Can a city still be fair when viewed through a veil of rain and hail? It is a moot point, and on one of my more uncharitable days, I might come down on the side of no. However, I am very far from feeling uncharitable about having left the warm climes to land on this frozen island.
Dublin greets you with a wealth of stately architecture and randomly twisting streets. Only O’Connell Street runs straight as a dye down to the River Liffe, once over the bridge the curvaceous streets around Trinity College invite you on a meander through history. Graceful Georgian stone claims the street frontage with Grecian columns and broad steps, jostled about by busy Victorian brick with elaborate porticoes. It rises high around you in narrow one-way streets, where cars come from every side and the press of pedestrians criss-cross oblivious to little green men, and red ones too.
It is cold and windy and everyone wears regulation black, brown or navy blue. As though colour has been banned for the season in case it reminds you of what you are missing. The grime of mud huddles around lamp-posts and presses itself into the the cracks where walls meet paving stones. And we all grit our teeth, straining for Spring, just one last surge up and over the parapets and surely we will shake off the long, smothering, siege of Winter.
I meet my friend for lunch in the Art Gallery, and afterwards wrap myself up in colour. The ordinary faces of men and women who lived so long ago stare out at me from portraits. They sing songs in a clean tiled room, or stand with stubby hands wrapped protectively around the shoulders of children, whose skin is so pale they might be ghosts. The reds and greens and blues of the twentieth century, blare out at me from chaotic canvases and I am transported by the luminous pink of the gown of the woman from five hundred years ago, as though I think she has no business to be so bright and brassy.
As I wonder back to Pearse Street station I find myself reminded at every turn, not of famous generals, or early town planners, not of big-wigs and worthies–no this is Ireland: the statue is George Bernard Shaw, the shop is the one where a James Joyce character purchased lemon scented soap and not far away, a discrete round plaque announces the birthplace of Oscar Wilde.
Salatheel 