LONG BEFORE DRAGONS’ DEN:

THE SALMON LEAP PUB

I’d heard this story a few times over the years. It was an O’Reilly family urban legend, and as with urban legends, you’re never too sure how true they really are.

“You wanna hear the best one?” my uncle, Robert O’Reilly, said to me. This was the first time somebody would be telling me about it.

It was the summer of ’91, and I was a seventeen-year-old on my working hols in Leixlip, County Kildare, Ireland. We were in the Salmon Leap pub, my Uncle’s local watering hole. I was a minor, but in Ireland, that was never an excuse not to go out on the lash.

“What’s that?” I asked.

My Uncle Robert — like his father, my Granda, John O’Reilly — was a great storyteller, or at least a willing raconteur after a few pints of Guinness had so gracefully slid down his throat: his favourite phrases were: ‘Wait till I tell yis’ and ‘Listen to this story’.

John O’Reilly was born in Ringsend, Dublin, in 1928, and first came over to England in the late 1940s. Many trips, mostly for work, followed until he courted and married my Granny, Margaret Maguire, in the early 1950s. They were very different: my Granny was quiet, timid and a chain-smoking worrier by default (she died in 2007); my Granda, on the other hand, a direct, naturally funny megalomaniac whose life motto was: ‘Nobody’s no better than you, son, always remember tha’, their shit’s the same colour as yours.’ It was quite an axiom to live by, and one I have always tried to follow.

CONEHEADS

“Did yer hear the one ‘bout the hats?” Robert began, chuckling already.

“The hats, what’s that?”

“The cone hats, an’ yer Granda?”

“No.”

“Ah, righ’… Listen to this story then…”

He began with the tale, all the time laughing as he talked. That’s the problem with my Uncle, whenever he tells a joke or an anecdote, he can’t help but laugh during the commentary. It’s always been endearing, but also a pain in the arse as it takes him forever to tell it.

My Uncle had just come home from work. It was the early 80s and he was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine at the time. Anyway, he went into the kitchen, where my Granny was, at the sink, fag in her mouth, talking to herself as she was looking out of the window. He gave her a kiss, as always.

“Are you all righ’ Mother?” he said

“Yer father’s lost it,” she answered.

“Lost it? Wha’ are yer ever on abou’?”

“He’s down in his hole.”

“An’ what’s he done now?” my Uncle asked, worried.

“Go an’ see him.”

The ‘hole’ was his man cave, his workshop.

In the garden was where my Granda had built himself kennels for the greyhounds he bred and raced. A few years before there’d been nothing but rhubarb and cabbages and carrots growing. He’d even had a greenhouse for the tomatoes in the summer. All that was gone by that time, though. He’d been a rather successful amateur greyhound trainer when he’d first started out, but it was a costly hobby with vets’ fees and food bills to pay for the twelve racing dogs had. And they were noisy, too. So much so the neighbours were eternally complaining.

“Yer lookin’ well, are yer sick?” my Granda said to him in his hole at the bottom of the garden.

“Wha’ are yer up to, Da?” my Uncle asked him. “Wha’ are these?”

All along the work surface were tinfoil cone hats.

“Try one on, son?” my Granda said. My Uncle picked one up. “Go on, put it on.”

“Wha’ are they?”

“Hats, wha’ dyer think, yer gobshite.”

“And wha’ are they for?”

“To stick up yer arse, wha’ d’yer think yer, feckin’ eejit… Go on, put it on yer bonce, try it on for size.”

“Are yer all right, Da?” my Uncle then asked him. “D’yer not need a head doctor to examine yer?”

“I do not.” My Uncle took a closer look at the hat. He started to peel away the tin foil. “Don’t do that!”

“But it’s just a children’s party hat.”

“I know.”

SKULL OF DOOM

My Granda went on to give my Uncle his reason for making them: My Granda loved TV, especially documentaries. One of his favourites in the early 1980s was Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. The programme, presented by British science-fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke, author of the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, described in thirteen separate episodes mysteries of the world as diverse as unexplained lines in the Nazca Desert to Bigfoot to ball lightning. But the inspiration had come from another source:

Crystal Skulls. He’s watched the episode Ancient Wisdom. In it, the programme talked about the Skull of Doom, a pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican human skull made of quartz, that — according to what my Uncle told me from what my Granda had told him, got energy from the sun, which in turn passed it on to humans.

“So, what’s the connection between the skull and your hats?” my Uncle then asked him.

“Quartz gets energy from the sun. Tin foil, too, because it’s made from aluminium.”

My Uncle just looked at him, before saying:

“And what’s the plan of action?”

“I’m going to sell ‘em?”

“Sell ‘em?”

“I am.”

“To who?”

“To people who want ’em. Sick people. People depressed… Sure, holy water’s good but I’m sure I can shift thousands of the feckers.”

“D’yer have a business plan?”

“A business plan, what’s one of them?”

“It don’t matter… D’yer have a partner?”

“No, I’ll do it all meself.”

He was a real Derrick Trotter.

“Well, good luck to yer, Da.”

My Uncle went back into the house.

“Did yer talk to him?” my Granny asked my Uncle.

“He’s a head-the-ball, that’s for sure, Ma, def-in-ite-ly.”

THE ENTREPRENEUR

Two decades before Britain’s Dragons’ Den and The Apprentice were transmitted to millions on terrestrial TV, John Mary O’Reilly, my grandfather, the gurrier from the South Dublin streets, was thinking of ways to make himself millions.

However, for that business idea, Granda, I’m afraid I’m going to have to use the words so eloquently put by the 45th president of the United States, Donald John Trump: YOU’RE FIRED!!!