Beginning with Guinness

DUBLIN: My Ryan Air flight touched down an hour late (gasp) in Ireland just after lunch on the 14th; I’d not managed a wink of sleep the night before (my flight was early, and I’d been up late writing and packing, so decided to pull an all-nighter lest I slept through my alarm and missed the plane), so my first impressions of the city were rather surreal.

It was raining, and continued to rain – or drizzle, or at the very least was cold and overcast with the odd droplet condensing on my face – for the three days of my stay. Still, the brooding grey shawl seemed suit the city, the architecture seemed to revel in the drizzle, and the cold was a nice change from the stifling Roman heat (though if I was in the countryside, I would’ve wanted at least a wink of sun). As the temperature was in the high twenties in Italy, however, I didn’t think to pack my thermals, which at times I could’ve done with.

My first day was not terribly exciting, not counting the excitement of being in Dublin for the first time! It might sound like a minor thing, but I can’t overstress how pleased I was to get stuck into some Irish tucker – bangers and mash, cabbage, gravy etc, though I could only nibble at the black pudding – after four months on a strict diet of pasta and pizza.

On the other hand, I did miss the Roman lifestyle just a tad – drinking fantastic coffee at a bar (more like a fuel stop in Rome) and having an apperitivo at dusk. (The few cups of coffee I did have in Dublin were woeful – and Liam’s mate Simon, who we met up with on Bloomsday afternoon, predicted I would become a coffee snob after living in Rome, which I fear is inevitable.)

I made up for this, of course, with many ‘nice pints’ of Guinness. By many, I mean many. I’ve never been a huge fan of the stout, but I drank it like water in Dublin. It’s often said Guinness doesn’t travel well, and this is probably true. Guinness in Dublin, however, is superb. The soft inch or so of froth is a sensuous, suggestive veil one removes ever so slowly from the dark, mysterious goddess beneath. I repeat, drinking Guinness in Dublin is one of the joys of life. As I write this, however, my kidneys are suing me for negligence.

I must admit I was a little surprised to find that not every Dubliner was as excited about Bloomsday as I was – the odd punter at the bar, when inquiring as to my reasons for being here, barely registered a shrug. This was a shame, I felt, considering that Ulysses, while certainly a confounding modernist text, breathes life into and sympathises with the plight of the average Dubliner in a way no work of fiction has, nor perhaps will again. Perhaps this says something too about the bars I found myself in on the first night. But I guess I just had a silly, romantic idea that every Dubliner propped up by a Guinness could probably recite Yeats.


Two things of note happened on my first night in the Dublin. First, a remarkable “it’s a small world” moment. Corralled into idle chat with a group of people in a bar called Leary’s, near O’Connell street, I found that one of the women, a fifty year old from Leicester here for her girlfriend’s birthday, had just been in Australia for her niece’s wedding. When I said I was from Queensland, you can imagine my shock when she replied, ‘Oh really? You know, the wedding was in Queensland, a place called Bribie Island. A little suburb called something like Woorim.’!

Yes, not just Bribie Island, but Woorim, the suburb I first lived in at the age of seven when I moved with mum and Abe to the island, the suburb I moved back to for three years to complete my Masters, the suburb my family lives in now… the smallest suburb on the island etc, etc. To recap: on my first night in Dublin I met a woman from Leicester who had just come back from her niece’s wedding at Woorim, Bribie Island, Queensland, Australia.

Secondly, stumbling past a hotel, I asked the porter where I might get some late night bread to sop up the many pints threatening to make me unseaworthy. To my surprise, the porter, who may have found me humourous (or laughable), invited me into the lobby for a pizza that he and his mate had just ordered, at about 2 am. He was from Lithuania – being barely able to pronounce his name, I certainly couldn’t recall it here. Now most of the immigrants in Dublin seemed to be from Eastern Europe. There are many Poles, for instance, and barely any dark-skinned people to speak of, hardly the swathes of Africans, Asians and Caribbeans found in Rome and London. Anyway, my Lithuanian-Dubliner friend said something very interesting. He felt quite at home in Dublin, he said, because Lithuania was to Russia, in many ways, as Ireland was to England (he went on to explain, though I won’t here.) I wonder what Joyce would’ve made of the analogy.