Travellers pick up many things on their journeys – souvenirs, stories and often altered perspectives. Marcoola’s Chris Dowding came back from his working holiday with a newfound ability to relax and live for today.
Pushed along by his “chaotic” new wife Kerryn, in 2001 the uptight engineer had packed his bags, given the credit card a workout and headed for the Emerald Isle. As Kerryn had decided they were going overseas, Chris got to decide where they would live. One of the things that attracted him to Ireland was its laid-back lifestyle.
“I think I really wanted to learn how to have fun,” Chris said. “I was a pretty uptight sort of person. I was always worrying about the future and trying to thing about what I’m going to do tomorrow – how I’m going to get where I’m going, get promoted and all that sort of stuff. What I could see in Ireland was they lived more for today. Some of them would just spend all their money going out, having fun. I really found that confronting.”
Chris, who was 28 when he arrived in Ireland, recounts his journey to become a more relaxed and accepting human being with great humour in his first book, A few Drops short of a Pint. It’s a full-bodied travel memoir that gives the reader a taste of Irish life and history, covering the author’s day-to-day life in Dublin, as well as his travels in both the Republic and Northern Ireland.
The first thing that struck Chris when he arrived in Dublin, the city he would call home for the next seven months, was the sense of disorder. “In traffic, waiting for the bus, whatever, you don’t queue you just push in,” he said. “And just walking on the street you sort of have to dodge and weave your way along – no-one stayed on the left or the right, everyone was just doing their own thing.
Chaos also reigned on the roads, where the rules were “loosely” obeyed. “I remember one day a little old lady going the wrong way around a roundabout, and she just waved at everyone as she went round and off she went,” Chris said.
“Hazard lights are a law to do anything.”
While Kerryn picked up reception work, Chris, who now part owner of Tod Consulting in Noosaville, found a job with a small engineering company. Many of the anecdotes in his book revolve around his boss, a somewhat contradictory character. “One day he’d be saying something had to be really, really, really safe – and the next day ‘oh no, that’s way, way too expensive, the client will never go for that’. So it was constantly swinging back and forth between what he wanted and what I did.”
Immersed in a foreign culture, Chris had to open himself up to a whole new social circle, and new experiences. While he was “always uncomfortable” playing sport in Australia, in Ireland he found himself playing soccer and Gaelic football. “There’s a really big thing in Australia about playing sport,” Chris said. “You’re propped up as a bit of a hero if you’re good at it. And I played it there [Ireland] and I was still crap. But they just accepted it like that, there was no real angst about it, no real pressure about it, and I got better.”
As he says in the book: “Accept your neighbour, no matter how crazy he seems” was an attitude he came across again and again in Ireland. And it’s one that helped him learn to accept the Irish, and himself. “I’m pretty sure now my friends did (accept me), but I was so closed in about myself I just didn’t hear anyone else saying anything good about me. I was really angry at myself all the time… (thinking I’m) not doing good enough, (I’ve) got to do better.”
Chris, who actually met his wife at an Irish pub in Brisbane, decided he wasn’t going to send the usual post-card emails back home, saying ‘I went here, I saw this’, but wanted to give his friends and family a sense of what the place felt like. His darkly comical emails were a hit, and had his friends asking for more.
“Towards the end of the time there [Ireland] I thought, well, actually I’ve always wanted to write something,” he said. “I think I always had a story I wanted to tell in there somewhere, and this seemed to be it. And really I think Ireland creates a lot of stories – you just need to have your pen ready to write them down.”
A few Drops short of a Pint was written over five years, from 2002-2007. “The Irish can tell a joke in 10 seconds and I took five years to get mine right,” Chris laughs. But get it right he did, with the story taking out the IP 2007 writer’s award for Best Creative Non-Friction.
