Crossing Paths
Wandering in the city today, tasting the air. Down Henry Street you can feel this thing gnawing down on the citizens. Grinding down the haircuts, shortening skirts, exposing skin and prejudices. Watching the drunks, the junkies, the pickpockets. The Henry Street hawkers and walkers.
This street vibrates at a crossroads. A heat exchanger for the city. Social groups pass over and through one another. Strange alchemical reactions occur here. Odd growths and mutant strains of Dublin flourish and cross pollinate.
A startlingly camp young man served me in a shop. He looked about fourteen, I guess he must have been older. He actually shrieked with joy at my choice of hair goop. How refreshing change can be sometimes.
Two young gurriers stand in the street, being studiously ignored, as they scream at long haired, middle class teenagers. ‘Heeyar! Heeyar hippy! HIPPY!’ ‘Heeyar ye fuckin’ ginger fuck! I’ll fuckin’ batter yeh!’ I give them the Face Ov Doom. Some things never change.
At Jervis street I pass a man I may have worked with once, but he does not notice me and I walk on.
Mary Street is transformed now, akin to a London backstreet. All life is here. A Polish shop offers ‘30% off Jars’, electronic phone repair shops with menus entirely in foreign tongues, Cyrillic alphabets and Chinese logograms. An asian family emerge from ‘Asian Market’ passing four immaculately dressed African men heading on into town.
One of the asian girls laughs in reply to a sibling, ‘Janey mack, you should have seen the state of him!’ The Dublin accent rolling off her tongue is pure inner city, shaded by the East. The idiom is Dublin to the bone.
On Capel street a short, middle aged man passes me. Bald, with a close cropped grey beard, he wears pale blue crocs, a huge pair of square diamond earrings and a short purple skirt. People lean out of doorways to stare. Love to know where he’s going.
On Abbey Street a figure emerges from the Garda Ombudsman building. An angry slouch, thin shoulders poised in an attitude beneath a hoodie. Cigarette, mobile, gold hoops, one blade haircut. Slouching along in that rolling, open crotched, alpha-male waddle so beloved of the city gurriers, she passes me, bellowing away into her phone.
The city is playing with me today.
On I go, I pass a woman I knew as a child. Twenty years or more have passed. She does not notice me and I walk on, lost in a web of memories strung amongst the familiar streets.
August 26th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Good entry, sir. Glad to see a new post.
August 27th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Good stuff! That’s a brilliant bit of writing right there. “…she passes me…” was a sudden milk-out-the-nostrils moment.
August 27th, 2009 at 9:34 am
You brought us all along on your surreal walkthrough. Giggling at the tweener shopkeeper — oh, the joy of helping someone make the RIGHT hair goop choice. I, too, get a huge giggle out of seeing brown and tan faces with mouths filled with Glaswegian; it’s a shocker every single time.
August 27th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Ta’ all.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:36 am
Nice one. Could really envision everything. Makes me excited that we might be able to make it to Dublin next summer. (We’re hoping to make a UK trip but this time bypass England and see the Celtic nations, drinking much beer at every turn.)
September 9th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Excellent! A meet up would be great. Keep me posted on this, maybe we could convince Neil and his fabled girl to venture down South for an evening or two.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
She exists, I swear. But when other people are around she turns back into a tailor’s dummy with a big red lipstick smile drawn on it by some madman.
But yes! Sounds good to me. We have our border papers and special Southern identities all in order.