REHOBOTH

There's woegeous journalism and there's an article on The Irish Times website, Is Dublin 8 the New Gay Village. It has the sentence:

The area's edgy cosmopolitan vibe is attracting gay residents.

The writer who should in her own interests prefer to be nameless, she really should, builds on this start and leads the hapless reader into a carcrash of an article.  It's all quite risible, embarassing, appallingly written and...oh for goddsakes...read the comments thereto attached...I actually could say it better myself but can't be bothered.

But but but...at least I now know that the majority of people in Ireland who have entered into civil partnerships live in the area of Dublin 8. (Village? Village? Dublin 8 is a huge urban area with a population greater than most Irish towns.)

Another thing I now know is that couples who allow Irish Times writers into their houses to write about them and their ideas on society and interior decor are pretty damn smug and self satisfied. And it's nothing to do with being gay, but that helps.

Jim and Philip and Nathalie and Carla are (head?)cases in point.

The photo of Mr and Mr shows them standing in what at first glance looks like an Ikea showroom under construction, before the bits and bobs arrive, and yes they do look pretty damn smug and self satisfied. Jim is in communications and Philip is a librarian. But we sort of knew that. Just as we suspect that Jim's role in communications does not involve climbing up telegraph poles to connect wires. The photo of Ms and Ms is much the same, oozing with a like amount of smugness and self satisfaction, but with added girlie bits, like cushions. Ms and Ms appear to be in design, and one Ms is an apparachik in the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network.

This is where I come in.

This is where it all comes together.

My amazing connections!

I shared a flat in London with one of the founders of the GLEN. There were two other blokes there. Every week one of us would cook a Sunday meal for the others. I was the worst cook and the least gay and got chucked out of the whole arrangement. I then shared a bedsitter with the brother of Eric Luke, the Irish Times photographer involved in this appalling piece of journalism. Many years later I came back to Dublin and met the same Eric up Dalkey Hill...he took a photo of my small daughter being picturesque in the snow. And not...only...that...the other photographer involved in the misconceived article is Cyril Byrne...and Cyril Byrne is married to a friend of mine in Shankill.

And...not...only...that...

Mr and Mr Jim and Philip live in Rehoboth Place in Dolphin's Barn. And I know an awful  lot about Rehoboth Place. I learned most of it when editing The Diaries of Mary Hayden.  Stuff like...

Molly Bloom's father lived in Rehoboth Place. Yes he was fictional, but real people who also lived there range from Isabella Mulvany who more or less founded Alexandra College and her sister who was the grandmother of Richard Murphy the Poet.

Whatever happened to him?

I think he's in Sri Lanka.

I suppose it all hangs together.

Sri Lanka being the sort of Dublin 8 of the Indian Ocean.

PS:  My new novel The Snake Dancer of Sati Choura is now in Irish bookshops. Though not of course in The Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar, see below ! Their demographic wouldn't like it.