My ears are still ringing.

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Our last night in Donegal was not the quiet Sunday evening we hoped for but it wasn’t a complete washout either. We had a meal at a highly renowned pub out in the wilds that is famous as a traditional music venue. I’ll not name it. We arrived at 7 pm and a blast of screeching, squawking and guffawing slapped us in the face when we pushed open the door. The place was heaving with people all turned out in their Sunday best because someone’s grandfather had died and that’s what you do. I yelled at the barman to tell him I’d booked a table for dinner and he pointed at a table slap in the middle of the uproar with a reserved sign on it. It was so noisy that we didn’t even try to converse with each other. After a while an elderly couple tottered in and perched themselves on the banquette beside our daughter, the man sitting squarely on my daughter’s coat which was sitting beside her. She doesn’t like that sort of intrusion and was quite incensed. She yanked the coat vigorously from under the man who thought his wife was poking at him from the other side and he started berating her. She of course didn’t know what was going on and berated him in turn and it became a bit of a domestic incident. I decided to remain uninvolved because things had become complicated enough. We ate, we drank. The tightly packed crowd thinned out considerably but the noise level rose. People standing about set their drinks on our table while they went to the toilet. We escaped.