IT S DARK and wet outside. Inside too, as ten pints of darkness slosh about in the author s increasingly queasy stomach and the driver leans on the old accelerator. We are speeding towards a spot I ll call Prozac Connemara. The wind howls and we lurch sickeningly a foot into the air over an enormous pothole causing a blood-soaked human heart to fall from the dashboard into my lap. The achy breaky organ in question had been ripped from my driver s chest the previous day during the Macnas parade. It s well-known I have no heart anyway, he laughs eerily.
We pull into the gravel drive and the hound of hell launches himself from the drystone wall straight at the windscreen. He always does that, my driver laughs. Last time I visited there was nothing in the house but a lettuce, a lemon and two bottles of expensive Scotch. Now there is only the lettuce.
As I approach my seat in the Town Hall Theatre for the Levi s Lecture, Living Yesterday Tomorrow the usherette says: Sorry pal, you re barred in here . But this is just a merry prank by the irrepressible driver and soon I am listening to Malcolm McLaren talking a lot of bollox and quite a lot of sense. At first he can t work the projector, Where s the techy? he squeals. The screen is all white light. Velvet s influence, cries a wit.
Then McLaren, thin, grey-suited and chainsmoking, tics us through his splattered career from tat outlets Let It Rock and SEX , via repackaging The New York Dolls, managing The Pistols and Bow Wow Wow and launching Adam Ant, to his own film projects and musical doodlings.
In two and a half hours of non-stop self-aggrandisement, McLaren avoids mentioning John Lydon at all. Which is rather like listening to two and a half hours of Brian Epstein discussing Ringo to the exclusion of the Walrus. It s a funny old karaoke world, reckons Malc, and there is nothing new, only the old, the borrowed and the blue. His accent veers from deep south to Noo Yawk but mostly sticks at Steve Harley cockney. I like his story of the Mafia lawyer making a deal over Sid s murder rap. They got the knife down at the precinct, see? Gimme fifty grand and when it comes to the trial there won t be no prints on the knife.
He professes admiration for Wilde to whom he often adverts yet one comes away thinking of Mme Modjeska s estimation of Oscar: What has he done, this young man that one meets him everywhere? Oh yes, he talks very well but what has he done? He has written nothing. He does not sing, or paint, or act. He does nothing but talk. I do not understand.
Baudelaire in his last delirium called crinom, crinom . For he was too enfeebled to pronounce the Holy name. So now with me. The dark night of the soul. Then this is hell, nor am I out of it. I am sick. I must die. I am on a floor somewhere. Stifling. What s that on my face? A cat. AAAAAAARGH!!!
Wait. It s coming back now. Actor s birthday. Three bottles of champagne in bar called The Unwell. Spontaneous performance of Spice Girls numbers by children. Cod and chips in chipper with polystyrene container of mushy peas which witty driver assured American tourist was avocado dip. Festival Club after pub. All girl band Rubyfruit Jungle. Incessant drumming. Drinking until five. No sign of driver. Crash.
Get up and open window. Blinding sun. Salthill. Breathe. Find Kalashnikov bayonet and peel orange. Walk to city.
An hour later I mount the winding stair of the imaginatively titled Castle Street Car Park Galleries to see Malachi Farrell s installations. The first cheers me up no end as it consists of a couple of trains made out of cardboard boxes that run up and down real rails with whistles and gun barrels and everything. Hot diggity!
Lulled into a false sense of security I wander through the amorphous Magritte-like opening in the wall around the corner. It s dark and there is birdsong. But there the birdsong turns into groaning and then sort of ghastly breathing and muttering and a white curtain at the back of the room begins to move very slowly. And I know there s something awful behind that curtain because the Stephen King noises keep getting louder. Next thing you know all these fizzy crackling noises start up and there, in the greeny flickering light, are two humanoid figures made of leaves being fried, twitching in electric chairs.
I may be old-fashioned but when I was going to school art was all about who could draw the most realistic orange. Obviously a lot has been going on behind my back since. Mysteriously, however, this petit guignol vista cleared up my hangover and so I took to going along to see it most afternoons.
Fans of lunacy will be glad to learn that Martin McDonagh s The Cripple Of Inishmaan is as inspired a slab of absurdist tragi-comedy as one could wish.
The Royal National Theatre s production is brilliantly cast Ray McBride, Ruaidhri Conroy (as the eponymous cripple) and Aisling O Sullivan particularly shine. McDonagh presents us with a vision of thirties island life that s part Ionesco, part Synge on diethylamide, in which the hero passes his days staring at cows, gazing through binoculars ( You can see a worm wrigglin a mile away ) and consuming sweetmeats called Fripple-Frapples . Then a film crew arrives and Hollywood beckons . . . But you ll see it soon enough in Dublin.
At the champagne reception for the opening at the Town Hall, the Lord Mayor told me a story about a feed he had above in Russia. They gave him a plate of dried apricots with a chocolate bar stuck in the middle. Not as amusing as the one about Marianne Faithful perhaps, but capable of being worked up into an anecdote with a little effort. Mayors are born free, I said, but are everywhere in chains. How we laughed.
And now a brief interlude for a Galway joke. An American tourist returning from the bathroom says to a barman Hey barkeep. There s no door on your washroom. It s a disgrace. Yeah, says the barman, It s been like that this thirty-two years and, d you know, we haven t had a shite stolen yet.
Morning in Prozac. Men move among rocks and pools and drystone walls, and bog cotton and wind-deformed bushes, as in a trance. The cows are on largactil. I stare at them. Far out to sea a dolphin has a cardiac arrest from ennui.
The city, by contrast, is jumping. People in whiteface commit mime (where s my Kalashnikov bayonet when I need it?), old hippies bawl Stairway To Heaven making up the words as they go along and, horribly disturbing to one in my condition, a woman dressed as a goat leans out from under the fringes of a Punch n Judy booth and sings Those Were The Days My Friend to acoustic accompaniment.
8pm outside the Quays Bar. The streets are full of locals and sunstruck tourists swilling pints. A barbershop quartet renders How We Buried Paddy Murphy : We took the ice right off the corpse and put it in the beer . Up the way, some clown is juggling fire. Crusty gals are threading those beads on other girls hair. Somebody starts to play the bagpipes.
In the pub a girl tells me she knows a girl with nine cats who s trained one of them to lick her nipples while she watches television. Then a lady singer says one of the most intelligent things I ve ever heard, Thirsty weather. God send more of it.
It s cold and nearly dark at Spanish Arch when Teatr Biuro Podrszy set the night on fire with the superb street theatre that is Carmen Funebre. Huge dynamos throb while stilted giants in leather masks and jerkins flash searchlights into the crowd and whip the rest of the cast around the arena. Black-coated soldiers stage a drunken rape then show the crowd pictures of their sweethearts before going up the line. Then they re back blind, maimed, hobbling on stilts and enormous crutches. Giant death in a flowing purple cloak and Ensor skull scythes the people down.
The most beautiful moment of the festival is the launching of five little paper houses with a night light burning in each by means of balloons. Into the now black sky they soar and soar until they re stars, then sparks, then gone. While below, the cast set fire to the huge kerosene-soaked gates and the dynamos fall silent.
Afternoon in the Unwell. I am sipping the first of the day and idly scribbling in my sketchbook when a large local looms saying: If you draw a fuckin cartoon of me I ll cut your liver out with a Stanley knife and pound it flat with a jackhammer. You don t scare me, pal, I respond. I ve been doing worse than that to it in the last fourteen days.
I sit in the pub on the last day of the Festival. The race crowd ll all be in tomorrow, the barman says. An all the Arts crowd ll be gone. Sort of a bloodless ethnic cleansing. n

Thanks to: Ted Turton, Corky Corcoran, Rose Parkinson, the witty Driver, and the sage chanteuse.