1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge by Tony Hawks, Prefers to remain anonymous Page B

going out there at all.’
    He regarded me with some surprise.
    ‘Rory McClafferty was away an hour ago.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Rory McClafferty is just after leaving. Around an hour ago, I’d say. He left with a load of blocks he’s taking out there.’
    ‘You mean, he left in a boat, from this quayside, to go to Tory Island?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
    ‘Ah yes, he was away about an hour ago. You say you wanted to get out to Tory?’
    ‘You could say that.’ I pointed to the dining room of Bunbeg House. ‘We’ve been in there all morning organising appeals over the air on national radio and trying to get the Ministry of Defence to clear a helicopter to get me out to Tory Island.’
    ‘Oh, you’ll get nothing in there,’ he said, pointing into the dining room. I had to admire the terse accuracy of this remark.
    ‘Will anyone else be going out there today do you think?’
    ‘Not now, not with the tide the way it is.’ He looked up from his nets and eyed me quizzically. Were you not down at the pier this morning?’
    ‘Er…no.’
    ‘Well, if you’d been down at the pier this morning, someone would have told you about Roiy and you’d be on the island now.’
    Of course I would. I had made a terrible mistake. I had trusted in the local knowledge of Andy, a man who came from Bermondsey. His awareness of what was going on amongst the boats outside his very door was on a par with his understanding of his new telephone system. Whilst he had valiantly embarked on the fruitless endeavour of securing a helicopter, a friendly fishing boat had left for the desired destination literally a matter of yards away. Telephoning fishermen the night before had proved to be no substitute for wandering down to the quayside and asking. As I walked the five or six yards back to Bunbeg House I was struck by tiie lesson there was to be learned here. Be ambitious, strive for great heights and don’t give up without a fight—but don’t do so without first exploring the simple option. I decided to spare Andy the news until later, thinking it might spoil his day still further. Besides, our failure had produced the bonus of a free afternoon which I intended to spend reading and relaxing.
    I was being naively optimistic. People knew where I was, and I was in demand. All afternoon the phone didn’t stop ringing for me, and Andy’s dining room turned into my office. RTE television were the first callers. An afternoon show called Live At Three had heard about me on the radio and were keen to send a presenter and a mobile unit to film me hitching by the roadside. They wanted to know where I would be on Friday. So did 1.1 tried to explain this, but it was a difficult concept to grasp for someone in the Filofax ‘lefs do lunch’ world of television.
    ‘But you must know where you’re going to be. Do you not have a gameplan?’
    ‘My gameplan is not to have a gameplan,’ I said, being deliberately nebulous.
    Antoinette, to whom I was talking, was torn between being genuinely amused by the whole notion of ‘fridge hitch-hiking’, and being frustrated by the guaranteed uncertainties which appeared to be a part of it. She seemed to be the producer, researcher and presenter on Live At Three , and I half expected our conversation to be cut short at any minute because she had to go and do some make-up or operate Camera 4. She called three more times in the space of an hour with more questions to which I could offer no satisfactory answers. I wasn’t making her life easy with my ‘I don’t knows’, ‘maybes’ and ‘probablys’, and I could have been more helpful, but there was a certain power afforded to me as a result of my not really caring whether I did this programme or not, and I wasn’t going to squander it.
    ‘Look Tony, you mad eejit, I’ll ring you later—but this is how well leave it for now. My intention is to get someone to drive you to wherever the mobile unit are going to be on Friday and then drive