DUBLIN: As Liam and I found ourselves near Merrion Square (in search for the chemist in Ulysses that sold Bloom the lemon-scented soap, which we couldn’t find), I made a request to visit the Oscar Wilde statue, and the house where he once lived (now the American Academy), which we almost couldn’t avoid anyway. 
(Myself and Oscar)
Such a pilgrimage to Oscar would normally in no way be an aside – and even now, I find it difficult to justify describing it thus, The Picture of Dorian Gray being one of the very first ‘literary’ books I read, at seventeen, which was a personal discovery… Ah those were the days, when literature was fresh and new. O god, am I beginning to sound jaded? (Or just more like a jobbing writer? I hope the latter.)
Hold on… Joycean moment coming on: as I write this, I remember hearing, blaring from a loud speaker on a tourist bus (!) as I stood on the corner across the road from the statue, that the jacket worn by Oscar-the-statue (see photo) is carved out of... jade.
After visiting the jade-coated but in no way jaded Oscar, we popped in to the National Gallery across the road. For some reason I was skeptical, but Liam showed me a guidebook that stressed the gallery was worth it. In hindsight, I’d agree. We whipped around in about forty minutes, and managed to see a handful of Goyas (the fantastic portrait of actress Dona Antonia Zarate c.1805), a Vermeer, a Rembrandt, and a Caravaggio (the latter two particularly gripping – it’s not appropriate I don’t think to use the word ‘gripping’ to describe Vermeer). What’s more, it was free. Forty minutes well spent digesting our lunch and looking at pictures.
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