Hitching in the Eighties
Category: Ireland
Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (2003)
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.
Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (2002)
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
Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (2001)
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.
Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (2000)
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.)
Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (1999)
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
Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (1998)
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.
Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (1997)
Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (1996)
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”).
1900
It’s sad to know what’s gone, i.e. the Dún from Dún na Mainistreach (the fortress of the abbey), but we still have the church and the abbey ruin.
Co. Waterford, Irish south coast
Looking east around 1900…
Dr. John Flynn 