A Stately Plump Liampold

ST LUKE'S: Still catching up... it's something I seem to preface every post with but that's just the way it is as I bang these posts out in windows of slow time during my working afternoons. That's also my excuse as to why they're crap and often riddled with grammatical errors.

So this is the post where I recount Dublin. If you want a fuller account try Rocket to Rome where my travelling companion has far more time to attend to the spurious malarkey. The purpose of my visit to Dublin: Bloomsday, the 16th of June. For the uninitiated Bloomsday is the day that James Joyce's Ulysses takes place on. It was a rather touching way of commemorating the day he first met his wife Nora in 1904.

After catching a delayed Ryanair flight, then waiting an hour for the slow bus into Dublin, I was well and truly ready for a pint by the time I got to the hostel. Unfortunately I couldn't find Jaya anywhere. So I ducked into the pub across the road and lo and behold. Sidling up to the bar it was time to imbide my first pint of Guiness. (Second actually, I had one at the Oxford with Flo in preperation about two weeks before.) And then, as Yon Yonson would say, so it goes. A pint of Guiness here, a pint there, a pub showing hockey here, a blues bar there. Most of the night was spent in the Temple Bar, Dublin's world famous tourist trap. But with pubs, bars and clubs serving up all manner of entertainment there was no real reason to get off the beaten track. Eventually we ended up at the pub around the corner from the hostel.

It was glorious waking up in the morning with nothing more than a slight hangover. Lucky too. It was June 16th and we had a walking tour booked. After a hearty Irish breakfast (exactly the same as it's English counterpart) we walked north through the city to the James Joyce Centre where various people were reading extracts of the novel aloud. Amongst the readers we heard were the Ambassador of India and the Ambassador of Australia. Inside there was a special breakfast going on that looked like heaps of fun. But both Jaya and I had baulked at the cost. You win some, you lose some.

Our walking tour took us through a particular chapter of the book. It was a pleasure to see Dublin, with the guide's help, through the eyes of both Joyce and the novel's protagonist Leopold Bloom. He even pointed out several elusive jokes in the text including the spot where two pigeons where debating who to shit on. Our tour took us to the National Museum but rather than go inside we walked around the corner in search of several other Joyce locations. Stopping for lunch at the World Street Entertainer's Championships and then wandering through the National Gallery while our food digested. The National Gallery, free, had a couple of really good pictures including works by Vermeer, Velazquez, Goya, Caravaggio and some of the Brueghel boys.

Next up we met up with Jaq's boyfriend Simon whose just moved to Ireland and we took a guided tour through Trinity College. It was two euros more than an entry ticket to the Book of Kels and included everything. When you put it like that how could you say no? Again there is a better, more indepth description of this on Rocket to Rome. And frankly, I can't be bothered saying something that's already been said before.

The evening was one of Irish food, Guiness with whiskey chasers and an incredibly intense game of hurling between Tipperary and Limmerick that ended in a tie after extra time. What made it more exciting was that it was a replay of a game from the previous weekend that had also finished deadlocked at the end of extra time. I discovered the next day in The Sunday Times that the comeback Tipperary mounted during the game was one of the greatest in the annals of Gaelic sports. And we were there. Well, we were in a pub that was showing it on tv. In our search for a music venue we also managed to sneak a peak at St. Patrick's Cathedral and Christ Church. Both quite beautiful in thoroughly unprentensious ways. Again we ended up in our local, this time hosting a full on hip hop club complete with blinging blokes and, what Scottish would describe as, bangin' beats.

On my final day I was going to visit Sandy Cove, the only non-Dublin location in the novel. However the trains weren't running regularly enough and I figured I'd definitely be back in Ireland one day. Instead I visited several of the Ulysses pubs for more Guiness and watched some more Gaelic sport. Then I went to the airport. And watched some more Gaelic sport. And drank some more.

So the weekend combined my three great loves: booze, sport and literature. Trés magnifique.