Capturing the experience

The pleasure of sitting at the deep back of a dark wood bar on a sunny summer day cannot be over-stressed, and for relaxation it certainly outweighs the outside passings of traffic seeking parking and a place to eat.

Add a pint of Guinness and fresh crab sandwiches and the opportunity to people-watch a murmuring crowd of like-minded lunchers and the occasion further satisfies.

In the days when I carried one of Seawhite’s small chunky sketchbooks and fine black ink pen in my tatty secondhand motorcycle jacket, and had a mini paintbox and brush in the pannier, such lunch stops were captured therein, not necessarily with the hope of a perfect rendition but in the certain knowledge that the resulting memory would be far, far longer-lasting than a photograph, for who looks at the scene they are snapping for more than seconds?

This was an August lunchtime in the Bantry Hotel on a trip which had begun as an Irish BSA rally but was hastily abandoned for a variety of reasons; over-reliance on hope on the part of the organisers being one, and a first, appalled, meeting with a ginger-bearded horror being the convincing second.

The scenery impinged less than it ought due to the combination of Irish roads and insufficient suspension on the second-choice bike (the first having sprung a leak in the petrol tank the morning we were due to leave) which meant that our eyes were continually scanning the tarmac, in order to stand up on the footrests at every unavoidable pothole, so that the back mudguard did not scrape and overly wear the tyre.

But nearly eight years later it is the good bits – the kindnesses, the taste, the music – that encourage me to return, time and time again, although nowadays my new slimline jacket has room only for an equally slimline notebook and pencil in which to capture memories but when space permits I take both).