Last Friday week, there was a rare glimpse of late Spring sun in Dublin. Since there hadn’t been much early spring sun, it was greeted with something close to applause. Arrived up on an early train. I breakfasted in Wetherspoons, vaguely aware of the rugby shirts at the other tables. (For the record, it was Ireland V Wales and Ireland won). I wandered around the strangely dry city – it had been two months of rain – to a couple of bookshops, picked up a Tintin comic for my grandson, guitar strings and a 1.6K roast for Sunday. Then I headed to the show in the Lighthouse, the moving picture house at Smithfield.

                        Elvis

It wasn’t a biopic. It was much better than that, being based, we were told, on found footage (down a salt mine? Really?) of Elvis in concert and footage of interviews. Hours and hours. The audio was added later.

            It was a concert, in a way. With added Elvis talkback. At the very end, much of the audience stood up and applauded.

            I thought back to the summer of 1977, in London. A long, hot summer. I was working in a builder’s yard up in Enfield as the breakfast chef, taken on to discourage the workers from swanning off downtown for long breakfasts. I was not a good chef. This was made clear to me. I bought overpriced meats for breakfast in a local butchers (I didn’t know one end of a beast from the other). It all ground to a halt shortly after one of the Greek Cypriot workers looked over his plate at me and said to me, with tears in his voice, in fluent Cockney

            ‘Can you not even fry up a piece of steak, mate?’

No: I could not even fry up a piece of steak, nor anything else much. Relieved of my post, I oddjobbed in the yard for the rest of the summer. It was better than facing off against the hungry looks in my ‘café’.

            One evening, bussing it back down to Muswell Hill, I came upon my aunt and uncle in floods of tears on the sofa. The tv was blaring away. A half-demolished bottle of gin lay on the low table. Who was dead? The Queen? (It was Jubilee year and the Queen was visiting Northern Ireland. Then I realised I’d heard on the radio that she was back on home soil).

A relative back across the water, then? I closed the door slowly behind me.

            ‘What happened? Who…’

My aunt’s face, swollen with sorrow, turned to me slowly.

            ‘Poor ‘oul Elvis is dead, so he is.’

Her husband nodded. ‘Isn’t that fierce? And he only a young fella.’ The Cork accent cut through the cigarette smoke and the couple of pints I had downed on the way home.

            I threw back a shot of gin and commiserated with them. There was no social media, internet or mobile phones in those days, children. So you could, if you wanted to, insulate yourself from a lot by turning off tv, radio and not reading newspaper headlines. Denial of distant disaster was still just about possible. But it wasn’t that easy in my aunt’s house though. My aunt’s sobbing, token of a terrible bereavement, stretched on late into the evening. I did my best to comfort her.

            We have no king but Elvis…and now he is gone.