My last night in Dublin

My last night in Dublin. I can't say I remember it in excruciating detail, and I probably couldn't have done so even the very next morning, let alone three months later. But I can tell you this much: I'm confident I remember more about the evening than anyone else.

It was Friday, the evening of the same day Dave and I had just spent seeing and returning from Ulster. We'd settled back with a couple of beers and I was anticipating a quiet night getting ready for my flight home in the morning. It was the second occasion that the drink seemed to hit critical mass in Dave, and before long, he was semi-intelligibly threatening to take me out on the town.

A couple of lines about me. Pretty much all my adult life, "going out for a few drinks" has meant finding a nice, subdued pub and settling back over conversation, backgammon, and trivia questions, hopefully in the absence of a television set showing any manner of sporting event. The sort of thing King Arthur might have meant when he referred to "gentle hobbies" in Camelot. Even when I was quite young, I was never the pub-crawling sort. Sitting in crowded, noisy bars with thumping music where I shout myself hoarse trying to talk to people three feet from me never held great charms for me. Especially not when I'm facing something like a trans-Atlantic flight in twelve hours. But by the time Dave's brother Jason and their nephew Chris arrived, the plan was in motion.

I wasn't keen on it, but for once, I managed to see it from someone else's point of view. Here was Dave... he had disrupted his own life and those of his friends and family for a week solid to make me feel welcome and entertained, doing his best to ensure that when I went home, it would be with a full, serious visit to Ireland, full of stories, behind me. And now all he wanted to do was give me a good send-off, and I was on the verge of being a colossal wet blanket and genuine Royal Canadian pain-in-the-ass about it, and how are we ever going to convince Ireland to rejoin the Commonwealth if we all carry on like that? So I said to myself, "Self, you're not going to do that. You're going to go out with these magnanimous people who've been busting their humps for you all week and show them you appreciate it. Focus on the fun, don't dwell on the noise." And you know what? It actually worked. Putting the right spin on it from the outset made all the difference and I genuinely managed to have a good time. :)

Part of the fun was watching the other guys as their inebriation, at various rates, outstripped my own... :)

I haven't mentioned Chris before in any of my posts, I don't think. He was around a few times during my stay, but that evening was the first time I really got to talk with him. Chris is Dave and Jay's nephew; a guy about 20 years old. As I recall, he was going to college north of Dublin, and he and his buddies were in a band. Comments he made gave me the distinct impression he'd recently and decently hooked up with an agreeable girl. In short, the guy had pretty much everything going for him (but he wasn't boastful about it). So while all this was in the planning stage, Chris said to me, "So it's your last night, then? I suppose that means you're out to get laid." I made some lame, self-deprecating remark about being too old for that kind of thing — the guy totally pwned me. Weeks later (of course) I came up with an ace rejoinder: "It's kind of you to offer, but you're not really my type." Damn! Why do you always come up with the perfect comeback when you're 10,000 miles away? Alright, you win this round, Chris... :)

The wheels were in motion. Literally: we hailed a cab so we could head downtown. By this time, I'd had a few, but I was still nominally sober. Jay and Chris hadn't really had anything much to drink yet. But Dave... ah, my genial host was by that time well in the bag. He was already doing the Drunkenstein walk — you know, the one that guys do that makes them look like Herman Munster walking into a stiff, intermittent gale? Yeah. Just getting to the cab. I figured at this rate we'd be taking him to the hospital before the night was over. :)

Meanwhile, Chris had a buddy, Finn, whom he knew would be cruising the city centre, and asked if we could all link up with him. This was going on over the cell phone as we headed south... ah, yes, the wonders of the age of mobile communications, eh? By this means, Chris managed to ascertain where Finn was... which was, approximately 85.9 nautical miles from where we were actually heading (okay, I might be exaggerating a little). Finn, apparently, lacked the wherewithal to hail a cab and meet up with us. Hmm, quite a dilemma. But no problem; it was Dave's beer-lubed logic to the rescue... Now, as I see it, we had three possible choices:

• Keep riding to the pub we'd decided to go to and let Finn just walk and meet us there...
• Tell Finn to meet us at such-and-such intersection, pick him up, and all ride together to the pub... (my personal fave, actually)
  
• Hop out of the cab somewhere in the vicinity of where Finn was supposed to be, try and spot him, and then all of us walk to the pub...

...Three guesses which one we ended up doing, and the first two don't count. :) Yay, beer. Helping mankind fail to spot logic bombs for thousands of years. :) So, we all trundled out and, in the glare of the city night, looked around for a guy only one of us could actually recognize; me feeling a little like one of the cast of Gilligan's Island, trying to figure out just what had been overlooked in our latest plan to get rescued...

Now only Chris had seen Finn before. I didn't realize that; given how often Chris had been around and the very gregarious nature of the life I'd been shown in Dublin, I assumed any good friend of Chris's had to be known to his family. But not so. Chris finally spotted Finn and introduced him to us all. Finn was a tall, lanky, good-natured guy, eager to talk and joke without insisting on being the centre of attention; the sort of person that I think most people would quickly adopt as an affable companion. One of the reasons I thought he must have been well-known to Chris's uncles was that Dave immediately took to calling Finn "Cat-Weasel". Finn didn't seem to mind, and so I assumed this was just a good-natured nickname he endured whenever he visited Dave's place with Chris. But actually, Dave hung the moniker that very evening, right then and there.

And so, with our party now complete, Dave, Jay, Chris... uhhh, "Cat-Weasel"... and I set off along the south bank of the Liffey.


The pub we were all headed for was The Blarney Bar (the one with the backwards clock Dave and I visited the Tuesday I was there). It was very different from what it had been like when we'd been there for lunch. The place was packed, the music was loud; we barely managed to find a tiny table for the five of us to crowd around. Here's a heroic shot of Jay with a pint of Bud.


I was trying to take it easy, so I was drinking rum and Cokes (supplied by Dave, whose generosity was enough to shame a guy). I had that flight in the morning and wasn't eager to face it hung over; I had no great ambition to be the inspiration for changing the words of Leaving On a Jet Plane to "heaving on a jet plane". As for the other guys, they were into the beer. As I said, by this time, Dave was already only marginally coherent. Jay started to catch up, and it wasn't long before Finn had a buzz on. Before he did, he managed to shout a few questions to me about Toronto. He was surprised when he asked me how many people live here and the number I told him (about six million) was larger than the population of the whole of Ireland. I reminded him that North America is a big place, so it's not too surprising it would harbour a few large cities. All those people who left Ireland over the years had to wind up somewhere, after all. :)

The interesting thing was, bars in Dublin seem to have staggered (no pun intended) closing times. Where I come from, they pretty much aim for about 3 in the morning: an hour after they must legally stop serving. But in Dublin, they seem to close at different times, and people are used to this. They seem to plan the evenings by figuring out where they can migrate to next, and where they can go the hour after that. The Blarney Bar shooed us out at midnight. We wandered to the next bar.

Here's Chris on the way to the next watering hole. At this point, he was the only one, besides me, who was still quasi-sober.


Here's Finn, Dave, and Jason. This was the last photograph I took in Ireland, as it turns out.


...I did shoot one more video, however. Here we are at a pub called Eamon Dorans. As the video begins, that's Dave and Jay there in the middle at the bar. Eventually, I turned the camera, which was balanced on my glass, to face Finn and Chris, but unfortunately, Finn was sitting too near me to be fully in frame, which was really disappointing when I reviewed it because he and Chris were having a blast.

I'm not really sure what time we left Eamon Dorans. I wasn't sloshed when we did, though I had definitely taken the edge off... but the four of them were in the full-on drunk logic stage. Conversations like this are always frustrating if you're part of them, but they're hilarious if you're not. To get back to Ballymun, we hailed a cab. It was like something out of Blade Runner, except it didn't actually fly. I'd never seen anything quite like it. From the outside, it didn't look like much, but when we climbed in... well, poured ourselves in for the most part, in this case... it was like a small bus inside. Limited version of the TARDIS, in effect. Anyway, I was impressed. When we got there, I paid the driver, partly because these guys had been paying for me all night, and partly because I was the only one who was still arguably competent to deal with money.

Dave could not actually figure out how to unlock the front door to his house. I think that has to be the drunkest I've ever seen anyone who could still actually operate his limbs. So if I was surprised at how fast he got loaded, I was also impressed by how well he navigated the evening (with obvious operational limitations). He and Chris both needed to take a leak really badly, so... they watered the front lawn. NOW I know why Ireland is so green. :)

My relative sobriety seems to have failed me at about that time, because I don't actually recall exactly how we got in... if Mary came down and opened the door and went back to bed, or if Dave finally did manage to get the key in the lock. Anyway, we did get back in, and by this time, everyone was ravenous. It was decided that a pizza should be ordered. A very, very large pizza. And so one was. And said very, very large pizza duly arrived. Now, I've heard of kosher pizza... if you're Jewish, you can have dairy, or meat, but not both... but this was the first time I'd ever seen one. When we opened the lid, there it was: a gigantic doughy platter of cheese, and sauce, and... nothing else. Not a single topping. Not a rabbi in the world could have found fault with it. Ah, but a bunch of Irishmen? Fingers were pointed, recriminations exchanged, accusations of epicurean incompetence flew to and fro. It's obvious that what happened was that someone picked up the phone, managed to dial the number, gave our address and ordered a large pizza and, mission accomplished, hung up before the obvious supplemental question was asked. Large pizza with no toppings? Sure, you got it, Pontiac. I suppose it's a small mercy no one gave the address as "Dave's place" or something. As I say, words were exchanged as a result. The only thing that staved off a fight was hunger, and the fact that humans can either have a mouthful of words, or food. Everyone opted for food. The pizza survived about ten minutes; the chicken fingers and potato wedges vanished even faster.

Oblivion ensued.