Mick jumps over fences

This picture was taken on a train in the highlands.

When I was a kid, I looked forward to going to my grandparents' place because there was always ice cream and comic books there. It's awkard to refer to them as 'grandparents', because they were always Mick and Eileen. I found out early on that other kids didn't call their grandparents by their first names, and never got a straight answer as to why mine made a point of being called this way. When I think back, they never were grandparents. They were people who told jokes and stories and had been awarded the privilege of spoiling us in ways others couldn't.

My grandad's treat was a walk down to Dun Laoghaire pier where our first stop was Teddy's. This little ramshackle ice cream stand squirted ice cream out onto the cone out of a machine that had clearly never been cleaned properly since it was bought. But somehow that made the ice cream taste better. It was probably part of the magic of Mick's storytelling that we never got ill from them.

To get from Mick and Eileen's to the pier you had to cross Dun Laoghaire from top to bottom. That meant either crossing the council estates and making a fairly large detour, or else cutting through the football field and taking a raggedy little path across somebody's yard. Mick obviously wasn't bothered with the easier, longer way. He led us through the brambles and over the fence to get to Teddy's. He jumped over fences like they didn't exist. To him, they never did.

After Teddy's we'd go walking down the pier itself. Dun Laoghaire East Pier is a very unimpressive experience when you first see it. It's an ugly concrete arm which hugs the ships into the harbour. But a walk down there was, and still is, always somehow unique and exciting.

First, there was the bandstand. As our little legs scurried across the first half of the pier, we scampered up the steps to this hexagon which stood in the middle of the Irish sea, and jumped onto the stand, in triumph at being higher up than anyone else. It was like celebrating the halfway mark of walking down the pier with an pedestal we could be kids from. Jumping up and down in the sea wind and pushing each other about was a way of making ourselves bigger than the world could comprehend. It was as if the breeze was inflating us as we hopped and ran and shouted aimlessly in this place meant as a stage for the brass band.

Then there were rocks. Whereas the rocks which bordered the pier on the outer side were an unthinkably perilous danger zone for my parents, Mick watched over us with his indefatigable smile when we skipped from one large boulder to the next. With him, the rocks became yet another game in which there were risks and rewards (just like bridge, golf), and he let us play. He knew that children playing involved some risks, and he was prepared to let us take them.

He knew that we'd come up against fences our parents didn't find any convinient gates for. He knew we'd fall of fences and cut and graze ourselves, or get splinters in our perfect pink skin while trying, and even if we cried, we'd have gone a step further.

Mick hopped over a fence into his grave one day, and kept going.