In an Irish pub in Perpignan recently, I saw it again. Lovingly painted in large, gold lettering over a doorway, it read: “There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t met yet.” And just below, in the same beautiful calligraphy, was the attributed source of these immortal words: “WB Yeats.”
Readers may remember that this same legend turned up on the Dublin City Marathon medal two years ago, to the despair of at least some Yeats fans, who knew that a poet as great as he could not have perpetrated a line so worthy of the verbal assembly line in a Christmas card factory.
Now here it was again, immortalised in an even less apt context, the real-life Yeats having rarely darkened the door of a pub and being, socially, as odd as three left feet.
So how did this myth arise and who if anyone is responsible for this folksy aphorism? The online sleuth Quote Investigator traces the phrase’s general sentiment back to a man whose very name made him a better fit for doing promotional work in the hospitality industry.
Here it was again, the phantom Yeats quote in an Irish pub in Perpignan
Skipping pages – Frank McNally on trawling through the discarded library of a lifetime
Trying times for Ballinsloe: The Galway town and Ireland women’s World Cup squad
For the Birds – Frank McNally on an encounter with Dublin’s Pigeon Man
Edgar A Guest (1881–1959) was a British-born American, known as the “People’s Poet” for his simple but life-affirming lyrics which, in 1915, included the line “…strangers are friends that we some day meet”.
From there, the quotation evolved over several decades into an advertising slogan, until it was used for a 1960s Bord Fáilte campaign, in the New Yorker magazine and elsewhere. Yeats was not yet implicated then. But to paraphrase something he did write, the connection must have been slouching towards Perpignan (and elsewhere) to be born.
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Now that Airbnb has largely abandoned the hippy philosophy from which it emerged, thank God for those great philanthropic idealists, Ryanair. The “Air” part of Airbnb, you’ll recall, dates from its origins in San Francisco in 2007, when the founders put an air mattress in their livingroom, creating a cheap bed and breakfast.
This was the sharing society in action: mutually beneficial for the hosts and for travellers on a tight budget, while also bringing people together in harmony. Denizens of the city’s Haight Ashbury, circa 1966, would have approved.
Alas, the concept has since expanded into a virtual self-catering industry, with whole buildings devoted to the purpose, forcing up rents for resident locals. The whole space-sharing thing, meanwhile, seems to have been forgotten.
But at least we still have Ryanair, a company whose socialist principles I was reminded of the other day while booking four flights to Scotland, for a weekend away with my kids. They’re grown-up kids now, so I had to book (and pay!) for four adults. And because it’s a short flight, I minimised costs by not reserving seats.
Since we checked in simultaneously, I thought, there was a good chance we’d end up close together anyway. But no. I had forgotten that the old hippies who designed Ryanair’s random seat allocation algorithm really do mean random, man. Rather than put us together, which would have been boring, they scattered us in rows 1, 6, 8, and 16, where we would have a chance to talk to exciting new people instead.
Because there are no strangers on a Ryanair flight, only friends who haven’t met yet. With any luck, I’ll be stuck between the ghost of WB Yeats and a veteran Mad Man from the 1960s New York advertising industry. What fun conversations we’ll have.
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On recent Ryanair flights, to avoid paying excess baggage charges – they hate it when you make them do that – I have packed everything into my 2019 Rugby World Cup rucksack, a cherished souvenir of covering Ireland’s games in Japan.
But this much-travelled bag also went with me on last month’s ill-fated day trip to the Electric Picnic. Which as readers will know, turned into a long dark night of the soul when my friend and I couldn’t find our way out of the festival site in time to catch the last bus back to Dublin.
To add to the trauma, I had consigned my vintage rucksack (with extra layers of clothes and other items of sentimental value) to a “green room” tent that was locked up for the night by the time I remembered.
So I texted the tent people afterwards who, failing to find it, referred me to the number (text only) for general lost property from the festival, based in Stradbally Steam Museum. And when the person there texted back on Thursday to say “sorry but we don’t have that”, I sighed and thought I’d never see my beloved rucksack or its contents again.
Then they re-texted, with a picture: “Is this it?” And lo! It was. So as instructed, I have since bought an address label from An Post, emailed it to Stradbally, and am told that the bag will be in Dublin shortly. For which service, the museum suggests only a discretionary “donation”. And I will indeed make one. But in the meantime, I’m also donating a public thank you.
