An emotionally constipated night out in a posh Dublin restaurant

Of course I know that medieval Europe was a horrid place where mad clerics burned witches at the stake before breakfast and ate children for lunch and poked whoever they fancied when the day was done.

Even the upper echelons of 18th-century society was a suffocating world of body smells, excessive farts and bad breath, but none the less it must have been fascinating to live in an age before psychiatry, when men were possessed by demons that caused them to pepper every dining table with lecherous conceits, scatological metaphors and satiric verse.

Other women sat at low tables discreetly motoring through vodkas, gins, diet cokes, and a plate of sandwiches and cold cocktail sausages that the hotel staff had laid out in some delicate attempt to get people to bed five hours earlier.

In fact you can still find traces of the 18th century in remote pockets of south Ulster. Just before Easter, I spent a night in a Border hotel drinking until 4.40am in the company of 20 intoxicated natives, reciting poems, singing old ballads and delivering recitations. The recitation is still common in Ulster, a powerful form of theatrical storytelling with roots in the broadsheets that once sold at street corners on fair days two centuries ago.

But a city friend with me was appalled. He looked with displeasure at the bar, and checked his watch as if he expected the guards at any moment.

“We’re all residents,” I assured him. “Nobody is driving.”

A watery stalk of a woman was singing in the corner and men with their elbows on the bar counter interjected between verses with yelps of enthusiasm.

“Good woman.”

“You’re at it now.”

There was a splendid liberty in the night, an unrestrained and raucous banter, boisterous slagging between the recitations

Other women sat at low tables discreetly motoring through vodkas, gins, diet cokes, and a plate of sandwiches and cold cocktail sausages that the hotel staff had laid out in some delicate attempt to get people to bed five hours earlier.

There was a splendid liberty in the night, an unrestrained and raucous banter, boisterous slagging between the recitations, and the shadow of Jonathan Swift and other unruly diners of the 18th century seemed like they might have just recently gone to bed.

It was all very different from the posh mannered and emotionally constipated restaurant in Dublin where I had dined with the General the previous night. A place of white table clothes and wine glasses as big as goldfish bowls, where the customers endeavoured to repress the slightest hint of spontaneity as they nibbled through lettuces and black puddings served with caramelised honey.

The waiter brought me a main course of fish that was meant for another table, but being intimidated by the swank I accepted it without comment. Half way through the fish the waiter returned.

“Excuse me sir,” he said, snootily, “but didn’t you order roast duck?” I blushed as if I had done something wrong and he plonked a large carcass of duck down beside me, as if for punishment.

The General stared at me like I was a half wit.

He hates looking silly in front of city people.

“I can’t bring you anywhere,” he hissed.

Urban sophisticates

But rather than surrendering to shame in the face of urban sophisticates he turned abrasively to the waiter.

“Fetch me your finest Bordeaux, like a good man,” he declared. The waiter had boyish skin and a cut glass accent and I feared he might tell the General to go “eff” himself, but instead he brought a bottle of red with a €32 price tag, and when I was finished the hake and the General was finished his sirloin of beef we split the exotic duck between us and dug into it with the assistance of the wine.

The General took the limbs and bones of the duck to his lips with bare fists and licked his fingers between each glass of Bordeaux.

“More duck, sir?” the waiter inquired.

“If I had anywhere to put it,” the General joked and slapped his distended stomach, while releasing a belch that resounded across the dainty tables where other diners were becoming uneasy.

“Exquisite,” the General exclaimed, though I’m not sure if he meant the wine, the duck or the wind. Even the waiter was laughing now and I heard someone at a nearby table speculate that we were probably a couple of actors.

On our way home from the restaurant we walked through the city towards our hotel, past the poor who were sheltering in the doorways of various banking institutions; the addicted wretches that itch all night for another drug to ease the pain of their destitution, in a world still largely governed by fat men.

“So there are still some traces of the 18th century to be found even in Dublin,” the General observed, eyeing pallid limbs in a sleeping bag. “Too bad that the good Doctor Swift is no longer with us.”