ON THE radio, Joni is singing about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot. There's a swan song closer to home too: Barry's Amusements in Portrush has been sold.
The name cast a spell over us in the long, long ago. There was one day in every summer when my father cast aside work-a-day worries and told us to get into the old Volkswagen Beetle.
It was magical. I can still see my mother waving us all off with such a smile. She'd just hit the jackpot – a whole day without the lot of us about her feet.
Before we left, our father had taken the silver Two Shilling pieces from his pocket and handed them out. We all got the same. Our family had a certain pocket money hierarchy – Two Shillings for the big two, One Shilling for the middle two and Sixpence each for the little ones. But Barry's was the exception.
The car journey was full of dreams and plans – how we'd spend our fortune, who would be brave enough for the Big Dipper. In my memory, there were fairy lights all around the harbour; the air was sweet with candyfloss, there was the clang and clash of bumper cars, the whirl of the waltzer and the excited screams of children were everywhere.
Was there a ghost train and did it scare the bejaysus out of us? We were easily scared. Dad's party trick was to allow us to watch Vincent Price doing Dracula with the lights turned off and to creep into the living room with a blanket over his head just to hear us scream. But that was long ago.
Barry's was our summer mecca in the days before anyone "went foreign". In the days before Disneyworld and Disneyland and Legoland too. Our holidays were spent up with our aunts and cousins in Derry.
We got to go on the parish excursion. It was a day in Portrush and we caught the train.
There were sandwiches in paper bags and a cream bun each for lunch – that fake cream with jam slathered over that we loved.
On the way home, as the train wound its way into the city, there was the sound of smashing glass – someone had thrown a stone at the window. My aunt and my little sister had glass in their hair.
Roll on the years and I went foreign with the funfairs. Remember the Hummelfest in Hamburg? I was 19. My friend and I went out for my first ever Chinese before we hit the funfair. It was sweet-and-sour chicken washed down with Cointreau... another first.
Afterwards, we took to the funfair and a huge pirate boat that swung up in the air.
Up and up we went and, suddenly, we were high high in the air, suspended upside-down above the city.
Coins dropped from people's pockets; people shrieked, my sweet-n-sour threatened to pour out on the unfortunates way down below. After we got off, I sat at the bottom, head in hands for half-an-hour whispering "never again".
It was the same thing with the chair swings in Buncrana. We all got on and it was a quiet day so the kind man treated us to an extra-long ride. But there's only so much a body can take and, eventually, we were crying "mister, mister, let us off now, please" as we flew around.
Years later, I'd drive my son and his two small cousins up to Barry's to relive a few memories. Two Shillings would take you nowhere these days – so they got a bit more and a warning that when it was gone, it was gone.
And times have changed too in Portrush at the various machines where you win tickets instead of money. Our boys exchanged their tickets for polystyrene planes and spent hours at the sand dunes flying them up, up, up and away. The big dipper, the waltzer, their eyes lit up at the magic of it all.
And now I look down at the ghost of my father, standing at the bottom of the rollercoaster in Barry's, in the long ago. He looks up at us as we wave and wait for the rollercoaster to crank up the hill.
In my memory, there are fairy lights. Our faces shine with the thrill of it all. His face is lit by the magic of his children's laughter.
