Dublin Words - Part One

   

Dublin Words – Part One

‘ You know I thought you were really boring when we first met’   Sam,  Circa 1996

My very dear friend Sam and I have known each other since we were sixteen and I am fairly sure we will know each other when we are a hundred and sixteen. She made the above comment to me when we had only known each other a few months.  I took it as a compliment but it wasn’t until I moved to Dublin in 2009 that I knew exactly what she had meant.

While London had me at a hello, Dublin took her own good sweet time to work her charm on me. It's pretty Dublin but you need to work a little, or rather to walk a little, to uncover her gems. The parks are a good place to start; secret cosy Georgian parks are dotted all over the city. Merrion Square is opposite the National Gallery, St Stephens Green is smack bang by Grafton St and Phoenix Park takes up a good chunk of the North. The grounds round the Modern Art Gallery, a little way out from the centre, also have some remarkably impressive grounds in which you can stretch your legs.

But, for the record, my favourite park is tucked away in behind a performing arts venue. It has a name but I prefer to refer to it as 'the secret garden'.  It is cosy and intimate, complete with a fountain and maze and bordered by a significantly high stone fence. It is full of nooks and crannies and the perfect place to have a few sneaky (and illegal) wines on a sunny Sunday afternoon. And once a year  it hosts a comedy festival where I had the pleasure of introducing my best Irish gal friend to Tim Minchin and ,in return, was introduced to the funny gorgeousness of Des Bishop.

 I am not going to tell you where my secret park is because I do not want to spoil the pleasure you’ll get from discovering it yourself. Here is a hint - it’s a stone’s throw from Harcourt St.

And when the weather was too wet ( and it regularly was) for parks, I soon discovered indoor gems like the Chester BeattyLibrary (a delightful and extensive collection of manuscripts, books and nicknacks. A stationery nerd’s heaven) and the Project Arts Centre to feed and nourish the mind and imagination. And the bars and cafés along and around Aungier St and Camden St to keep the physical body as equally pleased – Shebeen chic  was a particular favourite. And many thanks to the antipode baristas around my favourite part of town for knowing what a flat white is.

However, when I look back on my slow-cook romance with Dublin, I realised it was not so much what I saw but rather what I heard (or read) that really made me fall in love with Dublin. For me, Dublin is not about the pictures, but the stories.

This is a town of storytellers. And the Irish have certainly produced a few:

Bram Stoker, James Joyce (who spent most of his adult life in Paris, but solely wrote about Dublin), Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, J.M Synge, Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Flan O’Brien, Claire Keegan, Colm Toibin

The lists goes on…

 The first real spark Dublin and I shared was at the very pretty National Library. My first few weeks in Dublin were spent in the pursuit of a home and a job and a quick visit to the library was a way of distracting myself from the sobering reality of trying to find work in a post-Celtic-Tiger-mid- GFC Dublin. There was a Yeats exhibition on and part of the exhibition included  a collection of recordings of Yeats reading his work. You could just sit there and listen to him eloquently recount his unrequited love for that 'passionate woman' Maud Gonne and stories of the young revolutionaries that were executed by the British in The Easter Rising in 1916 -


           ' Now and in time to be /  Wherever green is worn / Are changed, changed utterly/ A terribly beauty is born'


(And my love of good Irish storytellers continues, I recently saw a production of Terminus at the Sydney Opera House. Geez, the Irish can write.)

It was also in Dublin visiting the Book of Kells that I came across this little poem - 
  
    ' I and Pangur Ban my cat / Tis a like task we are at / Hunting mice is his delight /  Hunting Words I sit all night'


And one evening after attending a reading of a woman whose name I wish I had made note of I scribbled this down in my notebook - 'all day I resented the rain, I especially resented the rain as I walk down O'Connell St to see the reading, my umbrella turned inside out. Again. I resented everything when I realised the reading had actually started at 6pm, not 6.30. But then as I was listening to the reading, the landscapes came to me through words and the language took me out of myself, out of my mood and my resentment and straight into the present of craggy mountains, and sentences, and stone women waiting for love to return them to flesh. And in the background of all these stories was the rain, falling on the roof like magic and  it all turned me, into a better me. '


Yes, it was the words that did it for me.
And not just the ones in the books...

Yeats 

Maud ( who just wanted to be friends)