Love and loathing in Ballyshannon

Age might be bad for the body, but it is a serum for the soul. I found that out a couple of weeks ago in Ballyshannon, where, during a Saturday spent at the Rory Gallagher Festival, I watched the ugly, cruel, insecurity of youth show itself up in front of the slack-skinned, laid-back, unselfconsciousness of age.

The Rory Gallagher Festival, for those who do not know, is a weekend of blues and rock music, held annually in Ireland’s self-proclaimed oldest town.

Every year, in the month of May, the town of Ballyshannon releases a wall-rattling snore and wakes herself from her half-steamed slumber.

Still wearing last year’s mildewed leather jacket, she picks at her crusty lips and climbs out of her sleeping bag.

Splashing a drop of water around her face, she plants her hands either side of the campsite sink, meets her own bloodshot eyesballs in the mirror and, with a brown-toothed grin, says, ‘Looks like it is that time again’.

This is who I imagine the spirit of the festival to be.

She is a roving, stumbling soul, whose wobbly step never leads her into trouble. Those who have been to the festival before will have seen plenty of people made in her image.

Garbed in decades-old denim, these freewheelers float through the streets, animated with the same carefree abandon of children at the playground.

Watching them brings a jealous smile to my face.

This year, the purest example of this envy and joy-inducing freedom came when a man, probably about 80 or so, took into a fit of dancing in front of a street packed full of people.

A small, footpath band had sprang into a session, and your man could not help himself.

Out from the crowd he emerged; a puppet alive on the strings of sound.

And what made it all the better was that he was not dressed like the spirit of the festival incarnate.

He looked like he could have been anybody’s granda.

With his baige shorts hoisted high and his summer shirt tucked tight, he became our hero, our leader, and the embodiment of everything good about the festival.

The crowd went buck mad as he stepped out from the herd.

Everybody loved it.

Age had liberated him from caring about the opinion of others.

However, the festival draws all sorts to it. People of all ages, tastes, types, creeds and kinds.

Among the cosmopolitan mix of movers and shakers that show up, there are always a pile of younger heads. Of these younger heads, there is a chunk that care infinitely more about the rip than they do about anything else.

These boys are the polar opposite of our fully ascended, spiritually-enlightened pensioner.

They are young hedonists, hellbent on drowning their insecurites in a weekend of unadulterated carnage.

Allow me, by way of another anecdote, to wholly illustrate my point that age soothes the soul, purifies the heart and erodes the ego in a way we should all look forward to.

Boarding the Rossnowlagh to Ballyshannon bus on the Saturday, it looked like the wagon was full.

Hoping this was not the case, I walked down the aisle, praying that there was an empty seat concealed somewhere at the back. Unfortunately, there was not.

“No seats?” I said, half-rhetorically.

“Well, does it look like it?” said some sweaty-headed, slabbery-toothed cub in his early 20s. I said something smart in return and he laughed moronically to his crony, who sat beside him.

At the next stop, a strange looking fellow got on: Long, balding hair, haphazardly arranged to cover as much scalp as possible, he wore ill-advisedly short shorts and sported a satchel across his shoulder.

“Peado!” roared one of the boys, as soon as they seen your man.

The entire back half of the bus seemed to laugh. All these boys, aged between about 18 and 22, appeared to be together.

“Get that peado off the bus!” jeered the next hyena, to the humourless cackles of his friends.

This continued the whole way to Ballyshannon. The oddball never responded, apparently not even realising that the abuse was directed at him.

Getting off the bus, I half-heartedly said to my friends that the victim might have been foreign, thus possibly protected from the grief by his lack of English.

Whether he was or not, only he knows.

Later on, as part of the adoring crowd who watched the older man busting moves around road, I wondered how the night would end up for the boys from the bus.

Apparently, I have learned since, there were a couple of bad kickings that night.

A part of me would like to imagine that the guy from the bus was not as clueless as he pretended, and not as harmless either. Perhaps that would teach them a lesson, accelerate their maturation process, and sooner make them more like our beige-bottomed hero of Ballyshannon.