Derry Is An Odd Place

Another town, another hangover, and another library. I've been out of The Town I Recognise So Easily (there's a tune Phil Coulter never wrote) for so long things keep jarring with me every time I'm back.
For example: I had to carry a guitar and a bass to the Dungloe for a gig we're doing tonight. It's a fundraiser for Rich Coast, a film being shot in Derry as I type - upstairs Dungloe, stacksabands, land if you're about. Now for anyone not acquainted with the Walled City, the distance from the depot to the Dungloe is a couple of hundred yards, five minutes' walk uphill. I was stopped three times, by three separate old men, who used to play in bands, and wanted to talk the ear off me about them. Apparently everybody who was young in Derry in the seventies was in a band, and also probably the Ra. Derry's a very strange place to be at half six on a Thursday in August. There's kids up to the age of eighteen, then nobody else younger than 30, except the occasional flock of foreigners swaddled in clothes that would boil my blood if I wore them in the Alps. Prime tourist season this, so they tell me. Must be a very sad place to visit. "Vere are all ze yunk peepil? Vere is all ze laife?" I know from experience, Herr Schneider- they've fucked off to Belfast and England and Scotland and generally have neither the bus fare nor the inclination to get back. You'll see a strange class of individuals come out after dark, fellas and fillies just about to fuck off to uni in the autumn, or reprobates back for a sesh, or the people who found a paying gig and never left. But we don't talk about them.
Anyway, before I get any more on my own nerves.... I dumped my various crap up the stairs in the Dungloe, which brought up some very unusual memories. I was never out of the joint before I fucked off to the West Glasgow that is Belfast. but that's another set of anecdotes to tell in my anec-dotage. I'm off to work on another hangover, and fund a film while I'm at it. Where else would ye get it? To the Walls, and don't spare the Buck...