A little lament for a forgotten friend – our country ‘local’

Country Living with Francis Farragher

There was an old mate of mine long since gone to his eternal reward who I often used to give a lift home from the local on a Saturday night. A decent, hard-working man, the salt-of-the-earth, as they’d say. He wasn’t a man to be out every night of the week but Saturday night was especially precious to him for a game of cards and a check on the births, deaths and marriages of the parish.

The odd Sunday evening, he might ‘escape’ too or occasionally on a week evening if there was a local funeral and there was a lift going handy.

Saturday though was always his night for the extra ‘one or two’ and on the way home he would invariably break into a verse of a song, that never really reflected his current happy predicament.

Our little chat would always cease half way back the road when he’d break into verse:

“Well it’s lonesome away from your kindred and all

By the camp fire at night

Where the wild dingos call

But there’s nothin’ so lonesome

So morbid or drear

Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer . . .”

He ‘had the lot off’ and three or four minutes would pass outside his house before the first verse would be repeated to wind up the song that was made famous by Australia’s Slim Dusty way back in 1957, a year close to my heart!

I’m not really sure whether Slim Dusty had any more hit songs – if he had I never heard of them – but this ditty now stands as a valued nugget of Australian song and folk history.

Of course, when my old friend used to give his weekly version of the song, we always felt reassured that it would never come to pass in our neck of the woods that we’d ever see the daywhen we’d come across a pub with no beer.

It never did come to pass for my buddy, as he journeyed off to the after-life some years back, but there have been nights over recent weeks when I nearly had to pinch myself and say: “There’s no local to go to anymore.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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