Dublins fair city

Just a bit more on Dublin which I truly loved. Our place was three stops up from St Stephens Square, a good park with an Oscar Wilde statue in a corner and pale torsoed young men basking in the heatwave.  All around were tall Georgian terraces, their bricks every shade of rust and pink and their big front doors bright blues and greens and yellows and reds.  It all exuded vitality.

The day we arrived the park railings were hosting small exhibitions by different artists and people were buying the pictures too. I asked a friendly looking artist if he could direct me to the Natural History Museum. “Oh, the dead zoo we call it” and he told me how to get there.

One delight of the Irish is the way any question brings forth about four times more words and comments than are strictly necessary.  There was a merriment and generosity of spirit in all my encounters with people in Dublin. There is often a bit of devilment too.  We went on a double decker hop on hop off bus and its driver had an eerie way of seeing all the passengers while we could only see the back of his head.  He got us  to identify our nationalities and then teased us about them.  “Ah the sweet Molly from Australia looks truly relaxed, that’s nice” he said and that was me.

We hopped off at the Gallery of Modern Art which is housed in a huge yet delicately designed old hospital and then went to have a look at the gaol nearby now a museum. I found glass case with an electronic copy of an old fashioned autograph book kept by a prisoner. It had little pictures and patriotic sentiments in it but also this little rhyme which seemed funny and sad in an Irish way:

When I asked her to wed, my sweetheart she said
Go to father
She knew that I knew her father was dead
She knew that I knew what a life he had led
So I knew that she knew that I knew what she meant when she said
Go to father.

Our suburb, Ranalagh, had good ordinary shops and people and also a tram that took us to town in a trice. We had a studio flat with a shower the size of a coffin only taller which drove Grant mad. One quirk of our room was that every few minutes or so you could hear what sounded like an electric kettle coming to the boil and then turning itself off.  It was the tram coming to the station and stopping and I knew it, but every single time my mind sprang to “who put the kettle on and why” until the repeated impact on my brain was like Chinese water torture.  I think G and I were happy to leave the key in the lock of that place but I would have loved to stay longer in Dublin.