For a day trip, we take the car five minutes over the water from Ballyhack to Passage East in Waterford. The boy is bewitched by the car ferry and keeps asking to see the captain, in the manner of a food critic asking to see the chef so he can stand up and shake his hand. Spotting the gruff, smoking man in an orange jacket who might meet this description, I decide he might puncture his mythical regard for this notional figure and tell him the captain is too busy charting our course with his lieutenants to speak with us right now. When given the option between fact and legend, like any Irish person who finds themselves working involuntarily for the Irish Tourist Board, I decide I must print the legend.
By the time you’re reading this, my son will have started primary school. There, in the real world, he may already have come home in flames, started speaking in dockworkers’ slang, or undergone a tattooed induction into a local biker gang. But, here and now, in the blissful past, we are enjoying a week’s holiday in Wexford, in Ireland’s southeast.
