Dublin on My Mind [video]
I skipped down the stairs of our hotel, the Mont Clare, in fairly fashionable Merrion Square on a pharmacy mission.
I turned the corner, passed an antiquated, rather haphazard shop, and stopped.
A white-thatched, distinguished gentleman was sitting behind a counter, reading out loud to a few customers.
I stopped to listen.
It turns out this was the pharmacy I was looking for: Sweny’s.
Here in a 12 by 14 foot space, the gentleman reader, was one P.J. Murphy reading from James Joyce’s Ulysses!
To his customers.
On the counter of Sweny’s were bars of lemon soap, because this was the original store where Leopold Bloom bought his.
And so, welcome to Dublin, a city so rich in literary history, one wonders how it remains so unpretentious and accessible.
Perhaps producing such literary lions as Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Brendan Behan, Samuel Becket and even Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels, has made Dublin a city of witty, funny, clever people.
As I experienced them, Dubliners are some of the most natural, open people I’ve ever met, with no attitudes whatsoever.
Not at all my experience in other other European capitals, say Paris or Rome.
From the start, Dublin is wonderfully built.
It’s designed on a human scale, a place for people, not for huge, anonymous high-rise buildings.
The streets, the cafes, the museums, pubs are all accessible and easy to walk to.
It’s a kinetic place with good energy, a place where young and old, male and female mix comfortably with each other, comfortable with who they are and how they look.
One has to respect the Irish and the ways they maintain their warmth and humor in the face of recent national tragedies and present day real economic woes, like 16 per cent unemployment.
A tour of the Kilmainham Gaol , for example, is very sobering.
This horrifically cramped, dark and depressing place was where the British executed 14 leaders of the short-lived Irish “Easter Uprising” in 1916, a drive by the Irish for independence from Britain, and brutally put down.
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