our walks. Janie looked at pictures on the wall of locals from a gurning competition. Janie wondered what they were about so I explained about competitive gurning.

That’s not a very challenging thing to do as a competition…

…said Janie, which motivated one of the locals to chime in to our conversation…

…it’s a lot harder than it looks. You try it…

…so Janie did.

A subsequent gurn some years later, Ethiopia, 2005

The handful of locals were seriously impressed.

I think we might have been bought drinks all afternoon had we hung around in that pub, but we beat our retreat while we were still on top. As much as anything else, we wouldn’t have risked that icy hill walking after any more than one drink.

We have occasionally returned to the Derbyshire Peaks since, although we in the end sort-of made the North York Moors “our place” for that sort of stunning, quite-challenging hill walking.

Janie and Ian’s First Holiday Together, Venice, 3 to 6 December 1992

Janie and I met in August 1992. Our first overseas travel together was a short trip to Venice, in early December that year.

02 Another grand canal view V_1992_3_Photo03_4 — A Grand Canal View

I didn’t keep a written log on that trip, but we did take some photographs and make up a small album, which is captioned and which you can see by clicking here or on the photo above.

Janie wore the travelling trousers in those days. She bought a little guide book and scribbled some notes in it.

So from the photos and the guide book we have today (3 December 2017, 25 years later) tried to reconstruct our memories of this little trip.

We didn’t have enormous success with Janie’s hand-written list of eateries above:

Caffè Florian – we indulged ourselves with a coffee but not much more;
Trattoria Alla Madonna – we recall failing to get a booking there. Other trattorias are and were available – we did eat well in Venice, but not there;
Harry’s Bar – we had coffee, cake and a Bellini, because apparently that’s what you must do there;
Gritti Palace – mercifully the top restaurant was closed. I say mercifully, because even the coffee we had in the Gritti Palace bar was, as I described it in my photo caption, probably the most expensive cuppa in the world. We had also hoped to visit the Peggy Gugenheim in that part of town, but that was closed for a refurb at the time.

More successfully, we stayed in the Bauer Grunwald, now renamed the Bauer Palazzo; we absolutely loved it there.

I considered adding my two-penneth to the TripAdvisor reviews, but thought that a 25 year old review might not have sufficient merit. The Bauer still gets great reviews. We were pushing our financial boat out staying in a place like that back then – we both remember it being our first taste of staying in a big room with an enormous emperor-sized bed.

But, extraordinary as it might seem, we also went out of the room on several occasions and did a rather a lot around Venice, enjoying a mixture of sun and rain during our outings, as evidenced in the photos.

If the labelled, album stack of 26 photos (above) is insufficient for you, the entire library of our Venice photos, “uncut”, is also available – click below:

The photographic evidence and Janie’s markings in the book suggest we did a lot of the usual Venice things:

The Doges’ Palace;
St Mark’s Basilica;
The Frari;
Rialto Bridge;
The Ghetto (I recall seeing it and on one evening eating around there too);
Clock Tower;
Accademia? – not sure we got that far through the list;
Museum of 18th Century Venice? – not sure we got that far through the list either;
Murano – yes – we have photographic evidence of that one, and we still have a glass bowl in the bathroom from there, holding the cotton wool, apparently;
Scuola Grande Di San Rocco – again with evidence:

Also, of course, we wandered around a lot, looking at markets and trying to imagine Death In Venice (in my case) or Don’t Look Now (in Janie’s).

We had a great time. We decided we wanted to explore more places together afterwards, which is a happy ending…

…far more than can be said about the movies that were stuck in our heads.

Harry’s Bar – Don’t Look Now – Death By Chocolate in Venice

I blocked out five nights/six days in my diary for this trip but in the end we only went for three nights/four days and went stright on to Annalisa’s party on our return on the Sunday. It’s as if we spent our life in speeded up mode back then – in our relative dotage, we’d never try to fit anything like so much in.

A Long Weekend In Stratford-Upon-Avon, 29 October to 1 November 1992

Twelfth Night Guest House/Bed and breakfast Image borrowed from Google on fair use grounds for identification – we believe this place has now closed down.

Janie and I talk about our short trip to Venice in December 1992 as the first holiday we took together, which is sort-of true.

But before that, only a couple of months after getting it together, we took in some theatre and dining on a long weekend in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

My diary is not terribly helpful with the details:

In those days, bookings and arrangements would have been made by telephone, so there is no electronic trail to speak of. But I did save programmes and started retro-logging theatre visits a bit later in the 1990s. That, combined with our memories, gets us quite a long way towards remembering this trip, even as I write 25 years later.

29 October 1992

We drove up from London to Stratford-Upon-Avon, probably in quite good time (if Janie was already hopeless at packing she would have hidden this from me back then and been ready with her bags, even if had taken her hours to pack).

We would have driven up in Red Noddy, my (or I should say, at that time, still Binder Hamlyn’s) Honda Civic.

We checked in to Twelfth Night Hotel in Evesham Place…recommended by Janie’s client Margaret if Janie’s diary is anything to go by…£22 per person per night according to Janie’s diary…

…(I originally thought The Shakespeare Hotel in Chapel Street, but Janie’s diary is explicit and I now recall that The Shakespeare was from our second visit)…

… and went to see a preview of The Changeling at The Swan – written up here – in the evening. We probably ate in Fatty Arbunkle’s that evening, one of the few places in Stratford that offered decent, Bistro-style food after theatre in those days. No photos from this trip, but Fatty’s (now long gone) looked like this wonderful watercolour from the outside. Inside were lots of pictures of silent movie stars, including Fatty Arbunkle himself, of course.

30 October 1992

I think we did a bit of gentle sightseeing during the day. Both of us had been to Stratford-Upon-Avon several times before, but neither of us had done much of the “Shakespeare trail” sightseeing stuff. So much so, that I recall we left some sightseeing stuff over for a future visit.

We weren’t going to the theatre this evening, so we booked a “top notch” place to eat; Lamb’s in Sheep Street. We had a very good meal on that visit and at the time of writing (October 2017) if TripAdvisor is to be believed it has become top notch again. But I do recall a subsequent visit (perhaps late 1990’s or more likely during the twenty-noughties) when the place was in dingy decline. Anyway, top notch it was for our first long weekend together.

31 October 1992

I think we chose to hold back on the sightseeing today (deferring to a future visit) to avoid the weekend crowds. So we mooched around and had a light lunch, ahead of a marathon effort to see a preview of Antony and Cleopatra at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, where Janie recalls we ate and drank in situ, before during and after the performance.

1 November 1992

We drove home. The diary suggests that we went to see NewsRevue at the Canal Cafe Theatre that evening. I suppose I was hopeful to see some of my stuff in the show and I don’t suppose I was disappointed at that time. It might have been Janie;s first visit, although we shall do some archaeology into Janie’s old diaries in the fullness of time. Janie’s diary appointment notes might reveal more details about her NewsRevue experiences and perhaps also about our very first long weekend away together in Stratford-Upon Avon.

A Week In Ireland (Dublin & Cork) With Bobbie Scully, 22 to 28 May 1992

I took no photos and I wrote no journal during this week off, which makes it hard to retro-blog the visit all that much.

It returned to my mind in December 2021 when writing a vignette, Deeply, inspired by Rohan Candappa’s adverb colander:

Three Vignettes From The Adverb Colander, December 2021

In fact, that vignette contains most of the specific things I remember about that trip, other than the following scant details:

We flew from London to Dublin, took the train from Dublin to Cork and back, returning to London by plane from Dublin I’m pretty sure;
We stayed in modest hotels in both cities. I don’t recall any high-class meals in Dublin – but I do remember eating and drinking well. We had a good time;
Although Bobbie has/had kin in Ireland, I’m pretty sure we didn’t visit any of them – we basically just looked around Dublin and then looked around Cork;
I was still struggling a bit with my back (from the major 1990 injury) and we sought out swimming pools in both cities, with reasonable success;
In addition to the football match night contained in the Deeply vignette, I also recall the following night, our last, when we ate at the Arbutus Lodge, a rather grand place which had a Michelin star at times and thus we ate a degustation menu at (by Irish standards but certainly not by London standards) enormous expense.

Bobbie might remember some other details and chip in with them – if so I shall add them of course.

That Deeply Vignette Replicated

An Spailpín Fánach, Tuckey Street, Cork by Mac McCarron, CC BY-SA 2.0

I don’t much like soccer football. I’m certainly not one to be deeply affected by a football match. But one match is deeply embedded in my psyche. The Republic of Ireland v Albania in May 1992.

Bobbie and I went to Ireland for a week at that time. My first proper break since my back injury two years earlier and my first ever visit to Ireland. I didn’t take a camera and I didn’t take a notebook, making it the least documented trip I have ever taken abroad.

That football match between Ireland and Albania dominates my memory for two reasons.

Firstly, I remember that, in the build up to the match, the Irish media was full of news about the visiting Albanian team. Initially RTÉ news worried, on behalf of the visitors, because the weather was unseasonably cold in Ireland and the visitors reported an insufficiency of warm clothing. Two days later, RTÉ news appealed to the people of Ireland, asking them to stop sending jumpers, cardigans and the like to the Albanian team’s hotel, because the visitors were now inundated with warm clothing.

A deeply charitable nation, the Irish.

Also a nation deeply passionate about their sports teams.

The Republic of Ireland had done unexpectedly well in the 1990 Football World Cup. This May 1992 match was at the start of the qualification campaign for the next World Cup.

By the time the night of the match arrived, Bobbie and I had moved on from Dublin to Cork. Bobbie is a keen football fan whose dad was Irish. We resolved to watch the match in a suitable-looking pub near our hotel.

As usual in Irish pubs, Bobbie and I were warmly received as guests.

There was much genial chatter about the warm clothing news items. The vibe was also charged with keen expectation. The throng expected their now-successful Ireland team to win a qualification match against Albania.

At half time and beyond, with the score still at 0-0, the atmosphere in the pub became tense. Bobbie whispered to me that we should make a hasty exit if the match failed to go Ireland’s way.

Mercifully, Ireland scored a couple of goals in the last half-hour of the game, turning the mood into a memorably shebeen-like party, with plenty of drinking, singing and dancing, until late into the night.

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That Deeply Vignette Replicated

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