Clamping CafΘ culture

One of the simple joys of living in Dublin at this time of year is that you can sit outside cafes in the evenings, sipping coffee and watching the world go by (if it's not stuck in traffic), and enjoying everyday Dublin street scenes, such as other people's cars being clamped.

If you're really lucky, you might even see a car getting declamped first, and then being towed away; something that actually happened outside one of my favourite cafes on a Thursday night recently. It was a long-drawn out operation, apparently involving several different State agencies. And when the tow-truck man, who was using a manually-operated carjack, finally got the vehicle onto his truck, the cafe nearly applauded with relief.

Various theories were advanced as to how great a crime the driver had to have committed to be clamped and towed (parking on a traffic warden was my guess).

Eventually one of the waiters made enquiries and it turned out that (a) the car was a hired vehicle; (b) it had been clamped for parking illegally; (c) the person who hired it had lost the keys; (d) replacing the keys was impossible, for technical reasons I can't remember; and consequently (e) it was the car company which was having the vehicle towed.

Normally, any two of these circumstances would have made it a special evening. But (f) (all of the above) was a real bonus. It was loosely estimated that between hiring, clamping and towing fees, as well as the cost of replacing the lost keys, the affair was going to cost the unfortunate car hirer the price of a house outside Dublin.

And if that person was you, I'm sorry, but watching the whole episode was better than a night at the theatre. The truth is there's just nothing like a bit of Schadenfreude (particularly delicious with a croissant) to help you relax after a hard day at the office. e society these days (my subscription lapsed some years ago, and I kept forgetting to renew it) and there have been so many changes in the interim (what the hell is a latte, anyway?) that I'm a bit nervous about showing up now.

One of the most dramatic developments in the culture is the number of Irish people prepared to sit outside cafes nowadays, even though it's either raining, or about to rain, or it's just stopped raining and the seats are wet.

We're clearly still not in the same league as the French, where many people do nothing except sit in and out of cafes all day. But considering the fact that in France you pay extra to sit outside, whereas here - all things considered - the cafe should pay you, I think young Dubliners are developing a pretty good technique.

I suspect it started with the Temple Bar thing, where a few years back people took to drinking outside on summer nights (from around February onwards), often with nothing to keep them warm except the flying pint glasses. Although street drinking has been curbed in recent years, many of those same wild things have probably since graduated to outdoor cafe culture, oblivious to the weather. And they look so much the part that, on good days in Dublin, you'd think you were somewhere else.

This is a big part of the fun of outdoor cafe life - that you can imagine for a moment you're living in one of the real European countries (the ones with a wine industry). But even if the weather doesn't defeat this fantasies, there are other local hazards too.

On a Saturday morning last month, I was reading the newspaper outside another coffee shop on a pedestrianised street in the city. The sun was shining and the air was fresh; the smell of newly-baked baguettes was wafting out the door, and for all the world I could have been in Paris.

The waiters were a bit too friendly, admittedly. For the true Parisian experience, I prefer to have the food thrown on the table by someone who looks at me as if I've just been scraped off his shoe. Even so, if I closed my eyes I might as well have been somewhere on the left bank (or the right bank; one of those banks anyway).

Except for one small thing: this damned busker at the end of the street, who was strumming a guitar the whole time and belting out Irish pub ballads in a voice you could have heard in Mullingar.

He was impossible to ignore, and when he started into Dublin in the Rare Oul' Times, I seriously considered asking him how much he earned in an hour, and paying him time-and-a-half to take a break. But by then he was on to Poor Oul' Dicey Reilly, and I couldn't take any more.

"Merde!" I said to myself (excuse my French). Then I picked up my paper and left.

A propos of last week's column, in which I proposed that the State could eradicate the DART accent by simply adopting the same techniques traditionally used to promote Irish, a person called Daly (I can't make out the first name) from Navan has written to me pledging support.

S/he informs me that the Daly teenagers have been warned against developing romantic attachments with native DART-speakers, "under pain of disinheritance".

This is a perfectly understandable reaction if - forgive me, Navan reader - fundamentally misguided. The whole point of my proposed new DART policy is that the accent can be killed off eventually, only if we do everything we can to encourage young people to speak it. Threatening to strike them out of the will is a sure way to drive them into the arms of DART speakers (and as you know, in these mixed relationships, the children will be brought up in their accent). My suggestion instead is that, once out of their teens, you should start nagging the kids constantly about marriage, along the lines of (for example): "Why don't you find yourself a nice young AA Roadwatch announcer and settle down?". It's the only thing that'll work.