Saturday, June 2, 2012
Killiney in the morning
Grainne and Paddy say I ought to go to either the north or the south side of Dublin Bay today, as it will be a sunny day. Grainne will come to "collect" me at four o'clock, but I have time to make the trip and back in time to dress for this evening's barbeque.
The Dart, an elevated rail line, runs frequently and will get me to either the north side or the south of Dublin Bay within a half hour. There is a stop near the hotel at Lansdowne Street. Of the places I might quickly visit are Howth, on the north side, but the road out nothing to write home about. Killiney, a stop on the lines out to Greystones and Bray, on the south side of Dublin, is the place where Dublin's wealthy live, Bono of U2, for instance, has his residence in Killiney.
Ireland has for many years attracted the wealthy and famous by a tax policy that encouraged their residence. John Huston, the film director, lived for many years in Ireland, attracted by the horse racing. If you have credentials as an artist, and a substantial income, Ireland welcomes you, not taxing you on your creative product. To Killiney I will go to see what wealth looks like there.
***
I walk down Lansdowne Road towards the Aviva Stadium and find the DART station easily. Buying a card is a matter of paying 5 Euros for a hard plastic card and buying a minimum of 5 Euros worth of transit, for 10 Euros in all. The turnstiles on the South Dublin bound trains are all marked "X" for inaccessible, and only other one is open, so I go through, thinking the conductor will frank my card while I ride.
We pass Sandymount, then Sydney Parade, where cricketers play on the green. At Booterstown the sea stretches out, as flat as a plate. One of the posters on the train platform shows a photo of a young woman's head, followed by the caption, I tried to bury the heartache of my abortion, but it kept coming back.
At Blackrock, an enormous suburban park on the other side of the tracks from the seaside harbors a pair of swans sitting peacefully on the laws. After Seapoint, with its attached townhouses, you can see sailboats on the water in the distance, their sails white as table napkins.
At Salthill and Monkstown stop, the townhouses become grander. Lovely dogs gambol on the green. The Yacht Harbor, East Pier, starts there, and extends to the grounds of the white neo-classic building at Dun Laoghaire, at which point the sea wall rises and we enter a tunnel. The ticket control makes its way through the car and I hand my card to the conductor. He inserts it into his hand-held device, looks at the screen and tells me that I have -0- Euros on the card. We go back and forth about what the facts of the matter are, and finally agree that as we are both getting off at Killiney, he will check the card history, and we will see what the truth is.
At Dalkey, the sea disappears briefly, then re-emerges, seen from a height, the open sea spreading out before the eye. The next stop is Killiney, where there are some motorboats in the water, and behind them on the heights, mansions.
At the train station all is revealed to myself and the conductor: As I could not activate the card at Lansdowne Park station, it appeared as though I had no Euros on the card. Simply paying my fare is not possible, because the return will cost 4.30 Euros instead of the 2.50 the sensor would have charged me at Lansdowne had it been working.
"I'll let you off this time: just put your card through when you come back. I could find you 100 Euros for not paying, you know."
I make appropriate gestures of abasement, and I can exit the station.
At the train station a young man tells me that there is no center in Killainey, and that the only pub is up a steep hill he points out in the distance.
"Bonos' house is up at the top of the hill, to the right of the steeple", he points out. "--But you won't see him" he adds, trying to temper my disappointment. He explains that I can reach the pub by following a climbing road to the left of the train station, and I set out.
I take in the beach as I do so -it stretches out until it becomes low-lying cliffs, which stretch out to just before almost the end of the point, where there is a building that looks like a hotel. Beyond is only a squat stone building and land's end.
I walk up the hill road, beside beautifully landscaped houses with gates and stone walls and privet atop them. Pines and other trees add further cover --this is the Dublin Riviera: flowered shrubbery, palms and pines and pools on the grounds of houses named Undercliff, Undercliff Cottage, Maraviglia, Vico Cottage, and Curlews lining the way, which is called Vico Road. A sign announces a fine of one hundred and fifty Euros for not cleaning up after your dog.
I reach the Dalkey town line, where the hill slopes and the point comes into closer view. The presence of cars, parked all along the bottom of the slope, and a sign in the distance, herald more public access, although how to reach the pub at the hilltop is not apparent to me.
I ask a woman mounting the stairs from White Rock beach about the pub, but she refers me to the ice cream seller's truck. However, the woman manning the stand is Polish and doesn't know anything about where things are found in Killiney and Dalkey.
A young couple, their three children scarfing ice cream, tell me to go straight and, where the road forks, take the right, ten minutes' longer walk, but with a view of Dalkey Island.
"It's misty today. It's too bad", she says, but I find it lovely without qualification, sea and forest combined with great houses.
The grand houses continue: St. German's on my left, The Coach House and Strawberry Hill on my right. Cyclists in professional kit pedal by. The houses are becoming more modest and closer together: the hill slopes again by those called San Elmo and Ventnor, and the hotel and point come into sharper focus.
At Hawk Cliff, a determined runner, all in black, drives himself to mount the rise I am gently descending. A private house for sale at #2 is having a viewing from noon to 2 p.m. I tread the pebbled path and admire the property, a horizontal ranch house with picture windows looking out to sea. Indeed, the axis of the house-- the seating, the bedroom layout --all centers on the sea edge. Despite the sign, though, no one is there to guide prospective buyers and the curious --although a radio, broadcasting two speakers having quiet conversation, suggests someone just stepped away. I walk back out as quickly as I walked through the gate, as two cars, drawn by the sign, roll in.
I reach a fork in the road, and stop two genial elderly men for directions. Seeing me writing notes, one asks
"You're not writing something down in connection with the referendum, are you? That was over yesterday--"
Confirming his surmise, I ask for directions, which they give, but not before asking where I am from. This leads to their questioning me about who will win the presidential election in the United States in November. I later read in The Irish Times that South Dublin returned the highest percentage of voters in favor of the austerity treaty. Those with enough can always see their way to pulling their belts in.
I take the Sorrento Road towards the DART at Dalkey Village center. The houses are now on a much smaller scale, attached in pairs with a common hedge between them. I continue along the Sorrento Road towards a squat church roof I see a quarter of a mile away. Sorrento Road is now Sorrento Gardens, and the houses are all attached and small, two storied, and further down, singly. Hobbit Cottage, the name of one, sums up the road, which runs into a shopping high street. I am in Dalkey village center.
A few minutes later, sitting at the counter of the local juice bar, I read more about the referendum. Although the measure passed 60%-40%, only half of those eligible voted. Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, whom I saw walking the grounds of Dublin Castle across the way from the Chester Beatty Library yesterday, and who was against the treaty, was quoted as saying,
"This is one battle in what is going to be a very, very long struggle" he says, adapting the old rallying cry of the IRA to the economic dilemma of Ireland.
***
The fairness of the Irish fascinates me. I have been told that in Australia, where immigration from Ireland has always been high, the grandchildren of original settlers, being so exposed to the sun, include fewer redheads, as the gene is being naturally selected out. In time, redheads will be fewer and fewer. This is not yet the case in Ireland, though, where the full range --from hazel-eyed, strawberry blonde, to green-eyed, pink-cheeked carrot tops, to brown-eyed gilded copper, are on display.
Then there are the light ash-brown-haired with the palest hazel eyes; or grey-eyed with dark ash brown. The black-haired, with full heads of hair, often silver prematurely, at the other end of the palette. With their exotic colorings, fine skins and largely regular features, the Irish were born to be painted.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
A Happy Turn
Memorial Day Weekend, the beginning of the American summer season, passed, without my thinking about it. Here in Dublin it is cloudy and moist, although no rain. Even so, I have my hotel umbrella, and although I had to discard three tops and my wool socks to please the check-in people in Santiago, I still have the green country jacket I bought at the Emmaus sale in Besancon.
The hotel, which is called the Roxford Lodge, is a townhouse converted to a businessman's hotel. My room is, again, tiny,but the hotel takes the prize for the most electric outlets with the least apparent risk of fire. Instead of an electrical strip, the plugs have been set into the electrical wiring, and there is one for everything. The desk (with ingeniously includes a mirror), has a printer/fax machine, a wireless internet hookup. A hair dryer is set into the wall above the printer (dry your hair while sending a fax?) while in the round window above is set a tray carved to fit its curves, on an electric kettle, a cup and saucer and the fixings for tea, including non-perishable milk.
The sauna stands next to the bed, a wooden box I first mistook for a closet. It makes for a fine clothes dryer --"Yes", I washed out my socks and underwear last night.) It has a radio and CD player and antenna sticking out of the top. Above the end of the bed is the television, and on a shelf below, the controls, along with complimentary DVDs: The Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4.0, Dances With Wolves, Juno, among others. There is also a DVD about feng shui.
My room has a total of five windows, including the roundel, with its stained glass. I am in a basement apartment, looking out on the parking lot. Immediately outside my window, next to the sauna, is a bubbling brook, something bought in a garden shop and placed next to a brick archway garnished with shrubbery that comes up mid-window. It is a small space, but ingeniously designed, a garret in a basement.
I make myself some tea with the electric kettle, putting one of the remaining the tea bags without theine I brought with me right in the water to get the most tea out of one bag. After it has steeped, I pour myself a cup and help myself to the milk. The tea is awful: when I am in Dublin center (a twenty minute walk away), I will have some Irish tea from a freshly made pot.
Paddy is coming to pick me up at 8:00 p.m., and Grainne is coming in from her overnight trip to London around the same time, so we will have dinner together. Tomorrow there is a party for me, I am not sure when. It will be good to see these friendly faces again. It has been sixteen years since Bill and I made a flying visit to Dublin from London for the day, a day which started when we caught the first flight out and ended on the last flight in, a pub crawl of a day. I worked with Grainne at Greentrees, coffee shop in Rockefeller Center my last year in law school, 1985. She returned to Ireland, then moved to London, taking a job with a Turkish carpet seller named Alton, a man of phenomenal disorganization. Grainne and Paddy were living in an apartment in Bayswater, where I camped out after the Bar. I went on to Dublin and spent three weeks with her family in Ranelagh, getting to know her sister, Niamh, her mother Clare, and her father, Augustine Martin, the Yeats scholar and member of the Board of the Abbey Theatre. The next year Niamh came over and I helped her get settled and find a job --she was at my wedding. My memories of the Martins and Paddy --who is a Bolger-- are very happy ones.
***
Those memories notwithstanding, Dublin overwhelms me with the scope of its transformation in sixteen years, let alone thirty. Gone are the old bookstores on Grafton Street that served Trinity College; the Georgian revival has led to the houses off Merrion Square (one of which, #1, was where Oscar Wilde spent his childhood) becoming offices for corporations and law firms, as in London. Grafton Street is pedestiranized and full of chain stores of the sort found in every city with a claim to being "international".
I walk along the inside perimeter of the park on the opposite side of Merrion Street: it is a pleasure to do so, its cool green path coming to an end by a statue of Oscar Wilde with many of his most famous quotes. Finally, Dublin recognized his genius.
Coming into Nassau Street my eye is caught by Read's, the largest bookstore in Dublin. The postcards on sale outside are hilarious: the caption under a photo of dilapidated cottage says, "One more payment and its mine" --The Irish may be down, but they are not out, if a sense of humor is any guide. In fact, yesterday the country voted 60% in favor of an amendment to the treaty with the European Union which provides that the deficit shall not exceed 3%. Until the property bubble made millionaires and just as quickly paupers of many, the Irish always held living within your means as a virtue, the return of which may be heralded in yesterday's vote.
This incipient frugality notwithstanding, prices of things are as dear as New York, if not more. New paperback books in Read's are, even with the 25% discount, expensive. The culture of shopping has firmly entrenched itself in Ireland, judging from the number of people out looking at the shop windows early in the morning. I am not enthused about staying on another week, a feeling that a visit to the tourist office at the end of Grafton Street does little to disperse.
John, a charming agent for a family-run tour bus company tries to get me to buy a 3-day package of bus rides to the West Country, even offering me the student discount. He was a trader in Hong Kong, lost "millions" in the property market, and set up this business to keep afloat. He is smart as a whip, and I enjoy talking with him, but after the Castro Mil, I do not want to be on a long-distance bus again, ever.
I try to reach Aer Lingus on my cell phone, which I have been able to buy an Irish SIM card for. However, the airline is having problems with the computer that books reservations, and will be down for a good part of the day. I try several times before calling American Express, which has the same problem. However, the travel agent is able to tell me that I could leave Dublin any day between June 5 and June 9, although it will cost me at least $450 extra. I am reminded of a criminal law professor, Abraham Abramovsky, who once paid a taxi driver to take him from Albany to New York on a Friday evening, even though he had to be back in Albany the next Monday. "It was worth every penny", he said, in reference to the unsatisfying prospect of a weekend in Albany. Not that Dublin compares remotely, but I know the Martins have busy schedules, and limited time to spend with me. If I cannot find some activity to justify staying through to June 11, I might as well save on the hotel and come home early.
The answer to my quandary comes in my visit to the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street. It has an incomparable Yeats collection and a new exhibit about the poet. At the entrance to the exhibit is an announcement that next Thursday there will be an all day seminar on James Joyce, focusing, as Bloomsday is nearly upon us, on "Ulysses".
While I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I have not tackled that work, and this might be the best possible circumstance to consider doing so. And at 30 Euros for the seven and a half hour day, the price cannot be bettered. I go to the office of the library in charge of registrations and put my name on the list, deferring payment until Tuesday, to give me time to think about the prospect,. While doing so I learn that the Dublin Literary Festival is on from June 4 through June 10. Combining the two would give my week the snap, crackle, pop that would justify the expense --particularly as a writer I have long admired, Mario Vargas Llosa, is speaking the day before I depart. If I can get a ticket, I will pay for the Joyce seminar.
I have to go to the festival office in Temple Bar, an area popular with young tourists. Taking in the tatoo parlors and the bars cheek by jowk, Temple Bar reminds me of Soho in London: a bit rough, but with its own energy. At the Theatre Festival office I am able to purchase a Vargas Llosa ticket --and a good one, in the eighth row --and my decision is made. I am also able to get a ticket for a session on James Connolly, an influential leader of the movement for Ireland's independence, and I am on the wait list for a talk by Alain de Botton on Religion for Atheists. I thought I would overlook my reservations about Edmund White because he would be interviewed by Colm Toibin, whose novel "The Master", about the late years of Henry James, I admire. However, White has had a stroke and will not be travelling, so the talk about his book "Jack White And His Friends" has been cancelled. Richard Sennett, Alice Leahy and Gavin Titley, too, were to have appeared together to discuss "Living Together --The Lost Art Of Cooperation", but one of them has taken sick as well, so the event will not materialize. I am uninterested in the W.G. Sebald celebration and screening of an accompanying film, Patience; likewise, Bosnia Twenty Years On --which would bring me up to date on a conflict I watched closely as it unfolded.
There is a seminar on Thursday evening on cultural connections between England and Ireland --always a sharp topic, especially in Ireland-- but after a day with James Joyce, the best thing might be a pint.
Tickets purchased, I discover that the Irish Film Institue is around the corner. They are showing "The Turin Horse", a Hungarian film in black and white about the day on which Nietzsche, seeing a horse cruelly beaten, descended into madness. On a lighter note, there is a new comedy from Ken Loach, The Angel's Share about two Glaswegians obsessed with single-malts. I will have more than enough to provoke my thinking over the course of the week here without having to fall into the stereotypical tourist round.
My last jaunt, at 5 p.m., before preparing to meet Paddy at eight p.m. in front of the Schoolhouse Hotel, is a walk to Saint Patrick's Church, where Jonathan Swift was Dean. The choir is rehearsing for choral evensong at 5:30 p.m. and the gift shop is closing. There are no photos of Jonathan Swift's two death masks, which are in a case in the Cathedral in the back of the pews; or any other likeness. I buy a card to memorialize my visit, read the biographical panels associated with the Dean --who, appalled at the treatment of the mentally ill in Dublin, founded the first hospital for the treatment of the mentally ill --the hospital where he was treated when he suffered the stroke that incapicitated him at seventy-five and under whose effects he languished until his death three years later.
Disappointed initially that he never was able to reach higher office in England, he came to defend, from his position in the Deanery of Dublin, the rights of the Irish, successfully defending their currency from devaluation and using his biting mockery to call attention, in A Modest Proposal, to the plight of its poor.
***
I was going to visit the homes for dogs in Dublin, and see about finding a puppy to bring home: the Irish have beautiful horses and dogs. However, while I am changing to go out to meet Paddy and Grainne, an amber and orange tabby comes to pay me a visit througb the open windows. I find her at he feet of my desk chair and put some milk in a saucer for her, which she laps up. She is very friendly and I regret having to call Desmond, the young man at reception who brought me tea to the room earlier, to ask what to do. The cat, it turns out, is one of three attached to the Roxford Lodge. Whenever anyone leaves a window open, they will come in. If I pick my new friend up and place her over the window she will find her footing outside. Indeed, she lands squarely on the window sill outside, not to say she likes it. She looks at me wide-eyed with reproach --I should have valued her magical capacity for inserting herself more.
***
Paddy picks me up in front of the Old Schoohouse Hotel. He has just dropped his youngest boy, Finn, off at a discotheque for young teenagers, from which he will be picked up at eleven. Paddy and I drive past Aviva stadium, and a new arts complex around which commercial real estate stands empty, as well as around the new docklands of Dublin, which imitate Canary Wharf in London, all luxury apartments by the river Liffey. We visit several other areas, some downmarket, which were targeted by speculators and inflated in value during the Celtic Tiger years, and now are worth much less than their mortgages. In another area, one of older houses, Paddy points out a house purchased for an astronomical sum, renovated for another, now unsaleable.
We arrive in Tenerure, where Paddy and Grainne live with their three boys: Tighe, Killian and Finn, about an hour before Grainne is due in from her flight from London. Paddy is a substitute teacher and a tutor in Dublin's schools, a job he took after spending many years commuting between London as a mechanical engineering consultant for the City's largest financial services firms. Grainne worked for a computer training consultancy, but was downsized three years ago, at which point she started her own training firm, which has been very successful. She travels several days a week, and is about to make her first training in Singapore, which will open up to her possibilities all over Asia. She has, coupled with great energy, the capacity to sleep on planes and a genuine love for her work. Paddy holds the fort down, taking care of the house and the boys, as well as nurturing their black Labrador and a dun colored Labrador puppy, both of whom have the run of the house.
It is as if we last saw each other yesterday: Grainne and Paddy remember every little detail of our times together, and I many others. They are leaving for ten days in Cadaques, returning two days after I leave, Paddy's first vacation in two years: why don't I house sit for them?
Their offer is like manna from heaven: it is not that I cannot tough it out at the Roxford Lodge, but it would be very nice to live in a house for a few days. Clare, mother of Grainne and Niamh, lives nearby, and Niamh, too is not far. I can see them, and still have time to go into Dublin. Of course, there are books everywhere, and a garden, and a refrigerator and a stove. I will have to take the bus into Dublin, but staying in Terenure, I will also get a flavor of Dubliners' lives, I would never have within the cozy confines of the Roxford Lodge. I gladly accept, and plan to settle in Sunday afternoon, after Grainne and Paddy are well on their way to Cadaques.
A Happy Turn
Memorial Day Weekend, the beginning of the American summer season, passed, without my thinking about it. Here in Dublin it is cloudy and moist, although no rain. Even so, I have my hotel umbrella, and although I had to discard three tops and my wool socks to please the check-in people in Santiago, I still have the green country jacket I bought at the Emmaus sale in Besancon.
The hotel, which is called the Roxford Lodge, is a townhouse converted to a businessman's hotel. My room is, again, tiny,but the hotel takes the prize for the most electric outlets with the least apparent risk of fire. Instead of an electrical strip, the plugs have been set into the electrical wiring, and there is one for everything. The desk (with ingeniously includes a mirror), has a printer/fax machine, a wireless internet hookup. A hair dryer is set into the wall above the printer (dry your hair while sending a fax?) while in the round window above is set a tray carved to fit its curves, on an electric kettle, a cup and saucer and the fixings for tea, including non-perishable milk.
The sauna stands next to the bed, a wooden box I first mistook for a closet. It makes for a fine clothes dryer --"Yes", I washed out my socks and underwear last night.) It has a radio and CD player and antenna sticking out of the top. Above the end of the bed is the television, and on a shelf below, the controls, along with complimentary DVDs: The Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4.0, Dances With Wolves, Juno, among others. There is also a DVD about feng shui.
My room has a total of five windows, including the roundel, with its stained glass. I am in a basement apartment, looking out on the parking lot. Immediately outside my window, next to the sauna, is a bubbling brook, something bought in a garden shop and placed next to a brick archway garnished with shrubbery that comes up mid-window. It is a small space, but ingeniously designed, a garret in a basement.
I make myself some tea with the electric kettle, putting one of the remaining the tea bags without theine I brought with me right in the water to get the most tea out of one bag. After it has steeped, I pour myself a cup and help myself to the milk. The tea is awful: when I am in Dublin center (a twenty minute walk away), I will have some Irish tea from a freshly made pot.
Paddy is coming to pick me up at 8:00 p.m., and Grainne is coming in from her overnight trip to London around the same time, so we will have dinner together. Tomorrow there is a party for me, I am not sure when. It will be good to see these friendly faces again. It has been sixteen years since Bill and I made a flying visit to Dublin from London for the day, a day which started when we caught the first flight out and ended on the last flight in, a pub crawl of a day. I worked with Grainne at Greentrees, coffee shop in Rockefeller Center my last year in law school, 1985. She returned to Ireland, then moved to London, taking a job with a Turkish carpet seller named Alton, a man of phenomenal disorganization. Grainne and Paddy were living in an apartment in Bayswater, where I camped out after the Bar. I went on to Dublin and spent three weeks with her family in Ranelagh, getting to know her sister, Niamh, her mother Clare, and her father, Augustine Martin, the Yeats scholar and member of the Board of the Abbey Theatre. The next year Niamh came over and I helped her get settled and find a job --she was at my wedding. My memories of the Martins and Paddy --who is a Bolger-- are very happy ones.
***
Those memories notwithstanding, Dublin overwhelms me with the scope of its transformation in sixteen years, let alone thirty. Gone are the old bookstores on Grafton Street that served Trinity College; the Georgian revival has led to the houses off Merrion Square (one of which, #1, was where Oscar Wilde spent his childhood) becoming offices for corporations and law firms, as in London. Grafton Street is pedestiranized and full of chain stores of the sort found in every city with a claim to being "international".
I walk along the inside perimeter of the park on the opposite side of Merrion Street: it is a pleasure to do so, its cool green path coming to an end by a statue of Oscar Wilde with many of his most famous quotes. Finally, Dublin recognized his genius.
Coming into Nassau Street my eye is caught by Read's, the largest bookstore in Dublin. The postcards on sale outside are hilarious: the caption under a photo of dilapidated cottage says, "One more payment and its mine" --The Irish may be down, but they are not out, if a sense of humor is any guide. In fact, yesterday the country voted 60% in favor of an amendment to the treaty with the European Union which provides that the deficit shall not exceed 3%. Until the property bubble made millionaires and just as quickly paupers of many, the Irish always held living within your means as a virtue, the return of which may be heralded in yesterday's vote.
This incipient frugality notwithstanding, prices of things are as dear as New York, if not more. New paperback books in Read's are, even with the 25% discount, expensive. The culture of shopping has firmly entrenched itself in Ireland, judging from the number of people out looking at the shop windows early in the morning. I am not enthused about staying on another week, a feeling that a visit to the tourist office at the end of Grafton Street does little to disperse.
John, a charming agent for a family-run tour bus company tries to get me to buy a 3-day package of bus rides to the West Country, even offering me the student discount. He was a trader in Hong Kong, lost "millions" in the property market, and set up this business to keep afloat. He is smart as a whip, and I enjoy talking with him, but after the Castro Mil, I do not want to be on a long-distance bus again, ever.
I try to reach Aer Lingus on my cell phone, which I have been able to buy an Irish SIM card for. However, the airline is having problems with the computer that books reservations, and will be down for a good part of the day. I try several times before calling American Express, which has the same problem. However, the travel agent is able to tell me that I could leave Dublin any day between June 5 and June 9, although it will cost me at least $450 extra. I am reminded of a criminal law professor, Abraham Abramovsky, who once paid a taxi driver to take him from Albany to New York on a Friday evening, even though he had to be back in Albany the next Monday. "It was worth every penny", he said, in reference to the unsatisfying prospect of a weekend in Albany. Not that Dublin compares remotely, but I know the Martins have busy schedules, and limited time to spend with me. If I cannot find some activity to justify staying through to June 11, I might as well save on the hotel and come home early.
The answer to my quandary comes in my visit to the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street. It has an incomparable Yeats collection and a new exhibit about the poet. At the entrance to the exhibit is an announcement that next Thursday there will be an all day seminar on James Joyce, focusing, as Bloomsday is nearly upon us, on "Ulysses".
While I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I have not tackled that work, and this might be the best possible circumstance to consider doing so. And at 30 Euros for the seven and a half hour day, the price cannot be bettered. I go to the office of the library in charge of registrations and put my name on the list, deferring payment until Tuesday, to give me time to think about the prospect,. While doing so I learn that the Dublin Literary Festival is on from June 4 through June 10. Combining the two would give my week the snap, crackle, pop that would justify the expense --particularly as a writer I have long admired, Mario Vargas Llosa, is speaking the day before I depart. If I can get a ticket, I will pay for the Joyce seminar.
I have to go to the festival office in Temple Bar, an area popular with young tourists. Taking in the tatoo parlors and the bars cheek by jowk, Temple Bar reminds me of Soho in London: a bit rough, but with its own energy. At the Theatre Festival office I am able to purchase a Vargas Llosa ticket --and a good one, in the eighth row --and my decision is made. I am also able to get a ticket for a session on James Connolly, an influential leader of the movement for Ireland's independence, and I am on the wait list for a talk by Alain de Botton on Religion for Atheists. I thought I would overlook my reservations about Edmund White because he would be interviewed by Colm Toibin, whose novel "The Master", about the late years of Henry James, I admire. However, White has had a stroke and will not be travelling, so the talk about his book "Jack White And His Friends" has been cancelled. Richard Sennett, Alice Leahy and Gavin Titley, too, were to have appeared together to discuss "Living Together --The Lost Art Of Cooperation", but one of them has taken sick as well, so the event will not materialize. I am uninterested in the W.G. Sebald celebration and screening of an accompanying film, Patience; likewise, Bosnia Twenty Years On --which would bring me up to date on a conflict I watched closely as it unfolded.
There is a seminar on Thursday evening on cultural connections between England and Ireland --always a sharp topic, especially in Ireland-- but after a day with James Joyce, the best thing might be a pint.
Tickets purchased, I discover that the Irish Film Institue is around the corner. They are showing "The Turin Horse", a Hungarian film in black and white about the day on which Nietzsche, seeing a horse cruelly beaten, descended into madness. On a lighter note, there is a new comedy from Ken Loach, The Angel's Share about two Glaswegians obsessed with single-malts. I will have more than enough to provoke my thinking over the course of the week here without having to fall into the stereotypical tourist round.
My last jaunt, at 5 p.m., before preparing to meet Paddy at eight p.m. in front of the Schoolhouse Hotel, is a walk to Saint Patrick's Church, where Jonathan Swift was Dean. The choir is rehearsing for choral evensong at 5:30 p.m. and the gift shop is closing. There are no photos of Jonathan Swift's two death masks, which are in a case in the Cathedral in the back of the pews; or any other likeness. I buy a card to memorialize my visit, read the biographical panels associated with the Dean --who, appalled at the treatment of the mentally ill in Dublin, founded the first hospital for the treatment of the mentally ill --the hospital where he was treated when he suffered the stroke that incapicitated him at seventy-five and under whose effects he languished until his death three years later.
Disappointed initially that he never was able to reach higher office in England, he came to defend, from his position in the Deanery of Dublin, the rights of the Irish, successfully defending their currency from devaluation and using his biting mockery to call attention, in A Modest Proposal, to the plight of its poor.
***
I was going to visit the homes for dogs in Dublin, and see about finding a puppy to bring home: the Irish have beautiful horses and dogs. However, while I am changing to go out to meet Paddy and Grainne, an amber and orange tabby comes to pay me a visit througb the open windows. I find her at he feet of my desk chair and put some milk in a saucer for her, which she laps up. She is very friendly and I regret having to call Desmond, the young man at reception who brought me tea to the room earlier, to ask what to do. The cat, it turns out, is one of three attached to the Roxford Lodge. Whenever anyone leaves a window open, they will come in. If I pick my new friend up and place her over the window she will find her footing outside. Indeed, she lands squarely on the window sill outside, not to say she likes it. She looks at me wide-eyed with reproach --I should have valued her magical capacity for inserting herself more.
***
Paddy picks me up in front of the Old Schoohouse Hotel. He has just dropped his youngest boy, Finn, off at a discotheque for young teenagers, from which he will be picked up at eleven. Paddy and I drive past Aviva stadium, and a new arts complex around which commercial real estate stands empty, as well as around the new docklands of Dublin, which imitate Canary Wharf in London, all luxury apartments by the river Liffey. We visit several other areas, some downmarket, which were targeted by speculators and inflated in value during the Celtic Tiger years, and now are worth much less than their mortgages. In another area, one of older houses, Paddy points out a house purchased for an astronomical sum, renovated for another, now unsaleable.
We arrive in Tenerure, where Paddy and Grainne live with their three boys: Tighe, Killian and Finn, about an hour before Grainne is due in from her flight from London. Paddy is a substitute teacher and a tutor in Dublin's schools, a job he took after spending many years commuting between London as a mechanical engineering consultant for the City's largest financial services firms. Grainne worked for a computer training consultancy, but was downsized three years ago, at which point she started her own training firm, which has been very successful. She travels several days a week, and is about to make her first training in Singapore, which will open up to her possibilities all over Asia. She has, coupled with great energy, the capacity to sleep on planes and a genuine love for her work. Paddy holds the fort down, taking care of the house and the boys, as well as nurturing their black Labrador and a dun colored Labrador puppy, both of whom have the run of the house.
It is as if we last saw each other yesterday: Grainne and Paddy remember every little detail of our times together, and I many others. They are leaving for ten days in Cadaques, returning two days after I leave, Paddy's first vacation in two years: why don't I house sit for them?
Their offer is like manna from heaven: it is not that I cannot tough it out at the Roxford Lodge, but it would be very nice to live in a house for a few days. Clare, mother of Grainne and Niamh, lives nearby, and Niamh, too is not far. I can see them, and still have time to go into Dublin. Of course, there are books everywhere, and a garden, and a refrigerator and a stove. I will have to take the bus into Dublin, but staying in Terenure, I will also get a flavor of Dubliners' lives, I would never have within the cozy confines of the Roxford Lodge. I gladly accept, and plan to settle in Sunday afternoon, after Grainne and Paddy are well on their way to Cadaques.
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