There’s nothing like a good aul’ visit to focus the mind. Whether it’s the Royals or the Yanks, it sort of makes you stand up, puff out the cushions, throw a lick of paint on the doorpost and reach up to the dresser for the best Willow design cups.
There must be a whole generation of Americans who think that the entire population of Ireland pre-1970, instead of being perceived as the mucksavages we were, supped our tea every evening from dainty little cups with blue designs, and ate salads consisting of a slice of ham, a leaf of lettuce and a solitary tomato the size of a sliotar.
‘Tis all about impressions, you see. We didn’t want to let ourselves down in front of these Yanks who for all knew ate their dinners back home out of a plastic bowl resting on their knees while watching Johnny Carson and Walter Kronkite.
When I was just five years old, we had a distinguished visitor to the back of our house, when US First Lady Pat Nixon landed in The Green in Ballinrobe. She came on the biggest of three helicopters; we all spit-gelled back the hair and waved little Stars and Stripes as she inspected our guard of bouncer before heading out the country to visit cousins who had dressers full of willow design cups and dainty sandwiches for her to eat.
For a few weeks the town went into meltdown as news of her arrival dominated every conversation. A stage was built for her, my dad prepared the loudspeakers and the wiring, and she came and went. I remember staring into the sky that night at the space she had been, wondering if I had dreamt it all.
On Page 50 this week, you will see the front page we had for the visit of Ronald Reagan back in 1984. It is a visit I remember well because as young lads in Mayo, we spent that weekend in a field outside Ashford Castle packing lunches for the 800 troops and soldiers who were spending the night in the woods and drains around Cong and Lough Corrib to mind Himself inside in the castle.
We had an assembly line and passed along a plastic bag into which we would drop a sandwich, an apple, some crisps, some chocolate, a can of some soft drink because water for drinking wasn’t invented in Mayo in 1984. We got paid handsomely and at the end of the two days, we were told we could bring home as many goodies as we could carry.
Now, since we started going out into the world as equals, we’re not so nonplussed anymore about visitors. Now, we don’t care so much about what they think of us; just that they have a good time, and that they will look back on their time here with fondness.
Of course, Kensington Palace took no cognisance at all at all of the publication time of the Galway Advertiser, because the visit falls in that nether time of too late for the print deadline, and probably too early, because by the time you read this, they might have well come and gone. But you can follow the whole thing on our social media.
So enjoy Galway, William and Kate. This is the kind of place you’d love to come to on a regular basis if you didn’t have to do the incognito thing. And by ye having a good time here, let everyone around the globe who sees you here pop along here at some stage as well. For a day at least, our city centre will become WilliamsKate Street.
