Dublin 2018

'Well, you're barely up before you're down again', the taxi driver who took us from Dublin airport to our rented apartment on Monday commented about the flight we'd had from Gatwick, which was true. Flying still seems an entirely unreal and hallucinatory thing to me, and I am glad when it stops!

I enjoyed Dublin. I found the city centre has an exciting mixture of building styles, mainly on a fairly small scale apart from the grand civic buildings, which are mainly Georgian. Modernism is done very well and on Rathmines Road (where I found myself wandering) I found the only bit of Art Deco I saw:

Christ Church Cathedral is rather a High Victorian jewel with the added benefit of some gloomy monuments in the crypt. Charles I and II are frankly zombified here:

The National Gallery has a dark room full of the painted glass work of Poe illustrator Harry Clarke, sumptuous and charismatic:

The sun shone for our walk around the cliff path on the Howth headland and on the heron I saw on the Dodder River near our flat:

At Dublin Castle I learned that the Order of St Patrick was founded in 1783 by George III at the request of the Earl of Buckingham, the Viceroy, so he could dress up in blue satin and a cocked hat with massive plumes. 

On our last evening we ate at L Mulligan Grocer in Stoneybatter, and persuaded by the ethical and local sourcing of the meat I had a slice of ham cooked so spectacularly I am tempted never to eat animal flesh again. And the sun set along the Liffey as we made our way back.