Tales Of The Gurrier

I saw a woman doing a poo in the street the other day. At the corner of Arnott and Heytesbury street to be exact. As I drove past I saw her there; pooing away to her hearts content. She didn’t mind me and I didn’t mind her. Me, as I was locked safely in my car and accelerating away rapidly, her as she was mashed out of her head on smack or glue or lighter fuel or whatever it is takes you to the shores of casual public defecation.

Heytesbury street and its environs are, like most places in Dublin’s inner city, awash with bits of literary history. Brendan Behan died in the Adelaide and Meath hospital in whose shadow our encounter occurred. A couple of hundred years earlier Jonathan Swift kept his horse in a paddock and had a garden on what is now the hospital grounds, in his day the boul Oliver St John Gogarty was a member of the hospital staff. George Bernard Shaw was born up the road and the author Cornelius Ryan was born in number 33.

Synge Street C.B.S Alma Mater to a slew of Irish celebrities and public figures spills over onto Heytesbury street. There’s a line or two from the Joyce fella’s book as well but sure there’s barely a street worth mentioning that isn’t. Clinton had a pint in Cassidy’s one street over on his visit in ‘95 and I’m probably missing out a geansai load of other trivia.

Heytesbury Street has its own Wikipedia entry surely a sign that one has arrived as a person, place, or thing in these times.

During a stint as a relief postman for An Post the corner in question lay on the very farthest edge of my route. For me it marked the turning point in the day. Once I reached the end of Arnott street I was into the home stretch. Mary Black or Mary Coughlan or Mary some singer or other lives around the corner. She would receive square boxes from her record label that needed to be signed for and always had nice decorations in her window at Christmas time.

The Adelaide and Meath hospital is closed now. Subsumed with several others into a mega hospital complex out in Tallaght. It’s used for offices or some such thing one presumes on a temporary basis as prime development property of its kind is a rare bird in the city centre in these times. I had occasion to visit the A&E (that’s ER American friends) there some years back. It was 1996 I think, before the current health crisis peaked, when a visit to the A&E meant only a wait of roughly ten or eleven hours before being seen. My girlfriend at the time had taken a fall at work badly damaging her knee and aggravating an old injury. I remember the bed she was lying on was covered in someone elses dried blood and a drunk kept running in and out through the double doors and screaming he was going to kill all the doctors.

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This rambling post was an experiment in how much information could be gathered on the net and from memory about a random street corner in Dublin. Not bad, I think. I wonder if I tried this experiment again in another five years just how much more information would be available.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Bloggery, Dublin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.