Pop Trivia

Do you remember the children's rhyme Pop Goes The Weasel? One of the alternative verses mentions the City Road and the Eagle.

Our new office is on City Road, and The Eagle pub, mentioned in the song, is across from us. I just ate a chicken pie there for lunch. Nice selection of draughts, too.

New Office

My office was moved over the weekend and this week is our first in our new location. We're ten minutes' walk further from London Liverpool Street than our previous location, so my walking time doubles.

The facilities are a big improvement. They're not extraordinary, though definitely swankier than most of the Portland and Seattle offices I've worked in. But just not having the shortcomings of our previous facilities (like having, oh, clean windows, elevators that work consistently) is a welcome step up. The lobby is quite smart, it's staffed so I don't have to deactivate an alarm when I get in, and we even have glass doors on the lifts.

I like our location less, however. We used to be on the edge of the Square Mile, the City, the area around London Liverpool Street containing much of London's financial offices, including the Tower 42 and The Gherkin buildings. Now we are in a more mixed neighbourhood, with council towers nearby, some offices, some small businesses, and a mix of pubs and restaurants (Jamie Oliver's is nearby).

Along the way I'm getting familiar with the pedestrian walkways under the roundabout at Old Street - there are 8 exits. Fortunately for us, our office is right next to the Moorfield Eye Hospital, and there's a green line painted in the sidewalk starting at the Old Street Tube station to the hospital. Definitely helpful in my bleary-headed pre-coffee mornings.

Margo's Comments

First of all, don't listen to Mike - Guinness is not rubbish. And, it actually IS a porter, as Mike would know if he had been listening to the recorded tour. Its original name was Guinness' Stout Irish Porter - now known as Guinness Stout. I think it is lovely and it's so thick that I am sure it is nutritious too!

Re: Molly Malone - popularly known in Dublin as the "Tart with the Cart". Every tour guide commented on her rather generous, and rather scantily covered, bosom. Apparently, before dying of a fever from which no one could save her, she was, shall we say, generous with her favours, and with the British troops too. Cockles and mussels alive oh indeed ...

I enjoyed seeing the monastery - 1500 years old and as our tour guide pointed out, Irish monks were basically the keepers of western civilisation and of Christianity during the middle of the first millenium AD.

I'm not overly awed by Georgian architecture so Dublin wasn't aesthetically all that interesting to me. What was interesting is seeing how close the modern city is to the Irish Revolution, which was less than 100 years ago. The columns in front of the post office and the statues on O'Connell street still have the bullet holes. Given the long, violent, and bitter history of British occupation in Ireland, it's actually pretty amazing to see the progress of peace in a relatively short period of time.

Cheers,
Margo

Dublin Day Four

Umm. There's not much to add; it was a short day. I got up first and, after showering, went out to seek a Sunday Times. I got one, and noticed it was truly an Irish edition: the editorials and many of the articles were by Irish authors, and much of the content was for an Irish readership. I'd noticed this yesterday with the Saturday Guardian also. Another difference is that UK papers seem to be printed differently here; some content is in black and white instead of colour, and some sections are combined. I did miss my Top Gear section, the guys' bit with the flash cars and gadgets, video game reviews, and exotic pubs, and wasn't sure if it was omitted from the Irish edition, or if someone had nicked it from my copy.

We packed and got a cab to the airport (cheaper than the bus-and-cab combo we'd had earlier). Margo and Sarah got breakfast. Then a fairly uneventful flight back to dear old Essex, reuniting with our Toyota Yaris for a stop at the petrol station and a drive home. Margo made us some pasta, we listened to Celtic music and I had some Irish Cream whilst typing up these bits. Hope you enjoyed it all, but it's about bedtime and I have to work tomorrow, so cheerio for now.

Dublin Day Three

Saturday. Our agenda for the day was to take in a day tour of the nearby countryside, the Wild Wicklow tour. So, after breakfast nearby, we arrived at our O'Connell Street pickup at 9.15. We had only called for a reservation the day before, so we didn't get seats on the first bus, but were destined for the second bus, driven by Michael, our tour guide for the next seven hours.

Michael. He said he was a school teacher, married with a newborn child. He chatted to us the whole ride. Michael had lots of jokes to share. And he took the piss out of everyone. He started with a group of Germans. Then some Dutch. On the way out of Dublin he had us singing the song about Molly Malone. We followed the coast to the South. We stopped to pick up some final tourists, gentlemen of Arabic descent, and there were gasps and nervous laughter as he took the Mickey out of them. Now at no point did I doubt that our Michael had only the best intentions, that he was genuinely being friendly, but I could only cringe as he asked them if they had a harem, and why they didn't like to drink. As I heard often that weekend, I'd be thinking, Swayt Jaysus! I once took a class in comedy improvisation from the ComedySportz group in Portland, and they had a rule: you can pick on ethnicities, as long as they were first world. So the Germans, Belgians, Italians, and Scots were all fair game for accents and mannerisms, but lay off the Indians, Africans, Muslims, etc.

We stopped in Dalkey first, taking in the seaside a bit, and looking at the tower that is the first setting in Joyce's Ulysses, and is now the James Joyce Museum. I got this picture of the village.



Next Michael took us into the hills of the Killiney neighbourhood, winding our newish Mercedes bus through narrow streets of hairpin turns, gabbing away all the while and making me wonder if the open bottle of Jameson's I spied by his doorside was partially inside his bloodstream. (It probably wasn't, though I'll get to that later.)

Unless Michael was full of blarney, then he truly did show us Enya's castle, and the gate to Bono's house, and perhaps just a door downhill, Van Morrison's house, and then Bob Geldof's.

Next we passed a forest that was part of the Guinness estate, and on to the Avoca coffee shop and tourist emporiumm at the Mount Usher Gardens.



We went through Roundwood, and past the home of Daniel Day Lewis. We stopped for a pub lunch at the Laragh Inn. Sarah had a tomato soup, and Margo and I shared a Guinness stew. I started with a Beamish stout (my fourth stout varietal so far) but afterward switched to North Star.

Then we wound our way over heathlands to Sally's Gap, a resort (with sand imported from the coast) built by one of the Guinness clan, and again, unless Michael was spouting blarney, was hideaway to Michael Jackson for a few recent months. This is also where Michael's Jamesons's was passed around with little plastic cups, a fitting accompaniment to the view.







The landscape was similar to the Scottish Highlands; it's quite similar geographically.

Our last stop was Glendalough (two lakes). We were dropped off at the site of an ancient monastery. The missile-like tower was used as sort of a medieval bank, a storehouse of artifacts and valuables during attacks.



We then needed to hike along a path to the upper lake to rejoin our bus.





And that was the end of our day trip. On the way back to Dublin, Michael sang another song or two, revisited some of Ireland's literary greats (Joyce, and William Butler Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde), and then we listened to radio for the rest of the way back, mostly via highway.

We made our farewells back in Dublin, and we returned to our room. Tired, we settled on pints and pub foods at the bar down the hall. (I was tempted to not put shoes on, but was uncertain about the floor cleanliness.) Sarah and I led the advance, getting drinks whilst playing Crazy Eights and watching Kimi Raikonnen battle Lewis Hamilton in the Grand Prix finals. Margo joined us and we got pub food while the bar began filling for the England v. South Africa Rugby game in Paris. It got much noisier after we left; later that night there was shouting in the streets, even though South Africa won the match.

Later that evening, I went out for a stroll down the riverfront. I saw that the Dublin Spire had lights at its top at night, visible for miles. I admired the three street lamps over the Ha'Penny Bridge, one of several pedestrian bridges over the Liffey (three of at least twelve). Most of the other bridges were lit underneath in green. A guy on the riverside tried to flog a hard disk drive. I remembered to note that the bins have holes in the tops for fag ends - there are lots of smokers in Dublin. (There are few public bins left the UK, ironically because of IRA bombs.) I recognised the electronic chimes of the street trolley as the repeating chimes at the end of U2's Zooropa album.

Dublin Day Two

Friday. We slept in. I noticed in Ireland they use UK mains. One thing I forgot to mention about our hotel is that we had a bar that served coffee in the mornings, just a few doors down. Not down the street, but down the hall. So while the others slept, I got an Americano and read a copy of the Irish Times, where I learned that they called football "soccer", another way in which Ireland is a bit closer to America than the UK.

Once the others were up, we had breakfast at the hotel, quite like the typical English breakfast but with a few twists, such as the light and dark sausages that were similar to the Haggis of Scotland.

Then we went out to take in one of the city sightseeing hop-on hop-off bus tours that are all over Europe. (Even Ipswich has one, but only in the summer months.) Conveniently, most of these bus tours start and end just around the corner from our hotel on O'Connell Street.

So we hopped on, and found ourselves going down O'Connell over the river to College Green, where we saw Trinity College, within which is the Book of Kells.



We headed west a bit, past the cemetery with the statue of Oscar Wilde, who lived in Dublin for several years. Then back east toward St. Stephen's Green. We alighted there and toured the park.



Then we went under the Fusiliers Arch to the Stephen's Green Shopping Centre, on the left.



In observance of the Two Hour Rule, we had to feed the little one. Do you see the dome at the top? We got some tea and scones there. Sarah is in the lower right.



The we walked the nearby Grafton Street shopping. It seems all the UK stores were here (Debenhams, Marks and Spencer, Topshop, HMV, Boots, Argos) so it was all quite familiar.



At the end of Grafton Street is a statue of Molly Malone. Before setting foot in Dublin, all I could remember of Irish songs was a lone ditty from my grade school music class (it was a Catholic school, after all) beginning with

In Dublin's fair city
Where girls are so pretty

And that is the song of Molly Malone, a song I would hear and, even, sing several times before the end of our trip.



We then walked through the Temple Bar area of touristy pubs and shopping. We noted one well-known pub (to which I'll write more about later) ...



... and, on the next corner, what appears to be the original Temple Bar:



Nearby we re-joined the bus tour, hopping on as promised. Our next attraction was Saint Patrick's Cathedral.



And further west ... the Guinness brewery. As the bus was moving constantly, I got just this one shot.



But it doesn't do justice to the massive complex therein. Because it is quite huge - many, many city blocks, like a Willy Wonka factory dedicated to stout beer. Now, whereever you are reading this, I am quite confident in thinking that you're within a few miles of a pub that serves Guinness, and I'm guessing it all comes from here.

Now, at the risk of having a van from the IRA with a bomb in it parked in front of our flat, I will say this: I think Guinness is rubbish. I think it's way too bitter for a proper stout. But in Dublin, it's ubiquitous. Lagers and stouts are what is drunk. It's some sort of bitter brown Mafia. To ask for a chewy brown ale or porter here would be like slagging the Pope. It seems a religious thing. So. We didn't take a proper tour, but we did drive around the perimeter of the massive global machinery of the Guinness empire.

Next, our tour crossed the Liffey and went into Phoenix Park, home of the residence of the President of Ireland as well as the Dublin Zoo.

The tour continued along the north bank of the Liffey, past more shopping, restaurants and pubs, until we rejoined O'Connell Street and the tour ended just past Parnell Square.

We went back to our room to relax a bit, and then set out for dinner and live music. Remember that yellow pub in the Temple Bar area? The Oliver St. John Gogarty? They have live music from mid-afternoon, so we got an early dinner there.

We noticed that the locals at the bar were quite friendly. It took us quite a while to get our order in because we were so busy chatting. (Suffolk is renowned for having less-than-friendly locals at the pub, so this is an unusual situation for us.) But then we realised the "locals" weren't - they were all tourists, just like us. But some of the one's we'd been chatting with were from the Liverpool area, and we started to realise about the relationship between Ireland and Liverpool - quite strong, apparently. I remember some Celtic songs mentioning Liverpool. We learned that northern English towns (Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle) have a kinship with Ireland that southern England doesn't.

We were early enough to get a table right behind the band, a trio: guitar, banjo and flute/Irish whistle. They'd play a song, then have a pint and chat a while, then play another song. Sarah had ribs and a salad. Margo got an Irish stew with Irish breads. I got a Dublin Coddle (sausage, crewam, potatoes, bacon, onions, and carrots) and Irish breads. I also tried a Kilkenny Red, which I quite liked, and an "experimental" brew from Guinness called North Star, which I thought was a bit tastier - smoother and not as bitter.

Sarah was tapping her feet to the music but was soon bored enough to want to start writing insults to me in my notepad. She has about four basic insults at this point (I am a spanking head, as well as a troll, and I eat like a shark, and I make farts that can kill people) and sometimes she can combine all four into devastating poetic attacks, but didn't quite reach that level this evening. But, for your edification, here is an excerpt:

Dad is a spangkin-head
he etes like a shark and
shakes his head like a shark
when they eat!

We stumbled across the Liffey afterwards to our room and that was our Day Two.

Dublin Day One

Well, it looks as though we haven't written in a few weeks. It's only because our lives have been dead boring and it's not been until this week that we've got interesting things to write about: We just returned from four days in Dublin.

Writing in retrospect, I'm tempted to put it all into one post, but I'll break it up by days instead. So. To the first day, Thursday.

We've been able to avoid flying in Europe so far, and could have this time, but taking a train to Holyhead in Wales and a ferry to Dublin would have taken most of the day, probably nine or ten hours. Flying was also cheaper. I lost the vote, so on a sunny Thursday morning we drove to London Stansted airport, which is only an hour away in Essex. Margo had also wisely made a reservation for valet parking, so leaving the car was dead easy.

We flew Ryanair, the low-cost, no-frills Ireland airline. (Not that Aer Lingus is expensive either.) And really, no frills. Not just no peanuts or soda cans; no assigned seating (we paid a few pounds extra for "priority seating" so we and half the flight could board early and sit together); and, to my chagrin, no seatback pockets. This last part got to me for some reason, though I can see the advantage - it must be much quicker to clean the plane between trips.

Airplane Tip: What do you do when your six-year-old farts so foully that you suspect her pants need changing? You turn on the overhead fans to disperse the miasma before the other passengers mutiny and throw you out of the cabin.

We spent twenty Euros to get on a bus to the city centre. I saw a farmhouse just opposite a roundabout. That farmer gets to see buses and taxis full of international tourists all day.

The Irish drive on the left, but speeds are in kilometers/hour instead of miles/hour. Road signs are in Celtic above, often italicised, and English below. It makes sense, given what I've learned of Ireland's history.

Despite what the song says, the road to Dublin was not rocky. In fact, it was quite smooth. One, two three, four five.

I noticed signs for Guinness everywhere. Really. All over the airport (I was looking out the bus and realised I was seeing it yet again on an airport windowshade), and just about every pub, which means pretty much every block. And the billboards. And some shop windows. At one point, on a corner pub, I saw the same "Guinness Time" painting of the guy standing on a seal and ostrich to adjust the clock - the same one that's on the back of Kells in Portland and I'm sure lots of other places around the world.

Since we didn't know our way around, we paid another tenner to get a cab ride from the Dublin train station to our hotel, the Jurys Inn on Parnell Square. Once again, Margo (with help from Mr. Steves) had chosen impeccably - we were just off the main drag of O'Connell Street and blocks from the river Liffey and most attractions.

After checking in and dropping off our bags, we went for a stroll to get a bite to eat, as Sarah was quite crabby from our travels and we knew food would help in fixing things. So rounding the corner onto O'Connell Street and heading toward the river, we came across our first attraction, the Dublin Spire. This was erected for the Millennium but doesn't commemorate anything in particular and cost loads of money, so the locals aren't too happy about it and have given it nicknames like "the stiletto in the Ghetto" and (Margo made me promise to include this) "the stiffy on the Liffey".



We ate at a café across the way, but first I got this picture looking up the Earl Street shopping area. On the left is a statue of James Joyce.



We agreed on some down time. I split off to explore. First I went in search of a pint. I ended up just across the river at a pub named Messrs Maguire. They brew their own, though they also stock the standard lagers (Becks, Stella, Carlsberg) and the Irish cider Bullmers, plus - I don't think I've seen this anywhere else in Europe - taps of Budweiser and Miller. I went for the "plain" stout, choosing from a few house styles. Theirs was quite similar to Guinness - bitter and dry with the famously thick foam.

Walking about I noticed I'd seen three people with fresh scars on their faces, in my first hour in the place. Tough town, yeah? I also noticed more beggars than in most European cities.

Then I walked west along the river (towards the Irish Sea). Here's the view. The U2 Tower studio and apartments is being built on the right.



Here's the financial centre, along the north bank.



I'd done a little homework the night before our trip, so I was able to find nearby Windmill Lane, which used to house the Windmill Lane Studios, where U2 recorded their first three albums. It's all flats now, but these graffiti walls are left for the fans, though I didn't really recognise any messages pertaining to U2.



There's been a lot of recent development along the waterfront. The Irish economy is just slowing from a boom; the country is one of the best places to do business in Europe.





Back at our room, we hadn't the energy to do much research into dinner, so we settled for pub food in a restaurant across the street. Then we watched some telly, including the evening news in Gaelic on TG4. And that was our first day ... I'll post the rest soon.

Ipswich Waterfront

I had my camera with me this afternoon when I was out and about in Ipswich. This is the view from my favourite coffee shop, on the waterfront.



I apologise for botching the focus a bit. I'd set the focus and exposure closer to the table's edge to compensate for the backlighting. But there's a few items of note. Yes, that is Portland's Beth Ditto on the cover of the Sunday magazine I was about to read through. My bike is just above my helmet, locked to the chain fence. But of course you can't see much of the waterfront, so here's another view.



There are four construction cranes on the waterfront. In addition, out of view to the right, a new campus for the University Campus Suffolk is also under construction. When my train approaches Ipswich, the tops of the cranes are visible above the hills long before the city itself is. I was noting to a mate how tall the cranes are, wondering why they'd use such tall cranes when the buildings won't be very high. Turns out I was wrong - one will be 23 storeys, making it the tallest building in Suffolk, perhaps even in East Anglia.

Under Pressure

I am continually amazed and impressed by the stoicism that the English show in a crisis.

Today a unique accident occurred on the A12 between Marks Tey and Colchester. I don't know the exact details but it involved a vehicle on fire and gas canisters in the vicinity at risk of exploding. Both the A12, the main thoroughfare through East Anglia, as well as the train line, were closed to all traffic for most of the day.

As a result, replacement bus service was established between Witham and Colchester, with trains running from London to Witham. However, because the main road was also closed, alternate routes were heavily clogged and buses were running very slowly. So by the time I got to Witham, there was a queue of, I would guess, over a hundred waiting for buses.

I thought things would only get better over time so I walked into town to get something to drink, find a toilet, and wait things out in a more relaxed manner. On my return, I saw this had been a bad idea as the queue was now about a quarter of a mile long, with no buses in sight.

But you know what? There was no whining. Some complaints, of course, but spoken jovially and in an air of camaraderie. People were orderly and patient and quite agreeable. It's as if Englanders are closet Buddhists - very able to accept situations beyond their control and bear down and tolerate them.

By the time I got within a busload of the front of the queue, the trains started running again, so my timing was probably ideal as, if I'd gotten on a bus, I'd probably have been much later. All in all, I was only about two hours late. And the mood on the train was quite jovial at the passing of a crisis shared by many.