On Sunday afternoon at short notice, I had to organise an impromptu cultural tour of Dublin for Swedish friends of a friend who were here for the weekend.
They had only an hour or so before leaving for the airport. So, starting near their hotel at the top of Grafton Street, I decided to confine the itinerary to Dublin 2 and concentrate on James Joyce.
But halfway down the street, passing Bewley’s, I realised the visitors hadn’t been in there yet. This meant a quick detour to see the Harry Clarke windows, with a side-nod to the more recent ones by Jim Fitzpatrick and Pauline Bewick.
A lesser guide would have called Clarke’s creations “ic*n*ic”. I didn’t, of course, because that word is now rightly banned by The Irish Times (it had already been banned unilaterally from An Irishman’s Diary) due to chronic misuse.
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Instead, explaining that they depicted the various Greek architectural orders, I drew special attention to the one on the extreme right, which is Dublin’s most Ionic window, and left it at that.
At the bottom of Grafton Street, foreshadowing the main theme, I drew attention to one of the Joycean plaques in the footpath, depicting scenes from Ulysses. Then we hurried along Nassau Street to where a ghost sign on a redbrick gable wall proclaims the long-lost “Finn’s Hotel”.
Here I told the Swedes the story of that establishment’s most famous chambermaid, Nora Barnacle. And how on June 15th, 1904, she first stood up James Joyce, before granting his appeal and meeting him the next day instead, with epochal significance for 20th-century literature.
From there we nipped around to Sweny’s Pharmacy, where the ebullient host PJ Murphy did not at first appear to be present. In fact, he was entertaining guests across the road in Kennedy’s pub, from the window of which he spotted our approach and, sensing a cultural emergency, rushed to the scene.
I was slightly disappointed to find that Swedish is not one of the 10 languages PJ speaks fluently. But he made up for that by being able to tell the visitors how he had met their king and queen during a royal visit to Dublin a few years ago.
Then he produced a book about August Strindberg with an inscription in Swedish thanking him for the “wonderful tea and beautiful song” he had provided members of the visiting party.
From there, on cue, he fetched his guitar and treated the latest visitors from Stockholm to a ballad in Irish. At the end of which, before tea could break out too, I had to drag the guests away.
Around the corner on Merrion Square, we stopped at the Wilde House, with its separate plaques to Oscar, his father William and mother “Speranza”.
[ Wilde Romantic Way: Frank McNally on the rise and fall of Oscar’s amorous fatherOpens in new window ]
Then we dashed across the road to see the multicoloured sculpture of the main man, noting its ensemble of stone from several continents, including the Norwegian blue pearl granite on Oscar’s trouser legs.
By now, I needed to explain to the law-abiding Swedes that jaywalking is a cornerstone of the culture here: our schedule was too tight to wait for the green man anywhere.
Even so, we took the scenic route to Clare Street via the National Gallery, stopping there to reprise the stained-glass theme via Harry Clarke’s masterpiece, The Mother of Sorrows (which, by the way, is ic*n*ic in the true sense, although I still can’t use the term), then visiting the Caravaggio and also saying a quick hello to the statue of GB Shaw.
Back in greater Graftonia, there was just enough time to pause before Davy Byrne’s pub and the revived Burton’s, and to mention their dramatically different fates in Ulysses: the impending-if-delayed revival of Burton’s (now advertising in the windows for staff) proving there is no such thing as bad publicity.
After that, we passed the Phil Lynott statue on Harry Street and the Luke Kelly one on South King Street, getting pictures of both. I suggested my guests should look up Raglan Road on that well-known Swedish institution, Spotify, as homework.
Dropping them back at the hotel for their luggage and a taxi to the airport, I apologised for the sweltering heat of Dublin in April. In the spirit of another great Irish cultural figure, Joe Dolan, I had sent them home sweating.
[ The mood in Brussels is poised between worried and smugOpens in new window ]
Although the tour was ostensibly for their benefit, any gain was mutual. In Dublin or elsewhere, it’s good to be reminded occasionally how extraordinary your environment is, when you pass through it every day without a thought.
On a press trip to Brussels last week, mentioned in Saturday’s diary, my group was one of two from Ireland doing the same itineraries on alternating days.
We kept bumping into the others, who were from the cultural professions. And it was disconcerting to be asked “Are you with the cultural group or the journalists?”, which happened several times. Personally, although assigned “journalist” at birth, I also self-identify as cultural. Living in Dublin, it’s hard not to be.
