A working day out on the road is always a good day – until it comes to lunchtime. Between 8am and evening, I could be anywhere, but it’s usually far from food. If I’m organised leaving Dublin, I’ll fire a box of oatcakes, cheese, some apples, and nuts into the car, so at least there’s something to keep me from eating my arm off halfway up a back road in the middle of nowhere.
I’m hardly ever that organised, though. I definitely wasn’t this week, when I’ve been on the road since Monday, researching four features stories. I’ve been in Mayo, Kerry, and west Cork, and twice this week, lunch was water. My stories don’t usually take me to touristy places, and lunch of any kind in untouristy rural Ireland, in midweek off-season November, is usually not going to happen. Those days, it’s the least rotting banana I can find at a petrol station. If I can even find one of those.
I did two interviews spanning lunch time this week, in people’s homes. I didn’t mean to be there at lunchtime; it’s just the way the mileage worked out. Both times, I arrived as my interviewees were finishing their own lunches (pea omelette in Mayo and poached eggs in west Cork). Would I like some omelette, my interviewee inquired. Her husband, who had just come into the kitchen when I arrived, looked briefly appalled, as he looked down at the portion in the pan intended for him.
Of course I said no. Feeding the reporter who is about to ask you lots of questions isn’t in the contract. I thought I’d stop somewhere later, after the interview, but it was getting dark by then, and so I kept going, on to the next stage of my travels, which was three hours away. Water is all we need anyway. You can survive on it for ages. (Yeah, right.)
As for poached eggs, you can’t really share a single poached egg, which is all that was left on the interviewee’s plate when I arrived in west Cork, also during the lunchtime slot. I arrived about noon, and when I left, just after two, I had (unintentionally) made my interviewee cry with one of my questions, but at least I hadn’t eaten half her poached egg, to make things worse.
That village was unbelievably scenic, but being out of season, nothing seemed to be open. And you can’t eat the scenery, as the saying goes. Thus it was water again. Even so, given a choice, I still far prefer these ad-hoc lunchless days on the open road, when I’m roaming around the country, to lunch eaten at my static desk in the office.
