Give my regards to Broadway, Remember me to Herald Square, Tell all the gang at Forty-Second Street, that I will soon be there.
Because it’s come to my notice that they’re making a movie out of Hamilton for release next year and we’ve been binge-watching musicals during lockdown.
I’m taking a Yankee Doodle Dandy dander through the American musical with a stop-off in London’s West End and Dublin’s Theatreland too.
Come From Away: Which is all visitors coming into North America anyway.
These ones, of course, were the 38 planeloads who had to land in the small Newfoundland town of Dander after 9/11.
And found out a lot more about each other as I did when I saw it in Denver.
We all come from far away and have become friends over the years at IPW, the American Travel Fair, who bring the best of Broadway to whichever town is in town.
I can’t recall what brought my short-lived Cubs career to an end nor much about what we did in the Scout Hut, but I do remember the Haunted House next door.
In these less innocent and imaginative days haunted houses seem to have gone out of fashion.
But the ghosts and ghoulies haven’t gone away, and with all of us consigned to our houses these days you’d better not have been ignoring them.
Scotland’s Scary One
Bram Stoker was certainly alive to their presence and spirited up the Dead when he was inspired to write Dracula on a visit to north-east Scotland.
And placed the nocturnal room in Slains Castle in Cruden Bay as the dwelling of one Count Dracula.
Although much like his crypt if you delve inside you’ll find there’s lots to sink your teeth into.
Dublin’s Bram Stoker Festival is always finding new ways of reinventing themselves and they’re billing this year’s digital offering as a Grave New World.
Slains Castle
Which is what we’ll all be doing too, turning our homes into Haunted Houses… and The Scary One and her Mini-Me have been dressing up for the part.
Now I don’t know where the Scout Hut is in my new hometown of North. Berwick but my mother-in-law never sees a guising.
Pumpkin time
And here’s an Irish Halloween blessing to keep away the gremlins…
At all Hallow’s Tide, may God keep you safe,
From goblin and pooka and black-hearted stranger
From harm of the water and hurt of the fire
From thorns of the bramble, from all other danger,
From Will O’ The Wisp haunting the mine,
From stumbles and tumbles and tricksters to vex you,
And because this week I’ll be hooking up with my German pals for a virtual celebration of Beethoven, this being the 250th anniversary of his birth, I give you the classics.
Ear, ear Beethoven
This one’s for Elise
Beethoven, Teplice, Czech Republic: And you’d expect to see Ludwig in this wellness town back in the 18th Century.
Because Bohemia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Vienna and Prague were musical centres where Germans flocked to.
I paid my tribute to The Great Man this year at the Beethoven Spa Hotel in Teplice where he stayed, and his room is still there for him.
And he got treatment for his ears, tried out some funky horns and left his death mask.
We also tried out the titular cafe, and the hot chocolate and chocolate cake for research purposes. An empty piano awaited the maestro.
If Beethoven had written a Fur Katarina I’d point you to that in celebration of our host and my pal, but we have the equally enchanting Elise, so here’s Fur Elise.
Rock me Amadeus
Eine Kleine Sadie Music
Mozart, Salzburg, Austria: And, yes, the Austrian singer Falco toasted Mozart with this hit.
A Wiener, he was what Mozart wanted to be, though almost certainly not in musical terms, but certainly in his origins.
Wolfgang was no fan of his home place, Salzburg, which he thought had a small-town attitude.
High standards. We loved it on out ski trip to Soll (it is a Sound if Music Mecca too).
Although the museums are too spread out, you do get right under Wolfie’s skin ;and hair). Here’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, pretty much the only German I know.
Vivaldi’s Veneto
The Dragon, Constsnce and Bandanaman in Venice
Vivaldi, Padova/Veneto: And for many, particularly the Eighties generation, punk violinist Nigel Kennedy, and his rendition of Four Seasons, was it for classical music.
I don’t know if Kieran ‘The Dragon’ who was in our party in Padova was an aficionado but he took casual chic to a new level.
I take some responsibility as I’d wheeled him and fellow Venice newbie Constance out to Lagoon City.
We were back late but had each taken a change of clothes while Dragon was still in his boardies.
While the orchestra were kitted out and the waiters and waitresses too in the sumptuous Padova Botanical Gardens.
Puccini, Prague: And long before rockers namechecked cities, the Classical composers were doing it.
Whisper it, the opera is set in Paris, the Bohemian bit is the fun label attached to what are modern-day Czechs.
And so, for me, the ideal place to watch Giacomo Puccini’s Classic is the State Opera in Prague.
Everybody loves to party in Prague, monks in the Strahov Monastery Brewery and priests swigging Champagne during the intermission at the State Opera.
Handel with care
No cats or mice allowed
Handel Dublin: And George Handel chose Dublin, the second city of the Empire, because he felt the London audiences had started to take him for granted.
No shrinking violet George, there was a statue to him erected in Dublin while he was still alive.
The premiere was packed and ladies were asked not to wear hooped dresses so as to allow more in.
That show was performed at the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street. Now you’ll want to go to Christchurch Cathedral for your opera fix.
But not the place for a cat or a mouse whose mummified remains are on display in the cathedral’s crypt…. they’d got stuck in the organ.
It’s immortalised in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
Anyhoos Christ Church Cathedral puts on recitals and thanks to my friends at Travel Department we channeled old Handel one balmy evening.
All joking aside about Zlatan ‘The Ego’ Ibramovich being cut down to size.
But is it right that the Sweden soccer superstar should befall the same fate as Edward Colston in Bristol, Lord Nelson in Dublin and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad?
A little big woman: Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi
Sometimes it’s the design that catches you and stops you in your tracks.
And so it is with this remarkable little woman,
The President of the USA, Lydon Baines, Johnson took extraordinary measures in stopping her saying her piece at the Democratic Convention by having television change its schedule.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s life was extraordinary, born into a sharecropping family and picking cotton from the age of six, she was later forced out of her home, threatened with her very life and beaten.
All because she wanted to sign on on the voting register.
She summed up her struggle in the Civil Rights Movement thus, and of course nobody could say it better: ‘I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.’
Us journalists like to think of ourselves as hard-bitten but I had to choke back the tears walking through the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam…. http://www.annefrank.org.
The audio narrative dwelt on a passage in her diary where she mentions that she wants to become a journalist when she’s older.
And what a journalist she would have been… ethical (yes, some of us are), prying and fearless.
Amsterdam is one of the world’s great cities and Anne one of history’s greatest figures… http://www.iamsterdam.com.
Statues should be provocative and the Czechs have this one down to a T.
‘Piss’ is the good people of Prague’s commentary on the politicians who have urinated all over their country.
You’ll not see it here but once the water gets flowing they pee all over the map of the country.
The Czechs as well as being the world’s biggest lager drinkers, per population, with some of the world’s best beers, are wonderfully anti-establishmentarian.
There are statues to musical giants all over the world but while former Thin Lizzy lead singer Phil Lynott isn’t the best or most famous singer of them all, try telling that to Dubliners.
It is a tradition now for visitors to Dublin to have their photo taken outside Philo’s statue off the main Grafton Street shopping thoroughfare.
That other statue, the Tart with the Cart, Molly Malone? Well you can leave that to the uninitiated.
Martin Luther stood as a defiant symbol of Dresdeners refusal to see their city disappear after the Allies’ firebombing at the end of the Second World War.
Dresden was known as the Florence of the Elbe and it is one of the great architectural stories of our age, or any age, to see how the Dresdeners have rebuilt their city to the same grandeur of its renaissance days.
Yes, the Little Mermaid is more visited, but personally I prefer the top-hatted Hans in the heart of Copenhagen.
Hans was an eccentric all right and once decamped on Charles Dickens, walked around the house in the starkers, and made it difficult for Charlie to show him the door.
Nelson Mandela Voting Line, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
March to Freedom: In Port Elizabeth
Statues shouldn’t just stand there. No, really. And this is a moving symbolic Voting Line which sums up South African democracy.
This is our host Sisseko and beside him a kid as he would have been back in 1995 when South Africa had its historic vote.
It is also immersive and you don’t have to climb up a plinth to get next to it as they do in Glasgow when they put police cones on the Duke of Wellington.
It is the way I should imagine that Nelson, a native of the Eastern Cape, would have wanted it.
But these selections aren’t marked on the best bars but the best bars if you see what I mean.
Bustin’ Boston
Irish-America: A Boston institution
The Black Rose, Boston (https://www.blackroseboston.com): Norm Peterson is my all-time drinking hero (now my big pal Finlay has gone to the Great Saloon in the sky).
My friend Neily worked with the Cheers franchise on their carts (the exterior of the bar is the same but the interior was Hollywood) I worked at the Black Rose.
Where every night an Irish-American sang standards (and I can’t get The Black Velvet Band out my head) and at the end of play the boss gave the staff a couple pf pints.
Glasgow’s Bar, Tobago Parlatuvier Bay, Tobago: Now Glasgow bars have improved since my childhood when there would be grills on the windows.
The common denominator here is that this is Karl Glasgow’s gaff where the locals, many of them workmen stop by to eat and drink at the bar and look out at this.
Mary’s Bar, Wicklow Street, Dublin (https://marysbar.ie): And this bar off the best shopping thoroughfare in the Irish capital. Grafton Street, has it all…
They have a quid pro quo relationship with WOWBURGER downstairs and you can take your beer, burger and chips up and sit at the bar.
Teamwork? I find the destination and I leave Herself to organise us getting there, so is it my fault if I give her the wrong dates?
So when we turned up in Monaghan one week early we had to rely on the kindness of the townfolk… Justin Asian Street Food, Monaghan County Museum and Brehon Brewery.
We did make our high tea meeting a couple of weeks later at Castle Leslie where Paul and Heather Mills got married. Let It Be!
I’ve been going to Donegal all my life… to visit my grandparents, my auntie, and doing an annual pilgrimage with my Mum since.
We always stay in the hotel in the nearest town to her Brockagh homestead, Jackson’s http://www.jacksonshotel.ie in Ballybofey where the Irish Coffee was born.
Twelve and a half years of it I spent in a soulless, friendless office… but thankfully my pal Nicky runs the iconic InterContinental next door… The InterCon… what a Ledge!
And Kilmainham Jail http://kilmainhamgaolmuseum.ie where the 1916 leaders were executed including the gangrenous Scot James Connollly, strapped to his chair.
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.
Eine Kleine Sadie Music
The Dragon, Constsnce and Bandanaman in Venice
