The wife and I have just returned from a weekend in Dublin. It's been a few years since we darkened its door, and, as I was there on Friday for work anyhoos, we decided to extend the visit.
Dublin has a special place in my heart. I spent a lot of time there in my late teens and early twenties - an impressionable time for anyone of course. But Dublin is an easy city for a easily-led fop to become enamoured of. It delights in its artists rather than its buildings, which is unusual for a capital city. This is probably a function of its having been built by the British. It is *full* of striking Georgian terraces, making it look very unlike the rest of Ireland. Dubliners, therefore, don't take massive pride in the city's aesthetic qualities. No, it's their wordsmiths that get the praise.
Take for example Davy Byrne's pub. Leopold Bloom stopped for his lunch there in Joyce's Ulysses, and acolytes still call in to replicate the scene with a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. Compare this with The Grapes in London's Limehouse. As a child, Dickens used regularly to visit Limehouse to call on his uncle who lived there. His uncle would take the boy to the pub and place him on a table in to sing ballads for the entertainment of the regulars. The pub is still largely as it was in Dickens' age. It's a wonderfully atmospheric place, with its dark smoke-stained wood panelling and the sound of The Thames lapping up outside the rear windows. But how many Londoners are aware of this place? Hundreds maybe. London is so busy hoicking-up its petticoats to attract tourists with a bit of architectural leg that it rather overlooks its gems like this.
