Nicky Mayhew

The day was long, starting with a brisk walk to the Martello Tower in Dalkey, then walking the strand in Sandymount, then Sweny’s, then The National Museum and for then what we hoped to be a relieving park bench in St Stephen’s Green before our next “appointment.” But could we find a spare park bench anywhere? No! Literally all benches were occupied and occupied, I might add, by a cacophony of bonnet/boater wearing Edwardians, some of whom were even playing American football! At last, we spied a shady bench and after a dash that would impress Usain Bolt, the bench was duly nabbed! We sat and napped only to discover on awakening that we were sat opposite non other than our very own Jim! There he was, plinthed and peering back at us with those dodgy eyes of his. It’s as if he had bequeathed his very own bench to a couple of foot weary flaneurs in our hour of need!   

Suitably reinvigorated we left our bench, said bench soon to be taken up as temporary dug-out for those Edwardian garbed American footballers, and made our way to MoLI for a lecture by Paul Muldoon, Irish poet and general polymath about town. He was giving the inaugural Dedalus Lecture entitled, “Spinoza’s Shillelagh: Some Thorny Issues in Ulysses.” We were treated to an hour of poetic investigation of, wait for it, the first three words of the novel. Can you remember them? Of course: stately, plump, and buck. To Muldoon, the whole book is bound within those three words. It was a fanciful and entertaining romp through Irish and Classical literature! 

The whole sixty minutes was, in a way, quite Joycean, not through design but in the way he was initially interrupted by the reggae band in the garden, then a stream of late attendees with himself, no less, showing them to their seats and then to cap it all, the gentle murmur of somebody’s mobile phone. All of us reached for our pockets but all but one was safe in the knowledge that it was not ours. For the poor eejit that discovered that it was his phone was bad enough but his woeful inability to firstly find the correct pocket and then work out how to switch the damned thing off, all the time the volume of its inane ringtone getting louder and louder, made me think of how Joyce would actually have loved this! 

After that there was only one final destination on the agenda: pints and a toasted sandwich at Peter’s Pub. No, not mentioned by Joyce but this favourite Dublin haunt of mine is so redolent of a bygone era of manners, stools at the bar and none of that musak, maybe similar to Davy Byrne’s in its heyday. As you walk in, they say “how are yer, what’ll you have,” to which the response is two pints please (no need for clarification in this boozer). “No matter, you sit down, and I’ll bring them over. Toastie?” No need to tell you the answer to that! 

Several hours later we are back on the DART speeding past Sandymount Strand with not a firework in sight! We look left across the sea denuded strand, peering into eternity. 

What a day!

Hope your day was special!

And just to say, Toby, how grateful I am to you for your amazing guidance on this epic journey. You certainly opened an old door very carefully to another way of reading and I can’t thank you enough. 

Go raibh mile maith agaibh