Sinister: We'll Be Thrown Out Of The Boozer

[P F]

Break a high note on wine pastilles: the first of too
many sweets. By the time we reach O’Connell Street
they’re nearly all gone. I had forgotten the absurdity
of buses that have refused to give change, but don’t
refuse to take excess cash. Myles would have had a
field day, possibly an anthology. The road through
Drumcondra lined with takeaways and pubs, not much
like a motorway. On O’Connell Street a top-deck
Christian silently reminds me of Belle & Sebastian
(Christians seem to begin to do this), then kindly
gives me some directions I don’t need.
– Thanks, mate, I say, as English as possible.

I wonder how and why the ring of land around O’Connell
Bridge is preserved as it is: coloured walls,
perpetual adverts for Guinness and Bailey’s stretching
beyond vision’s limits into past and future, like a
couple of native firms have bought the place for ever.

The Vicar reckons Paul Morley’s writing is grotesque,
unprecedented, bizarre and unfortunate.

St Michan’s 1000-year-old watchtower. In the quiet
cemetery behind it something makes me think of U2, and
what difference they brought to pop’s vision over 20
years ago: how unusual it was, for instance, to be
photographed on the Dublin docks. Inside the Ten
Commandments hang either side of the altar. These make
me think. Some feel unfamiliar; and their wording is
strongly rooted in 2000-year-old circumstances.
Religion as a community talking to itself; the skyward
appeal as a red herring.

Collins Barracks. Swords to ploughshares and gunpowder
to cappuccinos. Spanish Armada cannon, a Samurai’s
armour, Atlantic cables, cream salvers, sugar bowls.
Coins circulate, medals move only once. Black and Tan
awards for veterans of the War of Independence.
Internee camp tokens, coins stamped UVF or IRA a la
Tristero. How WBY’s committee specified animals to be
on the coins: different artists took up the challenge,
one succeeded in all categories though the judges
expected various names to win. Salmon, wolfhound, ox,
horse. Lady Lavery as Cathleen ni Houlihan, ploughman
and horses at sunset. Notes Kavanagh would have
tendered in the Bailey. A reflection on acceleration:
in modern human history inventions get perfected, then
rapidly superseded. Banknotes are relatively recent in
Ireland, but already, this exhibition tells us, much
money is virtual.

Rick’s Burgers are real and fresh – it’s true. 

A recurring type: the generic middle-aged working man
in a shirt and tie, behind a museum desk or standing
at an entrance, ready to advise on what to see and how
to go places. This one tells me urgently to visit the
military exhibit upstairs: the Wild Geese. Touched I
ascend Portraits, costumes, an Austrian diaspora. In
torchlight dun costumes, sabres glinting. With a
goblet of wine he toasts foreign compeers. Even a
thesaurus is scant help at this game.

The Lord Edward feels like an old English pub, save
that the barman says ‘Lovely’ to a simple order and
brings a pint over minutes later. Goodness, it’s a
long time since I’ve talked about Tales From The Black
Freighter. We can hardly remember what it all meant.
Allegory’s starting to happen.

Green quads and lawns, buildings’ obscure and
particular names, dripping trees, old and new
libraries. But for once the real new thing: plastic
floors, the scent of cheap coffee, a milling crowd for
a scientific conference on The Tree of Life, a lecture
theatre slowly casually starting to fill. It sweetly
feels like 10 years ago. Up concrete stairs the edge
of the English Department: between breeze-blocks, face
to face doors behind which lurk imaginary growls and
stale alcoholic smells.

Rain falls on scuba-divers, absent cricketers, the
natural history department with its turbine models and
its great boneframe. How does the poem go? –

They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate of air.

In Nassau Street the Irish Tom Jones sings. It’s
groovy, I admit. The rain grows farcical. The heavy,
overripe Mars Bar: mystery of its hegemony. Over fried
platters on a traffic island selected characters from
‘Manic Mungo’ make a comeback in transient air. Chuck
out the rhino.

Lemon platt, sugarsticky strawberry books. The Burton
is no longer visible, and I doubt that it became the
Bailey as they vaguely claim. The first ten years’
editions are surprisingly readable and elegant,
spaciously printed between the blue covers. €1200. To
you, a chara, £1600. Mutely crave to adore. In the
pricey mall the way people waste money’s visible.
Decorated cows, Irish bulls.
 
George Street South: North to Dame Street, West again
up Lord Edward Street, Christchurch, High Street,
Thomas Street West: into an old Dublin of cheap shops,
butchers, stallholders urging purchases on you, big
fellows in footy colours. The Guinness Hopstore has
improved beyond measure in a dozen years: discarding
information and education and transforming itself to a
high-rolling megastore, its vast lettering and bullish
promotion of the brand is enough to persuade even a
sceptic like me to try the stuff. One missing
ingredient is in the air all around you: Arthur
Guinness. It’s thrue what that man’s afther sayin.

High air at Dublin bar: tourists sprawl across the
crowded floor round the central ring which knocks out
pint after pint from next door. All around through
glass environs: from the Phoenix Park to the Pigeon
House and the mountains, via Collins Barracks, the
Spire, Customs House and Four Courts, distant blocks
of flats, the real Barrytown. I don’t know why it
moves me so.

Grand Canal Dock the local Canary Wharf. Why always a
dock or a wharf? Dun Laoghaire a dominion unto itself:
the serenity of the sea, the motion of the roads. How
Ireland never had… Indie. The Malaysians remind me of
minimalist pop artists. Bells, drums, dancers; their
final collective vocalisation is overwhelming. At the
interval, a view of the changing dark blues of the
evening over the sea, over Howth to which, to where, I
did not yet make it.

The Royal Marine Hotel swings at the heart of a
labyrinth unsignalled on the blithely encouraging map.
Inside a very merely average folk band plays. The best
thing I can hear about them is the snare beat
regularly laid by the drummer who looks like he hails
from Roy Keane’s Cork estate or demesne. People should
use that beat more, I think. Where have I heard it
before? Oh: ‘Queen of the New Year’. Better fun though
are the tough geezers of the audience. A fat fellow we
imagine to be a Morris dancer groupie, his Umbro top
seeming to proclaim Englishness, does the worst,
perhaps the least energetic, dancing I have ever seen.

– Duelling banjos! he cries. – Duelling banjos!

A shudder of promise as he brushes insouciantly past a
tough biker. The showdown shudderingly promised does
not quite arrive.
 
The Dublin Spire’s only feature is its great height.
If hired for big bucks or exuberant euros to defend
its virtues I’d struggle. At the world party Dublin
Gurus loudly sing. I think of GLC festivals of twenty
years ago. Immigrant children have captioned their
pictures.
– Brown is my favourite colour because I am brown.
The best is a rockist 11-year-old:
– My picture speaks. There are no words.
It’s all about the music.

The music is different wherever you go. Some busker
plays simple variations on a D that catch me. Somehow
we eschew the crêpes of the French stalls. On the East
Pier look south to Sandycove: a fellow in shades joins
the debate about whether we’re looking at Dalkey. A
familiar figure approaches. He doesn’t just dress like
“Spider-Man” – he moves like “Spider-Man”. It can’t be
– but… he *is* “Spider-Man”!
He bids me strike a webcasting pose.
– Thanks, “Spider-Man”!
– No problem.

The sea is blue: white yachts, a stationary tanker,
the quickly turning sea-cat. How does the novella go?
–

A large quadruped had arisen and was now standing in
the midst of the rocks, spewing showers of putrid
stench around it. At first I thought that an
exceedingly bulky seal stood before me but later the
four feet denied this. Then, the dull sheen in the sky
increased slightly and I saw that a great strong hairy
object was in my company that night, grey-haired and
with prickly red eyes, staring at me angrily.

I think that was a different sea-cat.

Like one-off performers from Robin of Sherwood, Morris
dancers arrive from the Welsh border, masked in
blackface, ribboned red and yellow, a different animal
rampant on each one’s back. Rabbit, tiger, Nick Park’s
sheep. The ringleader reminds me obscurely of Hopkins:
perhaps I am imagining him drinking real ale in a pub
over the eastern sea. A great black bull walks around
the edge of the crowd, near-silent, lending enigmatic
weight to the rest. The Vicar calls him ‘friendly /
threatening’, covering most bases.

In Pearse’s airy hall of orange brick and green metal
the pink-numbered hen girls wait to move. The chime of
the 6 o’clock city tolls down Dame Street, glimmering
in the sun like a great avenue of Glasgow. Amid the
central hotel’s books the birthday women wear boas. An
English builder calls from his Chinese table to assure
us that Cherie Blair’s Beatles performance was no
figment of the media’s imagination. A bone of
contention: Morrissey and Siouxsie’s ‘Interlude’. Like
the incredulous Vicar, I think it a record so poor
that I cannot even remember how it goes: but I give it
a listen back home. I think the surprising problem is
that after 10 or 15 years in pop to neither of them
seems to come the great idea of … harmony.

The Brazen Head reputed oldest pub in town beckons
youth to its doors. Beyond the warm courtyard a girl
looking like Britney Spears offers her friends’
favours to reluctant Brits. I don’t fathom the
reluctance. Under Robert Emmet one t only and other
memorabilia we remember how the Mission’s ‘Butterfly
on a Wheel’ announced the tomorrow’s whirl of the
1990s. Time for the Dublin Guru. Birdland were big in
Japan: Power of Dreams were more like the House of
Love than I ever knew: Kylie Minogue has only had two
good songs. I don’t know about that: I don’t even like
all of ‘CGYOOMH’, after the first few instrumental
bars are through.

The mystery of the geezer: like Scotland Ireland lacks
them, or will not divulge its own word for the
phenomenon. I am reminded that most of the time I say
Geezer I mean Geezthete, in the Nipper’s strict sense.
In the Clarence multicoloured lights flash like the
Edge is in town, or the original Dirty Vicar is
jockeying for discs.

In the Jervis Centre an inspiring pop record bids my
blood take the plunge and buy a bag of pick & mix
sweets. Fizzy cola bottles, sweet teeth, red lips,
white mice. Yesterday’s goals sound unbelievable. Big
Country get their first run-out in long years I’ll
wager. This Sporting Life has the atmosphere and
iconography, but its motivations are obscure; clouds
across the moon.

The tour guides drum into us the answer to Wilde’s
favourite topics: ‘art and aesthetics’. I am
surprised: I’d have expected some slack comic mileage
in the cheap answer ‘himself’.

White waves lap water’s edges; towns pass and I wonder
if one is Skerries. The countryside beats England’s
hands down, all fear and no favour. Dundalk: the text
says avoid it, a Wild West town, dead when not deadly.
The border nears, a strange buzz: this momentous
little country of many names; going abroad, yet also
coming back to my own… Kingdom. I will spare you
excessive details of the public toilets of the
station: their striking modernity and elegant blue
tiles.

How does the guidebook go? –

To look at, it is a wholly English creation of the
Victorian period – a parody, almost, of the great
industrial cities of the English Midlands and North,
and once their great rival.

I marvel at that sentence: its compression,
ambivalence, suggestiveness.

The cashpoint feeds me Northern notes which silly
London will not take. The mountains, like Sheffield’s,
are visible beyond the streets. Victoria looking
Northwest, the Titanic memorial. Grandeur, heavy stone
building; local cult of strength. Further North a pub
called the Hercules. No Antaeus. Provincial street
furniture, Aberdeen to Bath: bus stops and bins, amid
the old stone. Another genial generic mid-aged man
gives interminable advice about the best way into the
West. The religious décor reminds me again of Belle &
Sebastian and their fascination with characters from
the Bible. The Cornmarket shows no signs of the youth
cults the guide predicts. Bandstand, telephone boxes,
life going round. The Crown is maybe the most
spectacular pub I have ever seen: gold, silver, many
colours shining in and out. Into a booked snug drift
the television’s football voices. The south is almost
like Cambridge: brick buildings, leafy squares and
roads, an anarchy symbol painted on the pillar outside
Queens’ granite outpost. The Botanic Gardens are
worthy of a sinister picnic: in fact they put me in
mind of Kelvingrove. The Ulster Museum weirdly bolts
concrete on to granite: for a few yards it convinces.
30 minutes to see its impossible cornucopia: Belfast
painters, Irish cretaceous dinosaurs. Outside a
computer programmer reads me ‘The Song of Wandering
Aengus’.

Sandy Row’s kerbstones run red white blue white red
white blue white red white blue white red white blue
white red white blue white red white blue white red
white blue white red white blue white red white blue
white red white blue white red white blue white red
white blue white red white blue white red white blue
white red white blue white red white blue white red
white blue white red white blue white red white blue
white red white blue white red white blue white red
white blue white red white blue white red white blue
white red white blue white red white blue white red
white blue white red white blue white red white blue
white red white blue white red white blue white red
white blue white red white blue white red white blue
white red white blue white red white blue white red
white blue white red white blue white red, bunting
flaps diagonals all down the street, union flags fly
from pubs and in crude paint adorn the lids of bins.
London’s Jubilees have nothing on, and little to do
with, this. An old familiar irony: these colours mean
so much more to them than to us. The road’s hyperbole
bespeaks my nation, but leaves me an outsider. So much
talk of union flags – from Townshend to Morrissey,
Weller to Gallagher and even (I see on the Pops when I
return) the feeble-sounding Libertines – has focused
on London, on ‘Englishness’, on ‘racism’. To break
open those debates, walk this pavement: the colours
mean something different, and London is a long way
away.

We distant listeners never really understand what’s
meant about these roads: how they relate, how a road
itself can have such significance. As I near the Falls
I feel the intensity of a geographical encounter
finally about to happen. It’s traversed by the shared
taxis but not the army patrols promised by the dated
Guide; the tricolour flies from roofs, every other
gable is painted with elaborate faces. I fear
reprisals for no offence. At least if a republican
pins me to a wall I can reel off the names of his
people’s heroes: less conviction to offer the
loyalists. Children play in green Irish footy shirts,
throw stones at a young woman walking home from dull
work. Around these few square miles so much energy and
worry has been spent. Strange isolation of the place,
a town to itself. On the walls IRA has been updated to
CIRA. So much for taking the nationalist community
with you. But then, for whom does the street art
speak? There must be many who grow among it resenting
and resisting. Above Milltown Cemetery the mountains
brood. At the hill’s foot in a sporting cage women
practice… football. Irish football.

Through a window Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby plays
on someone’s TV. British TV. Sky TV. Outside the
takeaways boys wear red and white striped shirts. I
can’t believe they’re all Sunderland fans.

Outside a pub a crowd I can’t bypass. A crouching male
waves something at me, crying:
– Pot noodles! Pot noodles!
The rest of the gang jeers and sneers as I pass. I am
not even wearing my Arthur Griffith T-shirt.

Returning to Connolly, west along streets that
suddenly feel comically safe, seeing the silly Spire
down the road, feels like a sort of homecoming. I pass
Joyce, go up and touch him on the arm, like he’s after
all a truer symbol of this place than many have
reckoned or dared sentimentally admit.

Camden Street: the Palace Ballroom. No, no, notorious.
Synge Street: I see (where) Shaw’s framed letters,
albeit uncleared by my office, have been after making
a wall hilarious.
– You have a right to public support, but not to steal
another man’s job by offering to do it for nothing. If
you do not realize this you are a fool, if you do and
persist then you are a blackguard.
Underused word blackguard is. The garden with its
jakes puts me in mind of Eccles Street. Out the top
floor window: the world, the tape says, that Shaw
would take by storm. The Irish Jewish Museum’s
garrulous staff, maybe annoyed that I’m not seeking my
roots, chat in the hall, argue with a traffic warden.

Howth’s harbour a picture: stunning sea, fishing
fleet, smell of fresh herring, Ireland’s Eye offshore,
the standard-issue Martello Tower up on the cliffs.
>From Beshoff’s Italian girls buy chips for one cent
less than advertised price, take them up the hill,
marvelling at blue sea and white breakers. Inland, the
hill seems to rise forever, like something from a
fantasy game book. The rough guide is apt again:

- a sleepy, suburban place full of steep streets and
sudden views.

Back at the harbour Blue Sea ice cream like the cream
sea that is blue in the harbour. The radio flicks on
‘Take It Easy’. It sounds more inspiring than it did
in that Glasgow steakhouse on a rainy day.
– It’s a girl! – my lord: with a flat-black Ford.
 I can’t believe how good it sounds; I can’t walk out
of this place till the easily taken guitar solo’s
through.

Belle & Sebastian, yes, one more time. The B&S song
challenge is fuelled by a dangerous few bottles. I
don’t really buy the Vicar’s enthusiasm for ‘Jonathan
David’, but it does have some kind of… growing
urgency. ‘Middle Distance Runner’: their best song,
says the Vicar, class of 99, even *this* version. I
think the lead acoustic is mixed too prominently. But
he has a point somewhere. I have never been quite sure
what else is wrong with this version. ‘Modern Rock
Song’: the folly continues. This was mediocre as a
radio session, mediocre as a 45, is still mediocre a
surprising five years on. ‘I’m Waking Up To Us’ is
probably their most underrated record: a record that
shows that late B&S can be… good. The title track has
such structure, drama, diversity, style, quality of
arrangement, pacing; ‘Marx and Engels’’ genius we
already know. Its overlapping vocals do as much for me
as almost anything else on any B&S record I can think
of.

Sun pours on a string quartet below Bewley’s. Grafton
Street has such a range of busking quality: the real
thing, like this, sounding so good I’d thought it was
a record; but then also, sentries in alcoves up and
down the road, the unbearable freckle-faced mugs of
keening whining boys, an army of drownable chancers
that replenishes itself year on year.

In the Chester Beatty Library ponder again the history
of world religion. Papyrus scraps of the Bible, tiny
comic meditating figures from the Far East. In the
curator’s prose all Buddhisms come to the same thing.

– Through meditation, self-discipline and
thoughtfulness for others, it is possible to reach
Enlightenment.

In a basement your man funds half my steak sandwich,
an astoundingly substantial lunch. Debbie Gibson’s
‘Electric Youth’ sounds so good I first think it must
be a calculated retroaction. Your man recounts
lengthily a weird plan to write an appreciative essay
on Robbie Williams’ desire to be a serious songwriter.
– Son, I want to say kindly: don’t bother!

Taxi past green fields rougher than Heathrow or
Stansted’s modernized plains: within seconds of
take-off the country recedes breathtakingly. The
Pigeon House, the DART line past mud flats through
Sutton: Howth an astounding model village, its fishy
harbour and tower newly framed. Within 15 minutes the
brown rocks of the coast of England. But England – who
cares about England?



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