The old home town looks the same -- only better
Declan Lynch had a surrealistic experience when he saw the town where he grew up on television
There was a moment during RTE's The Restaurant last week when the camera moved away from the kitchens and the dining room, to show us the ravishing view which the patrons enjoy. It looked like something from the cover of an exotic holiday brochure, but where could it be?
Bali, perhaps. Or maybe Goa. Or could it be the Seychelles?
In fact, it was none of these places. It wasn't even a foreign country we were looking at here. It was Athlone.
Not Goa. More a case of Go-an-out-o-that.
This was the view from the Wineport Lodge, where The Restaurant is filmed. We were looking at scenes of Lough Ree, not the Seychelles. And the location was the village of Glasson, which, when I was growing up in Athlone, was just some place "out the country".
It was not a place with fancy restaurants and pubs and a golf course and country club, it was just . . . out the country.
Increasingly, as a native of Athlone, I am having these surrealistic experiences. I remember an episode of Dick Warner's Waterways, when I thought for a while that I was looking at images of Venice by night, when in fact I was looking at Athlone.
But it all came together last Sunday when a supplement was included with this paper, and again, at first glance, it looked like an invitation to dream of distant lands. Guess what?
Discover Athlone . . . it said on the cover, which featured a lovely scene of a blue sky, with a cruiser on the river at the Bridge of Athlone, and the ancient castle and the iconic church of St Peter's in the background . . . Discover Freedom.
And as I flicked through the pages, I could see that they were not bullshitting us here. Athlone is a great town now, and soon it will be a city.
I felt again this weird sense of displacement, even a sort of resentment.
It's as if they waited until I was about 17 years of age, when I left the town and moved away to the city, and then they said: "Right, he's gone. Let's get this place sorted out."
So how did they do it?
I don't know, really. I have no idea how a place like Glasson can change from being . . . well, Glasson . . . into the high-class leisure destination which it undoubtedly has become. It is beyond me how "the Connacht side", as I knew it, can now credibly contain a Left Bank.
But I see that it has, and it now behoves our leaders to pay attention here, to investigate what has happened in Athlone, how it has happened, and how it might be replicated in other places.
Because, when you look at that Discover Athlone supplement, you realise that this may well be the only story to come out of Ireland for about the last two years which actually gladdens the heart, rather than grinding it into the muck.
Forget about our local leaders, they should be coming from America to have a look at this.
The Americans are great fellows for coming over here studying places where there is an unusually high rate of depression or incest, so here's a chance for them to study a "cluster" of a more uplifting nature. A cluster of cabin cruisers and penthouse apartments and fancy hotels situated in areas of outstanding natural beauty.
It is the latter which provides me with the only definite lead as to how all this might have happened.
I guess in Athlone we always half-suspected that we lived in an area of outstanding natural beauty, with the river running through it and out towards Lough Ree.
Yet the town turned its back on the river, as other towns have done -- it is almost a venerable Irish custom to turn your back on the river.
To reject that which is consciousness-raising and life-affirming, in favour of that which is tedious, and horrible.
Roughly speaking, there were only three kinds of people, in my memory, who realised that Athlone had something going for it there, with the river and the lake.
These were the Germans; and my uncle Joe; and my uncle Joe's mates.
The Germans would come every summer to hire their cabin cruisers and to sail up the lake, which they knew was a bit special.
And my uncle Joe, who worked in the P&T, would take his rowing boat up the river most Saturdays, with his dog Spot standing on the prow.
They would not stop off at the Wineport Lodge for wine and canapes; there was no such thing. Though I recall there was a little pub called The Thatch, for the thirsty angler.
They would not drop in to the Glasson Golf and Country Club to hit a few balls; there was no such thing.
But they seemed to know intuitively that this was actually quite a nice place, when the light caught it a certain way.
And, over time, this view has been growing in popularity.
The Radisson people endorsed it by actually situating a hotel on the banks of the Shannon, so patrons can enjoy a view which was once restricted to employees of the woollen mills -- though in the mind's eye, as I look back I can see no windows on the river side of the mills, only walls.
So maybe it's as simple as that -- maybe one day some bright lad in the local chamber of something-or-other mused, "You know what? The river there . . . it's not bad, is it?"
And the rest, as they say, is geography.
Declan Lynch
Sunday Independant
23rd November, 2008 |
