Dublin this week. The National Library of Ireland.
There's a notice up.
As part of reorganisation and general improvement to readers' services...
Hate notices like that. I suspect they mean cuts, the country is broke, etc...
My suspicions were founded. The book I wanted was unavailable. (As part of reorganisation and general improvement to readers' services...)
I ordered up an alternative. It was 9.30AM.
Yes the alternative would be delivered to my table shortly after twelve noon. ..as part of reorganisation and general improvement to readers' services the attendants only deliver books at specified hours. In between these specified hours they do other stuff. To the casual observer this seems to consist of standing around in groups chatting to each other about how the National Library of Ireland has gone to hell.
It has.
You don't have to take my word for it. The academic Diarmuid Ferriter has resigned as a Director, in protest. He has that luxury. Unfortunately I don't, I need the place to do research on stuff that I need to write about. He being a professor of history has other places to go to. Mostly the bank. Because Professors of History in Ireland are very well paid indeed. Grossly overpaid. In fact...it seems to the embittered lateral thinker (me)...it seems the fact that he and his cohort are grossly overpaid in UCD bears directly on the fact that he has to resign from the NLI...because there is no money availble to run the library in an efficient manner.
He probably doesn't see things like that.
I sit at my table, bookless. I notice that the man beside me is reading bound volumes of the Annual Reports of Bord Bainne. Piled up on his table like a delivery of milk cartons.
The one book I wanted was about Madame Blavatsky. She had nothing to do with Bord Bainne. A pity really.
I have the choice of sitting at an empty table for three hours or leaving. I left and went to DunLaoghaire on the DART to see a man about a ms. In my world view a ms is a manuscript, in the sense of being a manuscript, an unpublished unprinted book. In his view it is a typescript. He is an editor. And picky. I tell him repeatedly that I've been in publishing for decades and everyone calls an unprinted book a manuscript. "Well," he says, "everyone is wrong. A manuscript is written with a pen. A typescript is wriiten with a keyboard. Simple as that."
Approaching his apartment I get a phone call.
"Do you want milk in your tea?" he asks.
"Yes please."
"Well get some in the shop, I've none."
I walk back a half mile or so to the shop. It's very hot. The shop is full of exuberant schoolboys and girls. Their schooldays just about over and the easy part of life about to commence, that sort of exuberance.
Yeah right.
I buy a carton of milk and walk back to the editor's apartment, thinking of the man in the NLI writing about Bord Bainne.
I have a rich inner life.
There are building works on DunLaoghaire seafront and a huge crane looms over. I and other concerned citizens gather to rubberneck. I whip my phone out to photograph. Its not a very good phone and not a very good photograph. But no matter. They are moving the statue of Christ the King. This is about the only thing that gives artistic or philosophic meaning to my home town of DunLaoghire so they better put in back.
"It's the resurrection," says one rubbernecker.
"Or they're taking it away for scrap," says another.
I walk on. If I want unfunny comedians I'll go to the Kilkenny Comedy Festival.
I cut through the grounds of the Royal Marine Hotel. Four star.
Twenty yards from the main front door of this hotel is a victorian bandstand. Click that link above and you'll see it. But what you wont see is what I saw. A knot of people gathered there. A woman of middle years is dancing around waving a bottle in the air, singing and drinking. The scene is vaguely Hogarthian. These people, I realise, are DunLaoghaire's derelicts and winos. Street people. The drinking ones. (The drug crazed ones gather on the plaza beside DunLaoghaire Church.) Building works have displaced these drinking people from their normal location in the shadow of Christ the King and they've now set up a new home on the bandstand.
Right outside the door of the Royal Marine Hotel. Four star.
I observe the scene thoughtfully.I expect to see a bouncer or some such functionary emerge from the hotel to eject the interlopers.
Nothing happens.
Except a large blue airport tourist bus draws up with tourists.
It parks beside the dancing drinking muttering singing alcoholics.
Tourists emerge bemused.
I think yes. National Library of Ireland disintegrating. Overpaid academics throwing shapes. Moving statues. Moving Winos.
Cead Mile Failte.
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