Monday - Dublin naturally – where else does piety and commerce seamlessly merge?
There’s a shop in O’Connell Street selling all things Catholic, statues of Christ and the Virgin Mother, darn-it-yourself tapestries kits of the Last Supper, artificial candles with a twinkling orange electric incandescence. Testaments for every occasion adorn the walls bestowing virtue on the innocent and guilty without distinction – and in the corner, is the Bureau de Change. I’m fleetingly tempted by a quick soul swap but it appears they are all out of Evangelists and really, little else tempts me. (I’ll do penance for this afterward, if you don’t mind.)
The SO and I last came here in ’98, she was being interviewed for a job, I was, like now, taking a weekend off. We drove into Dublin in a hire car – unnecessary if you know Dublin but she was on a short list of three and if she’d been offered the job we’d have needed to rapidly explore surroundings with a view to possible relocation. The first person I saw in Dublin on that occasion was a neighbour and customer of my Patisserie back in UK, visiting for a ‘boys’ weekend. For years, Dublin has been the place for a wild weekend, particularly from the UK. This time, we arrived early Sunday afternoon; there were no fewer than ten flights to London showing on the departure boards over the next four hours, at half-hour intervals, it’s more regular than the bus service!
This visit… well it’s different. Wow is it different. If it wasn’t for their innate ability to project vocally, the Irish would be almost lost in a sea of Europeans. The city is as cosmopolitan as London, more so than Lisbon and I’ll compare with New York when I visit next month. Incidentally, we’ve been offered the use of a most fabulous apartment in New York, more of that later.
Having arrived, we walked across town to see a gallery where the SO may be organising a international exhibition in 2008 – we only went to see the space but the current exhibition was interesting, Andrew Whightley’s slightly naïve and disturbing paintings in classical form but with an edge picking at cultural mores more to highlight idiosyncrasy than to confirm trait. We ate and extremely late lunch or early supper in a restaurant about to close atop a glasshouse type shopping arcade that may once have been a former market, railway station (I think not) or fire-station depending upon whom you ask. I think market is probably the right guess as I saw a former fire-station, ironically given over to the sale of fireworks, on my Monday wandering. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped for cinema, watching Babel – a fascinating juxtaposition of cultures and ideologies – highly recommended.
So Monday morning, the SO went off to the University to meet the woman who’d invited her to lecture, check out facilities, etc, leaving me to fine tune the video component of her lecture, which, if you don’t mind me saying so, looks bloody good. It’s the work and content that make it good, anyone can do the editing and polishing.
On the adjacent corner of the square where sits our hotel, is the Irish Writers Museum, which is where we adjourned when Mrs A returned from the University. It’s housed in an mid-eighteenth century town house boasting sumptuous plaster relief work in frieze form around the upper walls of the main first-floor rooms. It’s a beautiful and tranquil space, slightly seedy, but in a comforting way, with a superb (and cheap) café/restaurant serving an eclectic menu in keeping with a city transformed in the decade since my last visit and the multitudinous variety of writers and playwrights commemorated in the house.
I passed a pleasant hour exploring the exhibits, quite what Joyce would have made of his portrait being partially hidden by a bust of Jonathan Swift is anyone’s guess, but since the Joyce Museum is less than five minutes walk, he probably doesn’t take umbrage, if time permits, it’s on my itinerary for the morrow.
Caught another film at the end of the afternoon, ‘The Last King of Scotland’, a disturbing film about the reign of Amin in 1970’s Uganda; in my view, it stopped short of highlighting Amin’s rise to power through the good offices of the UK. I mention the cinema twice only because of an amusing anecdote, the Irish habit of emotional attachment to the movie; each twist and turn in the plot line is accompanied by sighs, groans and exclamations from the Irish in the audience, ‘oh no’, ‘surely not’, ‘no don’t’, audible all around us. I thought it might just have been a quirk of the emotionally up heaving Babel, but apparently not.
Regretably... more to follow
There’s a shop in O’Connell Street selling all things Catholic, statues of Christ and the Virgin Mother, darn-it-yourself tapestries kits of the Last Supper, artificial candles with a twinkling orange electric incandescence. Testaments for every occasion adorn the walls bestowing virtue on the innocent and guilty without distinction – and in the corner, is the Bureau de Change. I’m fleetingly tempted by a quick soul swap but it appears they are all out of Evangelists and really, little else tempts me. (I’ll do penance for this afterward, if you don’t mind.)
The SO and I last came here in ’98, she was being interviewed for a job, I was, like now, taking a weekend off. We drove into Dublin in a hire car – unnecessary if you know Dublin but she was on a short list of three and if she’d been offered the job we’d have needed to rapidly explore surroundings with a view to possible relocation. The first person I saw in Dublin on that occasion was a neighbour and customer of my Patisserie back in UK, visiting for a ‘boys’ weekend. For years, Dublin has been the place for a wild weekend, particularly from the UK. This time, we arrived early Sunday afternoon; there were no fewer than ten flights to London showing on the departure boards over the next four hours, at half-hour intervals, it’s more regular than the bus service!
This visit… well it’s different. Wow is it different. If it wasn’t for their innate ability to project vocally, the Irish would be almost lost in a sea of Europeans. The city is as cosmopolitan as London, more so than Lisbon and I’ll compare with New York when I visit next month. Incidentally, we’ve been offered the use of a most fabulous apartment in New York, more of that later.
Having arrived, we walked across town to see a gallery where the SO may be organising a international exhibition in 2008 – we only went to see the space but the current exhibition was interesting, Andrew Whightley’s slightly naïve and disturbing paintings in classical form but with an edge picking at cultural mores more to highlight idiosyncrasy than to confirm trait. We ate and extremely late lunch or early supper in a restaurant about to close atop a glasshouse type shopping arcade that may once have been a former market, railway station (I think not) or fire-station depending upon whom you ask. I think market is probably the right guess as I saw a former fire-station, ironically given over to the sale of fireworks, on my Monday wandering. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped for cinema, watching Babel – a fascinating juxtaposition of cultures and ideologies – highly recommended.
So Monday morning, the SO went off to the University to meet the woman who’d invited her to lecture, check out facilities, etc, leaving me to fine tune the video component of her lecture, which, if you don’t mind me saying so, looks bloody good. It’s the work and content that make it good, anyone can do the editing and polishing.
On the adjacent corner of the square where sits our hotel, is the Irish Writers Museum, which is where we adjourned when Mrs A returned from the University. It’s housed in an mid-eighteenth century town house boasting sumptuous plaster relief work in frieze form around the upper walls of the main first-floor rooms. It’s a beautiful and tranquil space, slightly seedy, but in a comforting way, with a superb (and cheap) café/restaurant serving an eclectic menu in keeping with a city transformed in the decade since my last visit and the multitudinous variety of writers and playwrights commemorated in the house.
I passed a pleasant hour exploring the exhibits, quite what Joyce would have made of his portrait being partially hidden by a bust of Jonathan Swift is anyone’s guess, but since the Joyce Museum is less than five minutes walk, he probably doesn’t take umbrage, if time permits, it’s on my itinerary for the morrow.
Caught another film at the end of the afternoon, ‘The Last King of Scotland’, a disturbing film about the reign of Amin in 1970’s Uganda; in my view, it stopped short of highlighting Amin’s rise to power through the good offices of the UK. I mention the cinema twice only because of an amusing anecdote, the Irish habit of emotional attachment to the movie; each twist and turn in the plot line is accompanied by sighs, groans and exclamations from the Irish in the audience, ‘oh no’, ‘surely not’, ‘no don’t’, audible all around us. I thought it might just have been a quirk of the emotionally up heaving Babel, but apparently not.
Regretably... more to follow
