FLAT LAKE

I take a break and go home for a couple of days. My sister is one of the organisers of the Flat Lake, a literary festival. My best friend Billy is picking me up from the airport - he too has been press ganged by the sister into attending. It’s good to be home for a few days as Peter is about to head off to Korea to teach English -assuming Kim Jong Il does not blow the shit out of it before then. Bill and I agree that we’ll do the Saturday night so Saturday afternoon, we load up on tins of beer and then make our way out to Flat lake. Imagine a big field, with a collection of big tops, yurts, tepees, a pyramid of books about forty feet high , a couple of stages, a double decker bus and a couple of goats and a couple of thousand people and that’s roughly the picture. So I’m doing my Nobel Prize Winner impression (old joke – outstanding in his field – geddit?) and wondering where to go, when my cousin James wanders over and drags me over to Clones Film Festival tent. Clones is my home town and some friends and relations have been running a really cool film festival there for the last eight years. They even have an award ceremony to rival the Oscars – The Francies – named after the lead character in The Butcher Boy – a novel written by another Clones man, Pat McCabe. At least I assume it is the Clones Film Festival tent – someone has re-arranged the letters so that it now reads MONET IS ALIVE. I have a chat with James and Harry Cleary about the festival and the possibility of getting to show Pizza in the Festival the following year, and I say I will have a chat to Arif about it when we are nearer the end.
Bill and I eventually run out of tins, so we have to resort to getting pints from the bar tent – this is precisely what we have been trying to avoid as they’re usually ropey as all buggery but they actually turn out to be okay – better than okay – pretty damn fine. Somehow we end up in a conversation with some wild young Bohemians about Leonard Cohen, Suzanne Verdal and Armand Vaillancourt. I wander outside for a smoke – I don’t have a light so I wander over to the first group of people I see and say “can I have a light?” A guy gives me one and I realize the bloke stand opposite me is Dominic West. We’re chatting a bit, I say I really liked him in The Wire, thanks very much, chat a bit about Harold Pinter, Robert McNamara, whatever really, when Pete comes over. Pete is bombed, and he wants to bum a smoke. So I hand him the ciggie and he says “...cheers man, really apprec....HOLY FUCK, IT’S MCNULTY, HEY EVERYBODY LOOK, IT’S JIMMY MCNULTY” He then shakes his hand, and says how much he loved The Wire, ya feel me, no doubt and as far as I can recall it, he calls him McNulty fifteen billion times. (I would mock except this is Cowardesque wit compared to the time I met Steven King – an experience I won’t detail here except to say so starstruck was I, I was literally having an out of body experience, watching myself make a complete dick of myself and powerless to do anything about it.) Dominic’s clearly had enough of this as he’s backing away slowly and trying not to make eye contact. I steer Pete in the other direction. A bit later I briefly meet Cillian Murphy but slip off when I see Pete coming as I can’t face “HEY EVERYBODY, LOOK IT’S THAT WEIRD SCARECROW LADYBOY FROM GOTHAM CITY, PLUTO”
I get back to Wiltshire a couple of days later. Jess’ husband has finally read the script. She says when reading it, he pictured Dominic West in the role of Hobbes. I don’t have the heart to tell her, I have pretty much insured that he is the one guy we will never get.