7 May Dublin

Dublin was very good. I stayed in a place called The Pillar (but not of society) in Talbot Street, which I quickly identified as a cheap area. The night before, I toured all the way down the street looking for the right number, and didn't find it until I had gone all the way up the other side. Some of the Irish streets are numbered up one and down the other, instead of criss-cross like the New Zealand ones.

I photographed part of a Yeats poems on the wall at The Pillar. Poetry is quite popular in Ireland. I also took a photo of my daughters' (Annie and Rosie maguire) cousins' brewery. They don't know about this part of the Maguire family but they are sure to be rellies....

Things to do in Dublin. My colleague Shelagh from Dublin said in passing that I should check out the book of Kells and the Guinness brewery, so I did. Actually the book of Kells is very old - I am always reminding Shelagh to use up to date references - now I see where she gets this habit of using old stuff from. The Book of Kells is in Trinity College in the University of Dublin library, so I visited their Buttery and enjoyed a cheap student lunch while I was there. I needed it; I had just walked for an hour – up the river to the museum and down again, just to see how far it was. The best thing about Trinity College is the long room in the old library, which is rather high, 65 metres long, and holds 200,000 old books, which are accessed by sliding ladders. It makes our library look a bit shallow somehow. The books, carefully filed in alphabetical order, are all old leather bound. As a vegetarian I have issues with that but I didn't say anything to the staff, as I didn't want to hurt their feelings.

I don’t usually drink Guinness, but for professional reasons I thought it would be useful to see how it was made in case I ever want to make a brew. The tour was one of the best displays / tours I have ever seen – very clear (just follow the arrows), wonderful exhibits (an enormous vat of barley, that you can dip your hands into, and a similarly enormous water fall), and plenty of Guinness to drink along the way. We all got a free pint at the end, on the 7^th floor of the Guinness Storehouse, and of course a chance to meet other tourists/ drinkers. I’m sorry to say I was pretty well stuffed after three quarters of a pint, so I tried to walk home. Guinness is quite strong actually especially on a fairly empty stomach (I just had coffee and croissant at the Buttery). I picked up a baguette and banana (one of my favourite travelling lunches) to soak up the beer, and as I walked home I marvelled at how Mr Guinness and his family claim to have done so much good for Ireland, providing work, looking after the workers’ families, providing a decent worldwide export trade, but I wondered in fact how things might have been if Mr Jameson and Mr Guinness had made their lovely drinks elsewhere, and the Irish had stuck to potato farming. There might have been less drinking....

I had to have a wee nap after all my walking and drinking, after which I ventured out to look for some diddlies (Irish jigs and reels). I was very disappointed – most of the so called ‘live music seisiuns’ were actually performances, using just one or two musicians. Let me explain. A seisiun in my mind, is a group of musicians – anything from four to a dozen or so – playing jigs and reels with songs in between. No mikes, no stage. This was not to be found in Dublin town. Nexct time I will go to Kildare....

After my nap, and before I went out, there was a lot of shouting on the street. I could see from my third floor window, a man with no shirt on and his trousers around his ankles, walking towards the traffic and shouting obscenities at everyone. I have never heard the word ‘fook’ said so many times since being in Dublin– it seems to be a regular word here, not a naughty one at all. This fella, who was steaming with anger, wandered around for 5 – 10 minutes yelling at everyone but they seemed quite used to this kind of performance and continued about their daily business as if he wasn’t there. Perhaps he wasn't (such is the challenge of perception and reality).

Odd things about Dublin. There are no sky scrapers – there are some big department shops and offices but the buildings are more like Auckland than other cities – low lying. Perhaps that's what creates in me the sense that it isn’t a proper big city (even though it is), and the real sophisticated world is elsewhere. A feeling that one might get in New Zealand, and perhaps drives so many of of us overseas to see what the real world looks like. There isn’t much development – it doesn't look wealthy (despite Mr Guinness’s good work) and there are very few cranes on the skyline. There are heaps of government employees – people coming to empty the rubbish, wash the streets etc, and many shops have security people. It’s a good place to learn another language – French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Serb, Russian, Polish......

I had a nice salad, some red cooking wine, and yet another baguette for dinner.