The summer of 1992 was golden. I spent two weeks of it in Castlegregory, in Co Kerry, hanging around the shops, playing music in the little pool room around the back, and running free on the wild beaches with friends I had just made. The stars at night — the absolute blackness of the night, the absence of street lights — revealed a night sky I had never seen before.
The stars were right on top of your head. We used to lie on the beach at night and watch the incredible lights of the Big Dipper, Jupiter, and little flecks of moving balls of light that were satellites whizzing overhead, which we took for alien spacecraft. Walking back from a dance in Castlegregory to Anchor Caravan Park, in Aughacasla, was as beautiful as it was terrifying.
The stories of ghosts, banshees, and murdering madmen who roamed the wet landscape made me a little jittery coming along the dark road. It was a magical time. It was even more special because I had a crush on one of the girls.
This was the second big crush of my life. The singer of 99 Red Balloons , Nena, was the first. Apparently, she was dating the bass player, which broke my eight-year-old heart.
But being a young lover, I recovered and moved on. And I was back on the proverbial horse. Those two weeks are a time I still reflect on 32 years later.
There was something special in that time that I find myself thinking about. When I returned to my house in Douglas, Cork, in the autumn of ’92, the girl I had just met in Castlegregory wrote.