The gulf between drinking loads of water and porter

And the second was a word of advice that got slightly lost in translation and briefly led to the Midlands man thinking he’d just been the recipient of the greatest prescription for long life that any man had ever been given.

The nurse, it should be said, was Asian but after many years in her profession and in Dublin, her accent was completely comprehensible – unless, it seems, you’re a resident of Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands.

“You can go as soon as you’ve had a snack – but when you get home, you’re to drink loads and loads of water,” she told him.

Only he heard her telling him that he was to drink loads and loads of porter.

And even from the other side of a curtain, you could sense the sheer delight in his voice as he thought about heading home and then straight out to the pub to down his own bodyweight in Guinness…purely for medicinal purposes.

“Wat-er, wat-er,” the nurse interjected, utterly shattering those thirty seconds of unadulterated joy she had unwittingly bestowed on our friend.

Catching a glimpse of him as he downheartedly departed the Hermitage Clinic, he didn’t look like a man who ever drank water. He looked like a man who thought it was just for washing yourself and for sometimes making tea.

And yet the philosopher in him might one day reflect on what it was like – however briefly – to think that dreams really do come true.

My late father-in-law never had an alcoholic drink until he turned 65. He had no want for it and he wasn’t at any loss for it either.

He loved the craic in a pub, even if he didn’t quite understand the protocol, and when it came to singing a song in any environment, the trick wasn’t to get him started – it was to get him to stop.

But at the age of 65, his doctor told him that the odd glass of red wine would be good for his heart – and so, because it was on the advice of a doctor, he decided to finally forego his pledge.

He even grew to enjoy it although I can’t recall him ever, ever going beyond two glasses. He went to his grave without ever savouring a pint or a small whiskey, but it’s a safe assumption that he didn’t miss out on a thing as a result.

And because wine is largely a drink consumed in homes – your own or when you’re visiting – he still didn’t become hugely familiar with pubs and he thought that you should be friendly to everyone when you entered.

In fairness, he was friendly to everyone wherever he went, so the pub was just an extension of that.

And he wasn’t to know that some people go to a pub to escape noise and to forget all going on around them.

One such silent man was seated alone at the counter of a pub called Carty’s in the village of Knock. The owner, John Carty, had served a term as a Dáil TD for Mayo.

John wasn’t there that day and, as it turned out, neither was the barman when four of us entered for an evening drink – but the buck at the bar was there, nursing what was clearly not his first pint.

Still, Tom said hello and the man responded in a manner that suggested to the rest of us that the conversion had reached its natural conclusion.

Except for Tom.

“Where are you from yourself?” he inquired.

The man told him – and one thing that we knew, but he didn’t, about Tom was that he knew a song about almost every village in Ireland.

Including this man’s place of origin.

So he started gently singing – and the man whose head was literally hanging rose like an eagle to join in, much louder and more passionate than Tom.

Which was how it was when the barman walked back in from changing a barrel and promptly told the Mayo man that he’d been on his last warning for singing and he could finish up his pint and leave.

Or words to that effect.

Tom wasn’t threatened with expulsion, which would have destroyed a record more impressive than the statistic that Gary Lineker was never once booked when he played football.

He also had no idea why the other man had been barred.

But his son turned on him and told him he was responsible for what had just occurred just because he didn’t understand the protocol – which is that, when you go to the pub, you’re all in the one room but there are independent silos, out of which you can come but which really you should go back into and stay there with your own company.

In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing that Tom wasn’t told he should drink loads of stout because he’d have done it without a second thought.

He was of the generation that took a doctor’s advice without question – not like the Doctor Googles of the next generation who would have you believe they’d completed their medical studies with nothing more than a free app.

I thought of him and I remembered that day in Knock when I heard the man from the Midlands believing he’d been told to drink loads and loads of porter.

His life had gone from the stress of a heart test to one of pure joy from that day to the finish line – only for his future to be stolen from him before he had a chance to properly digest it.

Like a Lotto jackpot winner who discovers he’d just washed his ticket in the back pocket of his trousers, he’ll have known what euphoria feels like – and how it often comes just ahead of a massive fall.