ultra gaelic

Good day and you’re very welcome to this guest blog. Kevin informs me that he has painstakingly built up a very substantial readership to his blog over the last six months, and to that end I’d like to welcome both of you back to these pages.

It was a pleasure to spend two weeks with the Hawk and to be privy to his unique habits and foibles. We managed to sample quite a bit of Ireland in these two weeks. Aside from Dublin itself, we spent time in Western Ireland (Galway, the Burren, and Connemara) and made a brief trip to Northern Ireland as well. What follows is five blog posts (including this one) on some of the goings-on in each of these places. 

Roughly half of our two weeks was spent in Dublin. On the day I arrived Kevin was attending one of his many conferences at some fancy Royalist institute. After I found him he supplied me with a set of keys and a suitably businesslike welcome before promptly disappearing into the conference room to check his email, add to his blog, and straighten his tie. A few days later I got to meet some of Kevin’s conference colleagues at a pseudo-French pub on Dawson Street across the road from the institute. A couple of minutes of small talk was followed by a solid hour of electronic publishing gobbledygook –  oh yes Mr. Hawk, you are right to point out that the synapse lead requires extrapolation via the coding interface value, which in turn requires us scheduling several more conferences for the benefit of our clique in exotic international locations. I’ve yet to get my head around what it is that Kevin actually does for a living and I’m not convinced it’s for want of trying. 

Conference over, Hawkington was free to show me around the city. We spent some pleasant evenings in the Dublin pubs, where Kevo unexpectedly developed a fancy for the old Guinness. The drinking culture in Ireland is substantially different from the US or Australia – one can expect to see male and female patrons of all ages and temperaments in the pubs and I don’t remember ever having to put up with wall upon wall of big screen televisions. Often enough the bars seemed to be under the control of a friendly matriarchal type who would make one feel at ease. Heck, if Kevin can relax and enjoy himself in the Irish public houses, anyone can! 

I also managed to drag Kevington along to the theatre a couple of times – a performance of Beckett’s Krapp’s last Tape at the Gate and a staging of Macbeth at the Abbey. Both were really excellent, wouldn’t you say Kevin? Some slight geographical miscalculations on Kevin’s part saw us floundering in the Docklands area of Dublin and subsequently struggling to make it to the Gate on time. We barely managed to wolf down a kebab from a well-meaning vendor, whose culinary pride and unacquaintance  with the English language prevented him from rushing our order, before assuming our seats in the theatre. The existential horrors on stage were ably matched by a rumbling stomach next to me – and though Kevin effectively denied it afterward I well believe that HE was the perpetrator and that the KEBAB he had unhappily forced down his gullet was the cause. Now is the time to confess, Kevin! The Macbeth evening passed by without incident, although the Irish speaking witches at the beginning, coupled with the recollection that the Abbey styles itself as Ireland’s national theatre, had us wondering for a few terrified moments if we had in fact stumbled upon an Irish Shakespeare. But normality was soon restored and it was also a thoroughly enjoyable evening. 

I was under quite a bit of familial pressure to see the famous Book of Kells at Trinity College and expected a bit more enthusiasm from my librarian friend when I mentioned the possibility of a visit. Instead Hawkeye laconically informed me that there were also old books on display at the U of M library, as if such a spiritual masterpiece can be meaningfully compared to a tome on crop rotation in the Upper Peninsula. We did manage to see the book, though, intelligently combining the viewing with a brief tour of the Trinity campus. Our tour guide was a true character, a dapper Dubliner who had blown back in on a money-making mission from his year (the first of many, one felt) in Paris, his gleaming Trinity pink pants attracting young ladies and young children alike. He was the source of many rollicking anecdotes, including one about a nineteenth century midnight gunfight between a peeved don and a group of drunken students, the don naturally coming off second best. 

I can’t complete this entry without making at least passing reference to the extraordinary bog man at the Museum of Natural History, the “Iron Age David Beckham” as he has been called. What a hairdo! If Kevin were to ever meet a violent death in the bogs on a repeat trip to Ireland, his intact, perfectly combed hair would doubtless inspire similar reverence upon excavation of his body some two or three thousand years from now. 

Summary: Dublin is grey, it’s not fancy, it is polite and gets on with things. Despite these qualities, it didn’t strike me as being a city for Kevin.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2010 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Both comments and pings are currently closed.