Will the real Clara Lara please stand up?
I am back from my summer holidays. Usually as a comedian, August is spent in Edinburgh, a capital city full of overpriced accommodation, rain, and miserable English people, so staying in London instead has been a really nice change of pace.
I don’t mind missing sun holidays, because readers, it’s time to be honest: beaches are horrendous. The sea smells of carsickness, while the combination of monotonous waves and never-ending horizons begs the visitor to think of death. The sea does not want us there. It lays out a welcoming mat of slimy green putrefying dish rags, washed up jellyfish, and seashells that prod bare feet like up turned electrical plugs.
The beach looks heavenly on TV because you know what else does? Absolutely everything else on TV. Because that’s how TV works. The Fake News spread by Big Beach needs to end. Give me a lake any day. Beaches are arrogant, unfriendly and rude. A lake coyly beckons, ringed by grass that actually wants to be sat on, trees with proper leaves and water that doesn’t feel like an acid attack. Beaches may boast banana boats, but lakes have whimsical rowing boats. Seas have mermaids, whores of the surf who spend their time combing their hair and luring sea captains to watery graves for pure shits and giggles, while ladies of the lake are too busy forming systems of government with their swords to mess with men’s heads for lols.
I’m biased because my favourite childhood holiday was by a lake.
Readers, it’s time to return to Clara Lara.
If you were a child in Ireland in the 80s, it wasn’t a case of if you went, but when. Even the four-hour drive squashed in the backseat between my two sisters listening to Irish country music, couldn’t dampen its wonder. Have you ever wanted to hear about the life of a lonely cowboy sung by a middle-aged man with a very thick Dundalk accent? Then the Irish country scene is the place for you.
But Clara Lara was worth it.
The squeak of the tyre swinging from the tree branch, the squelch of your feet in the lake, sandwiches that tasted of the cooler box they were stored in and warm red lemonade that made your hands sticky. The lake, the zip wire, the oil drum sawn in half that you could catch fish in, the metal barrel you’d crawl into and try to not fall out of while your new best friends for the day rolled you down a hill. For one day every summer, we galloped around Clara Lara trying to take in all of its impossible wonder.
But this story is about our very last visit to Clara Lara. We were all getting a bit too big, my older sister was about to head to secondary school. The car was all packed and Dad said, “OK last five minutes, go on your favourite ride one last time and say goodbye.” I swung out on the tree tyre – Queen of the summer, my reign ending in sun dappled glory, yelling “So long!” to the echoing trees.
We got back into the car, skin still warm from the last of the sun. Sated. Complete.
And then, something happened.
As we drove back, Dad took a turn down a road we’d never been down. Then we saw something we’d never seen before - a big sign that said “Welcome to Clara Lara Fun Park” and it was directing us in the opposite direction we’d just tearfully departed. The car grew silent. My Mam hoarsely whispered to Dad - “Follow that sign.”
In the same beat we all realised the place we’d been going every year hadn’t been Clara Lara, it was in fact, just a local park.
Reaching the car park was the first sign something cataclysmic was unfolding - our Clara Lara didn’t have a car park. The sun was setting, people were heading back to their cars, everyone seemed healthier, tanned, better. My Dad turned round, looked at me and my sisters and whispered “Run in.”
We ran past the security guards. The first thing I saw was the water from the fountains in the huge pirate ship misting the evening sky with glitter. At school when my friends talked about The Jolly Roger, I never quite knew what they were talking about. I just thought they had better imaginations than I did. I thought they meant the upturned shopping trolley at the bottom of the lake. Everything was so big, clean and lush. This was the Neverland my friends had been going to every single August while we’d been playing in a barrel five minutes down the road. Big eyed, my sisters and I spun around trying to make sense of it all before being dragged back to the entrance gate. We got back into the car and never spoke of it again.
Yet, every now and then, chatting with friends, brushing my teeth, ordering a drink at a bar, I will suddenly remember Clara Lara. It’s like my mind pushes the wrong button in a lift and my brain plunges down to the basement. My heart descends and doors swing open on a horrible thought “But what if I’m in the wrong Clara Lara? What if my real life, the one I should be living in, is just around the corner and I stumbled into the wrong one by accident and only found out too late? What if I’m really supposed to be a darts player or a primary school teacher or there’s a hobby that people write Guardian Long Reads about that will change my life, but I haven’t found it yet? Like cake decorating? God is looking down on me thinking that she’s supposed to be rescuing koalas in the Australian outback, she should have gone on that life changing holiday by now, isn’t she curious why she buys so many self-help books, how many clues can I give?”
I imagine myself on my deathbed. The nurse passes me a living will to sign that means when I stop breathing, they won’t resuscitate. My lungs are getting heavier. I distractedly scribble a thought that’s just popped into my head. I hear a nurse gasp. “Oh my god” she whispers, “has she just...unified General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics?...at the Planck Scale??...to finally produce a Theory of Everything??? Quick - someone get me a doctor. A proper one - one of theoretical physics.”
In the hubbub they don’t even hear my final words.
“It was fucking science all along. Are you kidding me? I was really a nerd the whole time.”
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.