Happy St Patrick's Day

A couple of days ago a nice-looking Flemish man with a very large grey beard came into the bar and sat up at the high table in the corner by himself.

"How much for one of those hats?" he asked, pointing to the stupid over-sized Paddy's day top-hats hanging up behind the bar.

"You buy four pints of Guinness," I told him. "And then it's yours."

He nodded his head. He'd have four pints, he said, over the evening, and then he'd take a hat. A long time ago, he told me, he was married to a woman in Derry and they had had a daughter together. She was grown up now, studying law for a year in Paris, and she would be coming to Belgium to visit him. He was going to take her out for dinner at that nice restaurant on the Graslei and then they'd go and drink some pints together to celebrate St Patrick's Day.

"She's a lovely girl," he said. "She'd laugh if I turned up tomorrow in one of those hats!"

I made sure he got his hat at the end of the evening. He didn't even touch the last pint he'd bought.

Last night he came back into the bar, late, around two in the morning when everyone was dancing and pushing and spilling their stupid green beer and falling all over the place.

"How was dinner?" I asked him.

"Ah, I didn't go," he said. "My daughter couldn't make it after all."

Then he sat back up at the high table in the corner by himself with the stupid green hat that he'd forced himself to drink three pints of stupid Guinness for, until everyone went home to bed and we started sweeping the floors.