Dublin!

Hello folks,

Goodness, I’m really having quite the time trying to keep you all up to date! I’ve had one adventure after another – both at home in Sheffield, and abroad. I recently got back from a short holiday to Nice, France, on the coast of the Mediterranean – awesome! And then more recently, I went home-home for a visit, which was also awesome. Since then, I've just been busy with... umm... life, I guess. Ok, enough excuses.

But I need to catch you up first. I’ll paint in very broad strokes here, for the sake of time. So here we go:

Last stop in Ireland: Dublin.

We didn’t get a lot of time in Dublin on our Marshall trip, mostly a briefing at the Office of the Taoiseach (their Prime Minister) on Ireland’s economic outlook. All very fascinating, especially since they discussed their somewhat unique ‘social-partnership’ model of financial governance.

Other than that one briefing, we had a lot of relax-time in the evening since we were leaving the next day. So a couple friends and I chanced our way into a traditional pub that was tucked away in the upstairs above a barber’s shop. It turned out to be the highlight of the whole trip.

Firstly, you need to recognise that pubs in England and Ireland are very different than bars. Pubs are respectable places to hang out. Whole families go to pubs. Pubs are where you get your traditional Sunday roast after the church meeting. In some villages, the pub is the best, or even only, restaurant around. Now, of course, not all pubs are this ‘noble,’ and I expect that the pub culture hasn’t helped the growing alcohol-related problems in the British Isles. But my point is that equating a pub with an American-style bar is incorrect.

At any rate, this pub, I believe it was The Partridge, was the smallest pub I’ve ever seen. The entire establishment was just one long, narrow room. The room felt strange because in addition to being skinny, it was tall, with a pressed-tin ceiling and dental moulding around the edges. The place was decorated in traditional pub livery – walls yellowed from years of smoke from ‘fags’ (ahem... cigarettes) and cigars, with a dark wood panelled kickboard. The bar was squeezed into a corner of the room. It had the usual elaborate tap handles. There were plaques on the walls commemorating who knows what. There were stools and barrels to sit on, but most people stood.

A hodgepodge folk band was in the back corner, just playing songs and having fun. I use the word ‘band’ in the old sense of comrades, not musicians who play the same songs. This was just a bunch of friends having fun, and tonight music was their medium. And old man was picking out the melody on a mandolin, the instrument propped up on his potbelly which was, in turn, propped up by suspenders. The flutist was either high or crazy or both, but was excellent never-the-less. The guitarist led most of the songs, but every once in a while he would put down his guitar in the middle of the song to take a sip of his ever-present Guinness. Everyone else just kept playing. And they were good too!

Another old man – tall and lean, unlike the first – would sing a ballad between sets, Danny Rogers style; songs about wars, quintessential Molly (whoever she is), and the gates of the city. The crazed flutist tried in vain to shush the crowed by barking “quiet!” at the patrons followed by over-emphasized hand motions pointing to the singing man. The rest of the band just laughed at him, pints in hand, as if they could care less if we were listening or not.

On one jig, the tall skinny man and an old man from the crowd – short, with a plaid hat and blue scarf – started dancing across the scuffed-up, beer-stained wooden floor. The crowd clapped along in approval. A girl who had been sitting on a barrel hopped off and danced along, darting between the two old men – who had by then linked arms into an arch while kicking their feet. The song paused for a second (another sip of beer), and then picked right back up – faster this time.

The ‘completeness’ of the scene – sights, sounds, smells – made it feel almost surreal. We stayed practically until the place closed, trying to soak in hundreds of years of Irish history and culture in one evening. That was Dublin. That’s how I remember the city.


Ok, I’m off, but I’ll be back soon with pictures from the spring and from France.

Cheers y’all,
Will