July 5th Onwards; So I’ve fallen far behind. It was bound to happen one day. I would write a whole heap or do tons of other stuff and realise that I’d practically been setting myself homework and then completely procrastinate for two weeks. In many legs of the Trousers of Time the whole of Travels of Jack ended right there… it went right down the plughole.
Just as well in your leg you have me, undeniable master of perseverance (lets not talk about how we got into this mess in the first place) and I’m of course going to tame this wild beast, shove the bit right back into its mouth and steer it back on track. Know that you’re not missing much except idle chatter for most of the days I’ll be trash-compacting. This is mostly because we did nothing much except survive, in the dullest sense of the word. Surviving can be exciting and fun… like Man vs. Wild. Or if you were watching slow motion wolf-attacks on the Discovery channel. Our surviving was not quite as exciting though. For whatever reason, society strives to take out the excitement that a wolf attack might bring into your life. The most excitement we got was elementary maths and some currency conversion, followed by walking down to aisle nine when it freed up at the super market.
So on the seventh we headed to Dublin. Hendo’s aunty, Terry, had apparently agreed to let us stay with her. Free accomodation was number one on our list of what we wanted. I asked Hendo many times if she knew all five of us were coming. ‘You’re sure you’ve asked her?’
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘She knows five people are arriving. To stay at her house.’
‘Yep!’
‘Five people. Us. House. Hers. Knows. She does?’
It took a full day of travel – two subway lines in London, three more trains with National Rail across the country side and a trip with Irish Ferries from Holyhead to Dublin Ferryport. When we were cruising along the coast on the train it hit me how long it had been since I’d properly seen the sea. Keep in mind that for nearly every day in the last twelve years of my life I’d be looking at the sea and horizon from morning till night. It’s funny how you completely forget about it until you see it again. Same thing with sunsets. Living on the a western beach I’ve seen it every night – haven’t really had one since I’ve been away.
The trains we took were pretty much guesswork. I wasn’t sure what time any of them were coming, nor entirely what places we were changing. We managed though. We got to Dublin and met up with Terry. She waved and gave us a bit of a cheer. Walking through the Greater Docklands of Dublin reminded me of Port Adelaide a bit – albeit a little more modern and a little less… stabby. Her apartment was very nice. She’d gone ahead and organised mattresses and everything for us. Another lovely person we met on our travels!
Kate got the spare bed, we all lumped our bags onto the floor of that room, and the rest of us proceeded to make her living room a lot smaller than it was. Ryan got the couch, Ben and Hendo shared the carpet and mattress and I, being the most experienced floor-sleeper, opted to sleep on the floor. It was a good floor – not cold, not too hard – though a week of it did cramp my shoulder up, but a good sleeping floor when all was said and done. A lot of our time in Dublin was spent sleeping in. We’d go to bed late, making far too much noise and keeping Terry up, go out later in the day just before everything closed and then come back quite early and stay up eating icecream and yelling. Satellite television did not help the situation.
One of the main attractions of our time there were double Sex in the City nights. I blame Mel and Spav for getting me into that show way back on our trip to Mission Beach. We watched a good two and a half seasons there. The boys got into it more than the ladies by the end. This time I was quite a loud advocate of the show – Kate too, somewhat, since I had made her watch the movie with me. By the end of the week everyone but Hendo was loving it. I think that deep down he loved it too.
When we did venture out of the house we did manage to do quite a bit. Dublin Castle, drinks at the Brazen Head - Ireland’s oldest pub (12th century sometime), the drink was Guinness of course, and I had some Irish Stew. Lots of galleries and museums (since they’re always free), but mainly icecream and Sex and the City.
Here’s one thing you should know though, but perhaps if you’re from Dublin now would be a good time to stop reading; everyone in Dublin is unhappy and in most cases, unbearably ugly. In fact, there was such a lack of ‘vision’ on the streets of Dublin, and in the pubs of Dublin, that we had to make a new word just to encapsulate our feelings about such apparitions. That word is ‘Dublin’. It mainly started once we got back into London, but Dublin is the newly coined term for anything a) ugly – this is it’s primary use, b) expensive, c) bad. It can be all three at once, but it doesn’t happen often. Often you would hear us exclaim, ‘here come some Dublins!’ or, ‘Where the hell are we? Freakin’ Dublin or something…’
So yeah, the city didn’t always impress me. Like I said, the people are pretty Dublin, the Liffey is somehow more rancid and thicker than the Thames (quite an effort), everything is Dublin expensive. That said, there are good things about Ireland. Most of them are outside the city. The country side is great. We took a couple of day tours to check out the attractions. Number one of the list for me was Newgrange… I’d seen it so many times on Documentaries, I’d heard of it in my Pagan studies, it was kind of odd to think I could finally get to see it.
The day started in the bus station. But I’ll skip to the exciting parts. We saw a whole load of places – Old Mellifont Abbey, the ruins of an old Abbey set up by solitude seeking priests way back when. I liked the figure they had from the height of the Abbey’s popularity – three hundred laymen and one hundred priests living on the site. It kind of gives weight to the old saying, ‘it takes three men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the clouds.’ We saw some of the High Crosses, surrounded by graves and a huge ruined bell-tower, drove through all sorts of idyllic places.
Newgrange itself was by far the highlight of the tour. It was one of the highlights of my entire trip, in a subtle way. This really is one of the oldest existing monuments erected by man for whatever reason. It’s about five thousand years old. It was in use for thousands of years and it is still standing. It’s hard to describe. An old passage tomb, hill built on top, rock wall built on one side. Stones set around the outside.
When we got came around the corner and arrived at the site the sky was completely grey, one of those eerie days, a sort of pall hanging over the world. Keep in mind it was once the land of the dead, in a way – where they took their dead to be cremated and sit inside the tomb. Every year on the winter solstice a beam of light shines through the sky box above the door and fills the inner chamber with a golden light. They simulate this for you with a lightbulb. It’s not quite the same, but it’s still incredible. The engineering behind the whole thing. The meaning it had for the people who used it. I think I need to think about it a bit more before I keep talking. It got me thinking anyway. It just seems to be a great weight on the land around it. You feel it when you’re there.
That’s it for recap one. The next recap will be even better. I thank people. You might be one of them!
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