Just a city boy Born and raised in West Glasgow Took the midnight bus Going all the way
JOURNEYMAN JIMMY
With apologies to Journey, but I am a city boy and these are my city delights.
Kicking off with Dublin where I have worked for the last 13 years (and hope to do so again) here is my occasional series City Delights on my favourite cities.
There will be no science to this.
I’ll just dip in and out of the cities I’ve visited and loved, ones I hope to see, and some I’m not that keen on.
The Four Courts: Photo by Picography on Pexels.com
The History
Dublin should really be called Blackpool, but thank goodness it’s not.
Not that the English pierside city hasn’t got its charms. But!
Black pool (dubh linn) was the name given to the settlement founded in 888.
Where the Poddle stream met the river Liffey to form a deep pool at Dublin Castle http://www.dublincastle.ie.
The Vikings, the Normans, the British, the Irish, the buskers have all sampled her pleasures.
And she was probably an amalgam of many Scottish/English/American and Irish traders of the 18th and 19th centuries anyway.
But Irish fishmongers did yell ‘Cockles and Mussels Alive, Alive O.’
Today you’ll find Molly, who is known locally as ‘The Tart with the Cart’, outside the Irish Tourist Information Centre. http://www.discoverireland.ie.
The Dubs have a way with words, a sharp sense of humour and a healthy mockery of their celebrities.
The Ace with the Bass: Phil Lynott
Feet of clay
The Fag on the Crag: Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square.
The Prick with the Stick: James Joyce on North Earl Street.
The Crank on the Bank: The cranky poet Patrick Kavanagh.
The Ace with the Ass: The much-loved Thin Lizzy rocker Phil Lynott.
And when the Dubs come to honour their Greatest Ever Citizen…
The Smart Ass in the Sunglasses.
Look out for the bullet holes: O’Connell statue
The fighting Irish
Dublin still bears the scars of its wars for independence.
On the plinth of the statue of Daniel O’Connell, ‘The Liberator’, the entry point to Dublin’s most historic city.
And at Kilmainham Gaol http://www.kilmainhamgaol.ie where the leaders were shot, among them James Connolly who was strappped to a chair on account of his gangrenous leg.
The craic
The Champ and his Dad at Mary’s
The party spirit is indistinguishably Irish but the word ‘craic’ is borrowed from the Scots, even referenced in Robert Burns.
Before making its way over the Irish Sea to the Ulster Scots.
What’s most important though is where to find it.
The simplest answer is: every day on the streets of Dublin.
But here are a few pubs where it’s in great supply.
