Florence, June 2008

I made the fatal mistake of losing the scraps of serviettes that I had scribbled my notes on but I can remember this much about Florence:

Don’t offend the locals by saying that the ice-cream is better than the statue of David, especially if you haven’t seen the statue yet because when you do you’ll realise what a stupid thing it is to say. Michelangelo was a genius.

Handbags are a necessity, never a luxury.

It is never too early in the day for gelato, there is no such thing as too much extra virgin olive oil, every conference needs its own barista, good Chianti will never give you a headache and it’s quite possible to drink four glasses of it and still cycle down Tuscan Hills without crashing – just don’t use the front brake.

Being outside high up on the Duoma, watching a summer thunderstorm roll in over the city and crash over you is a religious experience. The evening storms also drew out a shadow people that do not wear Gucci or Prada: North and West African migrants sold umbrellas and plastic ponchos to those of us who had assumed summer in northern Italy would be dry and felt cheated by the fact that it was warmer in England. I knew I was letting the Italians down by wearing a bright pink plastic poncho in a surreal urban-scape that includes yet another Botticelli fresco around any corner but there is room for the prosaic in Florence ... it's just that the Medici version of mundane sees a piece of Brunelleschi architecture becoming part of a fruit and veg shop.

Perhaps there is something to be said for authoritarian rule if we look at what the Medici’s achieved: rising early to get through the general business of the day, which mostly seemed to revolve around plotting, intrigue and murder, followed by luncheon involving live animals including from time to time small children, popping out of pies (the children weren't eaten apparently), and then on to a bit of poetry writing, painting and womanising. Although I guess if you were the poor person being taxed to death to pay for some of the Medici’s bad habits of war, gluttony and enemas you probably would have preferred a little less Renaissance Man and more Chartered Accountant. Medici women seem to have had a bad time of it too, forced to marry dubious cousins, have their children who then went on to marry more cousins in a complicated interconnected genealogical web, and then occasionally getting murdered when hubby preferred his mistress or one of the serving boys. Perhaps the only way to survive such profanities was to surround yourself with as much beauty as possible.

Between the eating and the making of children, of which the popes of the day seemed to have had plenty, the general mass killing of animals and humans, avoiding the plague and various fevers and pox, the jousting and general merriment of medieval Europe, there was the daily grind of keeping up with the shifting alliances between French, Spaniards, Germans, Venicians, Genoans, Napoliteans, the Duchy of Milan, the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire. Thank goodness we’ve solved all that by inventing the nation state whose borders we sanctify every time we swear allegiance to a law, pay taxes, get a visa or vote. I’m thinking the Medicis would be rather proud of the illusion and Lampedusa had it right when he wrote that some things change so that everything can remain the same (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, ‘The Leopard’).

Farewell Dublin (December 2006- April 2008)

June 15, 2008

Unusual perhaps to start a blog with a farewell but I left Dublin in April this year. This is a different place to the one I lived in ten years ago. This is 21^st century, high tech, Celtic Tiger, multicultural Dublin where a glistening, self-cleaning, spire with blue neon radiating from its tip takes the place of Anna Livia’s statue (Abhainn na Life, the River Liffey), and bronze statues take the place of the dockers who used to sing the cargo in. It’s part of New Ireland that still has room for the national ploughing championships on the news.

I did a lot of running in Dublin. Till my toenails fell off. I ran across Phoenix Park on one of those crisp autumn mornings with the sun reflecting off a light mist, the deer still lain, in perfect blue silence. I jogged past the fruit markets early enough to see the old fellas that have been up since two loading the day’s pallets into vans and semi-trailers. Some come to the Chinese, Korean and Pakistani supermarkets at my doorstep, a block away from the omniplex where I watch the latest Bollywood. The young Asian woman selling me my cabbage speaks with a broad Dublin accent. I run past the queue at the Irish Immigration and Naturalisation office of people wanting to get in and stay in as opposed to just a half dozen years ago when people couldn’t wait to leave.

I jogged past the Capuchin cathedral on Church Street and stopped to listen to the gospel choir and the monk give his sermon that resonated from the depths of his Converse sneakers. I jogged past the open door in the alley way near my apartment in the 'Quartier Italien'. The Italian quarter is actually about fifty metres of three restaurants, a café, a deli and a gelato shop, with a rendition of the Last Supper on the faux piazza wall that would make you weep every time someone tries to cut into it. A property developer who loves Italy created it and the residents seemed to love it as well – but without music, dancing or any late night discussion about the state of the world over wine and coffee and cigarettes. The open door in the alleyway behind the Quartier Italien led to a hall led to an altar led to a Nigerian community who also had to keep the noise down when their cries to God became too loud for Catholicism.

I jogged down O’Connell Street one Easter Sunday. Gerry Adams led the parade of the faithful, walking just feet from me, a man who had figured in my political imagination for much of my life. The subject of venom in my family unit, along with trade unions, indigenous land rights activists and the Fabians. His pragmatic speech impressed as did the prison tattoos on the hands of the man in the crowd next to me. Pipe and Drum bands in Doc Martin boots and brown/black/dark blue shirts followed. I came over all Trinny and Susannah and felt the need for a makeover. They marched past the teenage Goths and Punks in their heavy metal t-shirts and faces studded with metal who cheered them on while waiting outside the Ambassador for a gig to start or finish. The marchers rallied in front of the post-office that still bears the bullet holes from yet another failed military uprising. It sits opposite the new ‘Smiles’ Dental Spa. Italian tourists in shiny white hipsters and African Irish stopped by to watch.

The run back goes down Abbey Street where there’s a marker in the road that means it’s part of the Ulysses trail and hence forth all punctuation will be abandoned glance to the left to see a young man shooting up glance to my front door as two young men stagger past one trying to clear out his cracked nose and the other walking on the nod glance to the right at the young woman without shoes offering cheap blow jobs in a back street in this shopping café precinct surrounded by the housing estates that haven’t been gentrified and it’s simply a next generation that are wasting themselves including the one who shot himself up till he died in my stair well and I stood barefoot in his piss on the phone to paramedics who asked if I could resuscitate his broken wasted puss ridden body and I said no I could but I couldn’t wouldn’t touch his face but the ambos brought him back to life with the help of a machine strapped to his chest and a shot of narcaine but then he died again but then he was alive but finally he died known to the police his name was Stephen. End of Ulysses trail.

I went running down the street to be hit by a kid and to be told by News Radio listeners that I’m asking for it because I’m attractive, because of what I was wearing, that I should stay in the gym and that I should take it as a compliment ‘because my arse will be hanging down around my ankles after I’ve popped out a couple of kids’. Cue on-air laughter – play to your audience Mrs Presenter. I think it was because I was hit on my arse. A slap in the face would of course be taken more seriously. A woman phones in – a couple of lads set fire to her hair in the pub. A gay man phones in – he was hit in the stomach and told to go back to where he came from. He was of course already home. But slowly, baby steps, there is encroachment, reclamation, the rainbow flag on George Street and then another on Capel Street and sometimes another woman out jogging in public.

Across from my block a group of homeless people live in the doorway of a store called ‘Home’. It is difficult to tell sometimes how many are there. They intertwine around each other. One day there is a fight and a face is slashed open, cheek bone on display. His blood pumps onto the pavement, onto the other sleeping bodies in the doorway, onto the other man he’s now pounding. The ambos and police arrive and when I return in an hour’s time the area is scrubbed clean just as the straighteners come through Temple Bar every morning to hose down the blood and piss and vomit ready for the tourists in the day and the drinking in the night.

I ran to the Buddhist centre for a bit of peace but I had to be on the ‘same page’ before I could join in their Metta (loving kindness). Dancing to the same rhythm, chanting the same song, ritual, tradition, all in sync, like pipe and drum bands, like sex, like when did American Indian headdress become part of St Patrick’s Day parades, not to mention tam-o’-shanters and plane loads of US, and one Japanese, marching bands? Now it’s quite possible that I might have been sitting quietly thinking about something different to the person next to me in a meditation hall but I’m not sure how they’d know. I could possibly be meditating on the question of what hope the rest of Ireland in managing its new cultural diversity if Buddhists are getting exclusive. I slogged up the hill past the mosque in Clonskeagh during Ramadan, full to overflowing with celebrating South Asian, Southeast Asia, East Asian, Middle Eastern and Irish Muslims, boxed up on a conveyor belt and disappearing further inside the Department of Integration.

So I went the other direction, West, and the gentle bus driver took me off route to where he thought my camp ground was, and a family picked me up and took me to where the camp ground actually was, and the pub found me a comfortable seat and made the best soup and sandwiches, and the camp ground owners offered me more food and a quiet spot in the field, and the next day I climbed Croagh Patrick on Reek Sunday with twenty thousand other pilgrims, to circle the church, to worship life as the pagans did, and to see the sun rise red over Clew Bay.