A number of issues have arisen

Worst ODer, reporting for duty. So yes, a number of issues have arisen and I thought I may as well ramble on here like I used to. Today is the 11th anniversary of the day I met my wife, having known of her on OD for a few months beforehand. She’s now driving her mother home from a day around Dublin, which is now possible because she’s passed her driving test and can do such things unaccompanied. Her mother’s up with us because it’s the May Bank Holiday weekend, which means chaos in Killarney. Think The Fast & The Furious only more skewed towards Toyota Starlets.

Anyway, life feels very much like surfing these days. In that while you do feel exhilarated, you do fear you’re about to fall off at any moment. I’ve begun exercising on the regular, which involves taking a 3km walk at lunchtime and another in the evening. The key is to try and do them in 30 mins each, which is an average speed on 6km/h – below which it’s not really proper exercise. In addition, I’ve recently begun Couch To 5K, which involves running. I don’t usually run. I weigh….a lot. 115kg is the general ballpark, which Siri has told me is 253lbs if you’re American. In fact, it’s likely I’d be American at that weight. Nevertheless, I think I carry my immense bulk rather well – certainly if you were to Google those of the same weight, you’d get chunkier specimens than me. So maybe a lot of that weight is in my thighs, which are quite muscly. I have somewhat of a paunch, but I can see my genitals, which means I can’t be that bad.

However exercising is always preferable to dieting. Again, I’m not the worst but I have been known to buy two packets of crisps (chips) in the past, one to go with each sandwich. My main weakness has always been the post-lunch treat. A chocolate bar, usually a Twix or the ironically-named KitKat Chunky (as in “would you like a KitKat, chunky?”), would usually follow my lunch along with a coffee. I’ve cut them out since January, along with daily Burger King. I am finding it hard to avoid BK for a whole week, but when I do go I get something healthy like a Whopper (it’s got tomato in it). I know, I’m only fooling myself.

A lot of my determination arose from the month we had off drinking in October/November. During this time, I missed alcohol hugely and didn’t notice any health benefits. But I did notice I was able to stay off the stuff, which was impressive since I’d made a point of not denying myself anything ever. I think that it awoke in me a kind of adult nature, the one that says “come on, sort yourself out”. So I went back on the drink in a big way but nurtured the idea in my head that I might at least try and get fit and if I don’t lose any weight, at least I can’t be accused of being lazy.

On 14 January, I just walked to Phibsboro. It’s 3km from my office, on the way home but there’s another 17km after that. Nonetheless I did it and it wasn’t hugely difficult. So I did it again the next day. And the next. And I think a week later, I said I’d take a walk from my office near Grafton Street to Merrion Square and back because I may not get a chance to walk that evening. But I did walk that evening anyway. So that was 6K a day, and I’ve done it every weekday since with a minimum of exceptions. I’ve even walked in from Phibsboro on a morning when I knew I’d be going out after work and wouldn’t get a chance to walk back. The longer I keep it up, the harder it is to deviate from it.

And I love this walk to Phibsboro. It’s an urban village just north of Dublin city centre, very much like a part of London in that it has it’s own distinct personality to the city along with plenty of shops, bars and sights. On the way up O’Connell Street, I pass the rougher part of it, Upper O’Connell Street, which should have an enormous mall but instead has an empty lot (this is the Irish equivalent of the Champs Elysee, so it’s pretty awful) and the first business to open there in years is a Chinese restaurant in the old Dublin County Council offices. That said, the Savoy Cinema across from it recently held the European (and apparently world) premiere of Oblivion, with Tom Cruise being followed by a guy with a portable heater. The Gresham Hotel next to it is a huge, old grand place that was and still is one of the best in town, albeit with one of the worst locations, across from a 70’s dinosaur called Findlater House and the type of pubs nearby where you might get stabbed.

Then I cross Parnell Street, named after Charles Stewart Parnell who has a monument at the junction with O’Connell Street. Parnell was a parliamentarian without equal in his time, but he loved the poontang and fell from grace soon after an affair with some guy’s wife was exposed. He fought for Irish independence in the British House of Commons and was a great orator, he had this fantastic line “No man has the right to say unto a nation ‘thus far thou shalt go and no further'” A line apparently used by Hitler to justify his expanding German state – but luckily Germany has got a lot less controlling ever since. Oh wait……

Anyway, after that is Cavendish Row/North Frederick Street, which is a hill you walk up from O’Connell Street. It’s got a basement bar with a ‘Cheers’ sign that I’m sure has delighted and subsequently disappointed thousands of American tourists, since there hasn’t been a bar there for decades. There’s the Candy Store, a big long cafe that’s the last sign of civilisation as the street gets even rougher. By the time you reach Hardwicke Place, you’re in the projects and children may rob the bicycle from beneath you. There’s another cafe called Lovin Spoon that I once met my sister in (she works in the Mater Hospital nearby) and I got an all day breakfast. It had these nightmarish pancakes that were so cack-handedly made I’d never seen the like before or since until I tried to make them myself and ended up with similar examples.

You then reach the junction with Dorset Street. I love Dorset Street, it’s full of immigrants and again, has that kind of hodgepodge look to it that you might see in London. Lots of neon signs, takeaways, taxi dispatchers and an amazing array of wiring along the top of all the shopfronts. Dorset Street, as I’ve mentioned here before, is a Dublin shibboleth – real Dubs pronounce it “Door-set”, not “Door-sit” Street. There’s also special ways to pronounce D’Olier, Amiens and Clanbrassil Streets but that’s another entry.

North of the Dorset Street junction is Blessington Street, which leads onto the Blessington Basin, an old municipal reservoir that’s still a pretty little oasis of calm/drug-taking only 15 minutes from the city centre. I’ve never been there, Blessington Street is the kind of place I just keep walking through. I don’t like the lack of shopfronts, the lack of people, the feeling that no-one would come to your aid. I got a new camera at the end of January and decided not to walk that day, simply because of Blessington Street. It gives me the creeps, yet I walk it most days. There’s a model shop, a motorbike dealer and some kind of holistic massage place with Greek writing on the window that looks like it was done with Tippex. All are usually closed when I pass, the only place open is a corner shop run by two Indian guys on the corner of Nelson Street called Camelot Stores or something. My sister lived on Nelson Street a few years ago,just beside the entrance to the Mater Hospital, where she works. The shop is tiny but packed and you can get a can of Diet Coke for 80c, which is ok for a convenience store in Dublin.

After that is a Marie Stopes Reproductive Choices clinic, which is often….not quite besieged but definitely well-attended by a handful of protesters. They don’t chant, they just have pamphlets lest a woman of childbearing age attempt to walk in unharrassed. There’s so much division in this country about abortion and I’ve thought about it a lot – I can only conclude that even if I had no opinion, there’s a lot more sympathy, empathy and compassion from people who support a woman’s right not to proceed with a pregnancy and a lot of hysterics, shock tactics and foreign support from those who don’t. So even without an opinion, you could see who the assholes are in the debate.

Of course, after that is a church. Obviously it’s Catholic, but less obviously is that there’s a park next to it. In my days of wavering belief in Catholicism, I admired how Protestant churches were far more approachable, with parks next to them and a feeling that it’s just another building, not a towering behemoth of implied power like even the most modest Catholic Church. But this one, St. Joseph’s on Berkeley Road is ok because it has a park next to it. A tiny park, but well-kept. I’ve never been in it and the grass in some of the pebbles over the fence would suggest not many have.

We got married in a Catholic Church in Sant’Appiano, Italy five and a half years ago. We did it because we didn’t see why we shouldn’t; I suspect if we’d left it til now, we’d go for a Unitarian Church or something entirely civil. For years, I just saw the Catholic Church as a flawed group of well-minded simpletons with a few bad apples, reflecting wider society. But with all that’s happened in Ireland with that church, I’ve approached militant atheist at some points in the past few years. I can just about tolerate a passing reference to them in casual conversation; any more and I’ll go off on one. They’re utterly toxic, manipulative, controlling and into self-preservation at all costs. I hope they die soon.

Next up on Berkeley STREET (see, the church are so out of touch it even persists with calling the fucking street a different name) is the junction with St. Vincent Street, which I take up to Goldsmith Street. I thought for a while last year we might live on Goldsmith Street. It’s narrow and the terraced houses are packed in tight but it could be all we need. Living in the city is an aspiration I can’t quite shake. Even though it makes a ton of sense to stay in Ashbourne, I sometimes see a For Sale sign on the way to work and think to myself “wouldn’t that work out well?”

I grew up in Ashbourne and it’s a great place to live, really. It’s got lots of facilities, it’s peaceful, very little crime, minimal ghost estates (building sites abandoned when the economy crashed) and it remains as full of young people as it always did. But I always thought of it as somewhere we live til we move to Dublin. The funny thing is that with Dublin’s traffic and bus route consolidation, it can take an hour to get to the city centre from many suburbs. We’re outside the county, almost twice as far away, yet it never takes us that long to get in. We have a lovely house in a quiet cul de sac, overlooking playing fields. We could do a lot worse. So maybe we’ll do up some rooms in the house next year and make it more comfortable.

I turn onto the North Circular Road and cross Blanquiere Bridge, which isn’t really a bridge since it doesn’t cross water or have arches at all really. I’ll tell you why in the next entry.

J