Of the Dublin and Cork volumes in the truncated Journeys in America series, the latter did sell 1,100 copies but, with many unhappy returns, the former hardly scraped 250.
11 April
30 May
13 June
6 July
7 July
8 July
22 July
24 July
30 July
8 August
September
5 Sept
10-11-12 December
P.S.
The man doing the Hitler salute on the start-your-own-business course chose to extend his arm over the one Jewish member of the class, sitting in the front row.
March
9 April
June
21 July
October
November
December
I’ve mislaid the handwritten originals of the entries for 28 April and 19 December.
The portent that was the financial Fido appeared on 30 March; the garda gymnast did his thing on 22 September.
8 January (from an email)
March
April
19 December
P.S.
In case anyone might think these exhibitions (1996-2003) paint an excessively lurid picture of the capital, it’s worth checking out this passage by Emmanuel Kehoe in the Sunday Business Post of 17 June that year.
Released from a FÁS prison camp in Finglas in the spring, I got a job in localization thanks to a friend at the company.
Looking back, I really should have brained the miserable slug from Tunbridge Wells for docking me half an hour but that January I must have been at a particular spiritual low not to do it.
The next entry is taken from an email I sent on 11 October 2000. (The upshot was that the security man subsequently charged a fiver fee to anyone needing his cubbyhole to stash shopping.)
It was a year of Dublin sights and sounds shaped by
(a) getting shafted in March by DCU, those campus cowboys who had already broken my heart in my efforts to get fully paid (and on time)
and
(b) the unwise choice of a computer programming course in a FÁS prison camp on the Jamestown Road* in Finglas.
The latter began in July, while I was trying to finish a Ph.D. in Maynooth.
*I should add that I was already washing my hands when ordered from the “staff” toilets in Finglas.
February
March
*a prospective housemate playing golf while naked on the estate green rang an alarm bell or two.
July
August
September
December
On 8 March, all that remained of the car was a number plate, given to the police by a little kid at the flats. Already loose, it had fallen off as the joy riders bounced over the ramps.
February
*There was a Perspex skylight over the back table.
Having moved to Dublin in the middle of 1996, I wrote down what I saw and heard, like the random street violence, the accidents, the media types, the midnight ramblers, the Hieronymus Bosch culinary scenes of the Gigs Place, the Parnell Road welfare interrogations, and, through the keyhole of painting and decorating, an air hostess leaving her poetry scattered on a dressing table.
May
June
August
September
October
November
December
P. was sitting on the remote control, hiding it from the two older fellas in the room, who wanted to watch Glenroe. It was his revenge for one of them emptying his colostomy bag early that morning (“while I was having my egg”).
Adelaide Road Vigil II
August is the cruellest month for patients. It’s a time when even basic cop-on is away on holidays. I got a call from Adelaide Road while on the long road from the country. It was a failed attempt to turn us back (not an option). I could hear the words “Shamrock Rovers” mentioned after I passed the phone to my passenger (‘Shamrock Rovers?’) but then we were asked to get to the hospital as soon as possible. We wondered was this something about match traffic but later it turned out the Rovers were playing in Albania. But the match was on Rovers TV.
After an absolute deluge in the Pale, I still dropped my passenger at the gate half an hour early. Then I got a parking spot around the corner on Harcourt Terrace. Security let her in by prior instruction but then some incompetent beauty from a different admin section told her she had no need to check in as normal. Eight or nine other patients arrived and got seen and sometime in all that my passenger got another call from the first beauty asking had she reached the hospital yet. When she said she was in the hospital, the first one hung up.
After an hour and a half of this codology, some nurse finally twigged she was a loose end without a number. She was the last person seen and didn’t get out until six. Shamrock F*cking Rovers.
I had to wait then until half past for the traffic to ease, along the canal. By then a fox had appeared from one of the prosperous gardens on the west side of the street. He crossed to enter the abandoned cop shop that lies in the shade of the tall trees and grasses at the canal end.
I wasn’t into wandering around needlessly in the heat. I did walk a plucky old lady down to Wilton Terrace by the shady canal to get the Navan bus. She was after an injection in her eye. She told me why she hadn’t brought her husband (“He’d only get lost”). When two more old dears were waiting to hail a taxi outside the hospital they got distracted, nattering to each other, so I discreetly flagged a cab down from behind a tree and then pointed to them as he pulled in. Good deeds help pass the time.
The fourth time I went around up the corner to put money in the meter, it was half past five. I crossed from the appealing evening sunshine to the shady, greener side of Harcourt Terrace. A beautiful blonde, I’d say thirty, was standing near the meter. She looked like she was on hold, on her phone. A loose pastel blouse, light blue jeans or trousers, sandy sandals or shoes… I didn’t look her up and down when I got close. She looked up. Her face looked a bit tense or troubled, either from the phone or from my crossing the street, or both. By then I had a two-euro coin evident between my fingers. I said “Hi” with a smile. She echoed the hi, I suppose a little relieved. I had a nice shirt. I got the final ticket with my back to her and went up further, to the car. When I turned back towards Adelaide Road and its tall trees, she was gone.
My mother got out at ten past six. We were away from home fifteen minutes short of nine hours. For what? No one had actually put her name down for the machine test. The consultant macgyvered a couple of things (a protective lens, a lash pluck) and told her to come back in three weeks. A charmer of an unfamiliar nurse (“too much hair and peroxide”) had even made an issue of her throwaway mask being on upside down.
Dr. John Flynn 