I need little excuse to go to Dublin, one of my all-time favourite cities. The only trouble is that recovery between visits takes so long. I’m neither as young nor as thirsty as I once was. And I’m still haunted by a bizarre trip I made many years ago when I hadn’t even intended to visit the Fair City. I’d been at a family party in Co. Down, drinking Guinness with Bushmills chasers for what seemed like days.
Next thing I knew, I was waking up starkers three days later
It was an accident waiting to happen, of course, and, thanks to too much poitín, the wheels came off spectacularly in the Dufferin Arms, Killyleagh. Next thing I knew, I was waking up starkers three days later on the floor of what turned out to be the honeymoon suite of the Central Hotel, Exchequer Street, Dublin. I was completely alone and have absolutely no idea how I got there nor with whom. I spent the next 24 hours being sick.
I vowed to tread much more carefully this time and took a chaperone in the form of a rather nervous Mrs Ray. I had persuaded her to come with the promise of plenty of wild swimming (it’s her thing), lots of Irish literature and only a modicum of drinking.
We made straight for Cavistons Seafood Restaurant in Sandycove. It was even better than I remembered. It might not be quite as charmingly shabby chic as in its previous incarnation a few doors down but, crikey, the food’s top notch (oysters, chilli and ginger prawns, chargrilled lemon sole on the bone and wild Irish brill and chorizo, since you ask) and the Guinness can’t be bettered. The staff are infectiously jolly too.
Such a blissful, boozy, belt-tightening lunch was probably not the best preparation for our dip at nearby Forty Foot, the promontory long used by locals for sea swimming and a good natter. The neighbouring Martello tower was famously stayed in by James Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty, and it not only provides the backdrop to the start of Ulysses but also serves as the James Joyce Museum.
Two minutes in what ‘stately, plump’ Buck Mulligan (based on Gogarty) refers to as ‘the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea’ was enough for me, and I decamped to the tiny JJM while Mrs R continued to turn blue in the foam.
Then it was off to Dublin’s Docklands and the newly revamped Anantara The Marker Hotel, so named because it was the last marker or payment site on the Grand Canal from Athlone. The hotel is lovely, with an enticing rooftop bar boasting cracking cocktails (mine’s an Amaretto and Cherry Sour, thanks) and great views of both city and mountains (‘If you can’t see the mountains, it’s raining, and if you can, it’s going to rain,’ runs an old saw); a spa and a fancy restaurant, Forbes Street, overseen by local hero Gareth Mullins.
We had a delightful corner room flooded with sun thanks to windows on three sides overlooking Grand Canal Square, heart of what is known as Silicon Docks, home to the likes of Airbnb, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, Meta and TikTok. We perked ourselves up with a couple of Irish coffees and The Marker’s signature, ‘Poetry and Places’ high tea, a vast and tasty spread of sandwiches and pastries enhanced by a choice of 16 different teas and glasses of ice-cold Bollinger.
Ireland has won four Nobel Prizes for Literature (Beckett, Heaney, Shaw, Yeats) and it values its writers more than most, with scores of memorials, plaques and statues dotted all over the city, and we walked off our unexpected feast by picking off as many as we could, some deliberately and some that we just happened upon.
The best bits included the statue of Patrick Kavanagh on his canal-side bench, the birthplaces of both George Bernard Shaw and Leopold Bloom (yes, yes, I know he’s fictional, but there’s a plaque commemorating his birth ‘in Joyce’s imagination’ at 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street); one of W. B. Yeats’s many homes at 96 St Stephen’s Green and the louche, lounging statue of Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square Park.
We hung out at the Museum of Literature Ireland, an absorbing celebration of Ireland’s greatest writers including the Nobel Laureates above along with such titans as Brendan Behan, Mary Lavin, Sean O’Casey, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Katharine Tynan and more, many more. And, best of all, we dug deep and immersed ourselves in Dublin’s renowned Literary Pub Crawl, a hilarious three-hour tour of the city’s finest pubs in the company of actors/musicians John and Kevin, complete with songs, poems and beautifully declaimed passages of prose, washed down with lots and lots of Guinness. Two unexpected facts I picked up: Samuel Beckett wrote part of Oh! Calcutta! and, although not young, I am still thirsty.
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