Pt3 - 21:

 DUBLIN

The suburbs of Ireland’s capital felt like home. Mysterious forces led me to the B&B on Avondale Road in Killiney just following my nose. I’d chosen the southern side of the city deliberately for its proximity to the ferry terminal at Dun Laoghaire (pr Dun Leery), where I’ll board the Sealink for Wales, and to Sandycove, where I’ll pay homage to James Joyce. Avondale was right on a bus route too, so I could park the bullet up for a few days and avail myself of the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transport). And a happy bonus - Bailey’s pub was an easy stroll away.

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Day 1: I rode the 25 minutes into the city on the DART and emerged from Pearse Station into bright, warm sunshine. I strode out for Trinity College, alma mater of some of Ireland’s finest writers and repository of the Book of Kells. I entered through a rear gate and crossed the green playing fields to the Berkley Library, a modern addition to the campus and inconsistent with the fine Georgian architecture around it. What struck me most about the entire Trinity complex was how big it wasn’t. For a venerable institution with an imposing reputation it was actually quite compact and navigable on foot in ten minutes. It was Orientation Day, so there was a festive feel about the place with stalls set up in the main quad to attract new students to the various clubs and societies like Drama, Debating and Drinking. I just made the last one up, students don’t need an invitation for a piss up.

The Old Library, which houses the Kells, goes back to the early 1700s and is all soft light and warm wood panelling. Kells is an illuminated manuscript of some gospels or other created by monks back in the 800s. Along with the manuscripts at Meteora in Greece and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Kells is the oldest text I’m ever likely to see. Before you even get to the book itself, only two folios of which are displayed in climate-controlled cases, there’s an absorbing exhibition placing the book in its historical context. The elaborate text and intricate artwork was interesting enough, but what fascinated me most was the presentation on how the scribes prepared their materials, from the parchment to the various coloured inks. No artliners or highlighters here; the pigments were mixed from scratch using insect dyes, rare ochres and ground metallic elements like ferrous oxide (rust), carbon (graphite) and Malachite. It sounds like bollocks, but the fact is a single monk might spend his entire working life in the scriptorium on just one text. So if you ever think your life is pointless, spare a thought for Brother Kev.

You leave the building via the fabulous Long Room. Sixty-five meters from end to end and with a breathtakingly beautiful barrel-vaulted ceiling, this is the home of something like two hundred thousand of the university’s oldest books. You can smell the pages. Fine marble busts line each side of the room, including Jonathan Swift by Roubiliac. There’s also an original of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic read by Patrick Pearse during the failed Easter Uprising. The piece de resistance for me though is Ireland’s oldest surviving harp, generally believed to have been made in the 1400s. Constructed from oak and willow, it's just a beautiful thing to behold. The Irish harp appears on everything from the currency to the Guinness logo and is forever linked to the legendary High King Brian Boru. How about that? Any other warlord would have an instrument of death on his coat of arms, but for Brian its an instrument of music. Gotta love the Irish.

Seized with the necessary religious fervour I set course for the High Temple of St James. I walked up Grafton Street to St Stephen’s Green where I sat for a while on a bench and watched the ducks describe lazy circles on the shimmering lake, preparing myself mentally for what I was about to receive. Then I took a long detour through the backstreets, past quaint panelled facades and a woman scrubbing the footpath, and eventually came out beside the Guinness Hopstore at St James’s Gate.

I am visitor number one hundred and sixty-four thousand nine hundred and thirty-four, although I prefer to think of myself as a disciple. The time period isn’t clear; it’s probably for the year but there were enough acolytes here today to suggest it could be for the month. Covering 64 hectares of prime Dublin real estate the Guinness Brewery is larger than the Vatican (49 hectares) and has an equivalent population of around 450 souls. St James may not draw as many pilgrims, but we are just as devout.

We begin on the second floor with an exhibition of the inspired advertising campaigns employed to spread The Word. From the playful fantasy of flying toucans balancing a pair of pints on their beaks to the iconic cartoon characters created by John Gilroy back in the 20s and 30s to utter simple trademark phrases like Guinness for Strength, It’s a Lovely Day for a Guinness and Guinness is Good for You, the display is absorbing and highly entertaining. These were supremely sophisticated and effective campaigns. Even kangaroos featured in global ads long before globalisation was even a thing. There are banner ads, billboards, radio and early TV commercials on a loop and all sorts of bar merch.

The first floor walks you through The Process. From the stages of brewing to the packaging and distribution, it’s once again an impressively slick presentation. Designed to engage and pitched in a way that makes you feel like the discriminating member of the very select club you are, the emphasis is on the senses. The wafting aromas of malt and roasted barley, the sight of the rich liquorice liquid and the creamy head are nothing short of salivational. A small theatre runs a short film on the evolution of Guinness from its birth in 1759. The commitment to deep tradition continues with a look at the cooperage where archival footage of the master coopers at work takes you back to a time before mass production.

Then you descend to The Altar on the ground floor. Tricked out like your classic Irish pub, here’s where you swap the tokens attached to your entry ticket for the pints you’ve been keenly anticipating since you crossed the brewery threshold a couple of hours ago. I have drunk from The Source, and it is good.

It was late afternoon when I let myself out and wandered down to the Liffey. You couldn’t call the Liffey beautiful, but I was feeling pleasantly satisfied and sauntered along the south bank to Temple Bar, peering in shop windows without really looking and generally taking in the atmosphere. Of all the cities I’ve visited on this journey Dublin is the one whose streets I’ve already walked many times through the vivid prose of its most celebrated writers, principally James Joyce. Much felt familiar, street names and districts I recognised from The Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And Ulysses. But more on that masterwork tomorrow.

For now, I found a seat in Fitzsimons pub on Temple Bar and settled in for Shepherds Pie and just a couple more of the usual.

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Day 2: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.

And so begins Ulysses, James Joyce’s impressionist painting in prose. Mulligan steps out onto the gun platform of the Martello tower at Sandycove. Although Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus, a character we originally met in Portrait of the Artist, appear on the opening page, Ulysses belongs to the character Leopold Bloom as he navigates a single day in Dublin - the 16^th of June, 1904 to be precise. Joyce’s magnum opus, structurally and stylistically a work of towering genius, is as much an intimate portrait of early 20^th century Dublin as it is a vivisection of Bloom; the city still celebrates Bloomsday annually, with readings, performances, festive music and ritual pub crawls. It may have been the 3^rd of October but I kicked off my own personal Bloomsday with a visit to Sandycove.

The young Joyce himself stayed very briefly in the tower when he was teaching in nearby Dalkey, so it is a natural shrine to his legacy. The ground floor is a museum of memorabilia - letters, photographs, rare editions and a few personal possessions. The middle floor is set up according to its description in the opening scenes of Ulysses with a basic bed, a hammock, a small table, a narrow shelf of knick-knacks and even a porcelain black panther. The gun platform, perhaps three or four meters in diameter, gave out over a calm sea on this splendid, warm morning.

From Sandycove I jumped the DART for the Writer’s Museum on the North Bank of the Liffey. I think what resonates most with me in Irish literature is its sheer radicalism. You’d be hard pressed to find a national literature, whether it be British, French, German, Russian, American, Scandinavian, Australian; whether it be prose, poetry or drama that is so consistently experimental, so consistently out there, that so consistently pushes the boundaries of human expression. From Swift’s A Modest Proposal to Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest; from Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion to Samuel Beckett’s Breath; from Brendan Behan’s The Hostage to Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock there’s a passion for, and command of, the rhythms and nuance of language. And I haven’t even mentioned Yeats and Heaney, or the many others who rode the tiger of Irish nationalism from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century.

The Writer’s Museum is for students of literature. It’s not a razzle-dazzle-in-yer-face kinda place, but a quiet collection of memorabilia and original documents breathing life into writers you’ve only ever met through their characters.

Time evaporated.

Later I strolled across Ha’penny Bridge to Temple Bar, along Anglesea Street past The Oliver St John Gogarty to Dame, then down past the Houses of Parliament. From there I crossed the main road in front of Trinity College, walked down Church Lane to St Andrew’s and the statue of Molly Malone and on down Suffolk Street to Grafton. Off Grafton turned down Duke Street for The Duke and Davy Byrne’s, where Bloom muses on the state of his marriage to Molly over a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of red.

At seven thirty I presented myself at The Duke for the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl. Can it get any better than a piss up at a selection of pubs haunted by legends of Irish literature? About twenty of us set out with two young actors, Frank and Donagh, leading the way. First stop was the steps of the Old Library at Trinity where the lads performed a scene from Beckett’s masterwork Waiting for Godot before ushering us across the road to O’Neill’s on Pearse Street. The bar of choice for the likes of Wilde and Shaw it was a wood panelled warren of a place crowded with Trinity College types.

After a pint at O’Neill’s we wandered across to the steps of the central Tourism Office where the boys treated us to some Wilde and Brendan Behan, then it was off to Behan’s favourite haunt – and he haunted it a lot – The Old Stand on Exchequer Street. A more comfortable establishment this bar; I fell into conversation over my pint with a young couple from Sydney who wanted to hear all about my travels in Turkey.

On the way to our last pub for the evening there was a third performance and finally, on the street right outside Davey Byrne’s, the boys treated us to Breath, the entire play. Frank and Donagh were an absolute hoot, couldn’t have wished for a more entertaining duo to crawl a few Dublin pubs with. Davey’s was also the perfect place to finish up, associated as it is with Dublin’s literary elite and featuring so prominently in Ulysses.

At 10:45 I wandered down to Pearse Station and hopped the DART back to Killiney. As we pootled through the suburbs I took mental stock of the Irish experience. The people are well met and the country rich in variety and contrast, from the lush glens of the northeast to the stark stony landscapes of the temperate west coast with its pandanus palms and wild fuschia. The music, culture, history, architecture are all absorbing and unique. I still don’t know what to make of the paradox that a people so gentle by nature is yet passionate enough to kill each other for an idea. As for Eire – what do you make of a country who calls its leader a t-shirt? It is a country I could live in.

Tomorrow I’ll reluctantly board the ferry for Holyhead, but I leave Ireland well content and wanting more.

Coming up: A whip through Wales and back to London...