Having sold up his beekeeping business of “many” years, James Corson has headed north to “see what the rest of the world is doing”. He’s still dreaming of lakes of honey though, even as he winds along Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way on the back of a motorbike…
By James Corson
In the late afternoon I rounded a corner on the Wild Atlantic Way, that magical road that follows the west coast of Ireland from north to south and south to north. The rain swept in from the Atlantic and the wind hit the bike with a force that had intensified to that of a hurricane over its 8000km journey north from the Caribbean. I paused to record the moment on my phone and dolefully remembered another biker I had met a few days previously commenting that the wind had been so strong it had ripped, gutted and shredded his tent in the blackness of the early morning.
In the failing light I found a warm café that was still making ‘all day breakfasts’, and a campsite of pods in the lee of a rocky outcrop above the high-water mark.
With a full belly and a dry bed, I hunkered down for the night, splitting the last can of Stella and dozing on the bunk to an Irish rebel song on the ‘buds. And somewhere in that wild stormy night on the west coast of Ireland I dreamt…
Of a lake of honey, turgid and golden, below a glacier high in the mountains and Barry Benson with his sunnies and lilo lip-sinking to Abba’s Honey, Honey, coming from a boom box on the shore…and there were rugged hills with a million beehives spewing forth amber goo that oozed down into the lake, and men in white suits trying to close the taps and ease the flow, but the day was warm and the bees were on a roll …. And the men were whispering ‘enough is enough’, but the bees wouldn’t listen.
The pod rattled and shook as a million pebbles from the beach pinged on the door.
And when I opened the door a man in a shiny suit walked in. He carried a can of Stella and a laptop and he popped the top and opened the lap and scrolled through a thousand spreadsheets of 60,000 tonnes of honey stagnating in sheds from Cape Reinga to Bluff.
And he scrolled on. And in a picture I was standing on a misty hilltop beneath a wood of gnarled and windswept Beech trees looking down on the village of my ancestors. The shiny suit smiled and said… “James, this is the land of your ancestors. It is green and pleasant and full of rain and imports 50,000 tonnes of honey a year. They have trucks and roads and factories making glass jars … and 68,000,000 mouths to drain the amber lake beneath the glaciers…”
The shiny suit disappeared into the storm and I saw a throng of smiling white suited people watching a TV on the beach…. And there was Barry Benson on the big screen licking the last drips of amber honey from the pebbles of the empty lake bed.
And he was humming.
“Oh sugar, honey, honey …”
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