Many’s the driver agreed, repeating the mantra – there’s no tomorrow – as they turned off the engine and went inside for that feed. The small cottage with its green, galvanized roof humming all night until the clear light of dawn. Though in latter years the supply of special whiskey ran out and the music suffered from a lifetime of smoking Sweet Afton.

There were snooty bitches who raised their eyebrows at a man like the Vet mixing with the likes of Dattledo Donoghue, but for goodness sake it was the most natural thing in the world. The Vet from Cork needed to get around the countryside in a hurry. The job took Alex up highways and down laneways. It was always an emergency. There were no maps of the by roads in those days, and the back end of east Galway was a maze of untarred lanes, crossroads without signposts, and T-junctions in the middle of nowhere. He needed to find bulls and calving cows, and horses with chest infections. And nothing suited Hughie more than a long summer’s day in the Vet’s old station wagon, his dog looking out the rear window, and the Vet singing ballads from Cork, as they whizzed along between the bramble ditches, turning this way and that way in accordance with Hughie’s masterful directions.

While Alex was poking in some cow’s rear end, Hughie was in the kitchen talking to the wife, or searching for some fiddle player who lived a few fields farther on.

In the time before tape recordings, the musicians always greeted each other with special joy, like long-lost comrades, and Hughie was able to pick up new tunes wherever he went. In fact, he was as welcome as the Vet ever was on their travels, because he had all the tunes. No one at the time was travelling more of the west than Hughie. So no one had more tunes. And the more tunes he had, the more he got.

Have a cow – get a cow. Have a tune – get a tune. Same story. People said he had over five hundred polkas alone in his head and fingers.

So he was invited to the wedding. It wouldn’t have been thinkable to keep him away. Even if Birdie’s daddy did have a problem with him.

Dattledo and Daddy had a history. Oh yes. Daddy treated musicians with the same caution as people treat journalists nowadays. At least the tabloid journalists. And for much the same reason. Musicians were notorious for recording the sordid details of all weddings or funerals. If there was dirt, then the balladeers could rake it up.

Years earlier when Daddy was burying his wife in Mayo someone in the pew behind him remarked that if the lady hadn’t met Waters, she might be still alive. Nobody required the newspaper to tell them whom Daddy had hit in that blind fit of rage. Or how he had taken a candlestick off the altar and clapped it into the full face of his wife’s brother, drawing blood in squirts from the victim’s nose, which sprinkled the congregation like holy water, and fell like flecks of pepper on the cream habit of the deceased woman, as she lay stretched in an open coffin. Nobody required photographs of the priest in his black and white vestments flapping about like a deranged penguin trying to calm the fracas. Nobody required a newspaper report of the proceedings, because within a week the entire funeral was sung, verse-by-verse and blow-by-blow in every pub from Belmullet to Castlebar. Daddy couldn’t stand musicians after that. It made no odds that Donoghue didn’t know the song. As far as Daddy was concerned, all musicians were guilty.