Dublin: Off the beaten (up) track.
A true story.
It’s my fault. I blame myself entirely.
“Let’s get away from the Temple Bar type tourist traps,” I said, “What could possibly go wrong?”
It was a Gallery Trip to Dublin, in my grad year of a Fine Arts degree, where the tutors had this insane notion that you’ll somehow benefit from weeks of whizzing around a gazillion art galleries, exposing yourself to as much art as is humanly possible.
Not exposing yourself in the biblical sense, you understand.
Not in a ‘Stop Oil protest’ kind of way.
Unfortunately for me, it had the opposite effect.
I was suffering from an excess of Expressionism. A congestion of Conceptualism. Sculpture saturation sickness.
Less was definitely Moore.
So there we were in Ireland’s capital, after what can only be described as the worst ferry crossing one could ever have, without actually drowning.
Sixty students let loose overnight in a ferry bar, quickly finding out what it’s like to have the Bar get its own back, by hurling its bottles back at you, while a force nine gale upends you like the tumble cycle of a washing machine.
No sleep til Dublin.
For anyone.
Sadly, for the Fine Arts professor at Dublin City University, It must have seemed so disrespectful to see the entirety of the visiting English contingent nodding off immediately after the lecture lights dimmed.
So, lectures and trips over for the day, we hit the big city streets and that’s when I had the bright idea of finding a Real Irish Pub.
To drink Real Irish Guinness.
For those not personally familiar with the Black Stuff, let me enlighten you:
It’s basically dinner in a glass. If dinner was thick, creamy and bitter all at the same time. With added iron.
It’s definitely an acquired taste. After nine, ten or eleventy pints, it even starts to taste nice.
The man we ran into coming out of the Real Irish Pub we’d found, had tasted many, many pints that day, and I think he liked it.
I was the first to encounter him, having being pushed volunteer-like to the front, because it was my idea to head down the back streets of the city to find this watering-hole, and once there, the other students with me were shitting themselves.
I halted in my tracks — because he hadn’t.
If anything, he had the momentum of an slow moving avalanche, so I hastily reversed and took him in fully, starting at the ground and traversing upwards.
He was basically a mountain in dirty clothes. Triangular in shape, he possessed a shock of white hair at the apex of where his head ended, which adorned him like a frightened halo trying to escape his red and angry face.
What scared me most, were the bandages on his knuckles, which had obviously seen recent use.
We parted like the Red Sea - like we had a choice - and allowed him to pass.
It was only then, we noticed he was being propelled from behind, by a much smaller man, like a tug boat in reverse.
I presumed he must have been the landlord, because the apron he wore showed the full menu of that day’s repast, in varying degrees of colours and flavours. I could definitely make out egg-yolk, and what I hoped was tomato sauce and not blood.
Sleeves rolled to the elbows, he steered the belligerent mass onto the pavement before releasing him carefully back into the wild with the immortal words:
“Now, Seamus. I can’t be serving ye any more drink today, if ye can’t see!”
Welcome to Ireland.
