St Patrick’s weekend, and it wasn’t snowing, gales weren’t howling, hailstones weren’t ricocheting off the statuary on monsoon-heavy streets. March bank holiday weekend and our teeth weren’t chattering; the sun was even trying to shine. Old St Patrick had finally bestowed on us a sweet smile. We must be doing something right – or maybe this was just the calm before the storm.
Last week a reader responded to a column I wrote about finding St Patrick’s Day somewhat depressing. “Hope you’re enjoying life a bit more nowadays, Hilary,” he wrote, which was either deeply sardonic or straightforwardly kind-hearted. I’m opting for the latter. Well, yes, thank you, having pulled myself up by my emerald bootstraps and braved the city over the weekend, I’m feeling just dandy.
It was a beautiful morning; spring was whispering in the city’s ear and the streets were jumping. I was sitting on a wooden bench outside a city-centre cafe in the sunshine, having ordered a ginger tea (hell, why not live dangerously), my feet in a trough of spring flowers, watching the patron saint’s glorious world go by.
This doesn’t feel like Paddy’s weekend, I thought. Who were all these people with brazen orthodontistry and legs longer than barstools’? Where did they come from, these youthful metropolitans with their artily tattooed musculature and dead-straight hair? Who banished the belching trolls staggering around in 40 shades of green and leprechaun hats made in China?
And more to the point, when did the city wriggle out of its anorak of winter skin and become this languid, sun-dappled, barely recognisable place?
From my ringside seat outside the sunny cafe, I watched an alternative parade last weekend: elegant women in houndstooth shorts and opaque tights clacking along the street in spindling heels, telling secrets to their mobiles; a band of Hari Krishnas in saffron robes and Marks’n’Sparks jumpers, banging their cowbells and chanting their confections; thin men on thinner bicycles with complicated arrangements of facial hair, men who probably make a damn fine risotto and most certainly call themselves feminists; van drivers delicately clipping each other’s wing mirrors and exchanging unpleasantries, their sun-kissed faces swollen with irritation.
Around the cafe the clientele were tethered to slim telephones and elegant laptops. They drank coffee from tall glasses, entwined their rose-tattooed limbs around fragile chairs, polished their expensive spectacles with the hems of their T-shirts. Small cabals of earnest young men bent their fashionably shaved heads together to talk about the media landscape and yogilates and the demerits of giant couscous.
Across the road, a window cleaner with a quivering brush that gushed firm watery jets spent an inordinately long time washing the lettering above the bright-pink sex shop with rubber dresses in the window. The shop boasts an impressive array of adult products, vibrating bunnies and size-nine kitten heels and rubber-handled whips that don’t scuttle under rocks with the belt of a crozier.
It was almost lovely, and vaguely lonely, being an observer of this crisp subsection of city life. Maybe it was the light, but momentarily I could have been somewhere else entirely, Rotterdam or Amsterdam, as the song goes: the culture, the faces, the snippets of conversation, even the casual affection between these young people, felt hewn out of something larger than the familiar ruts and crevasses of Irish life.
The ginger tea arrived courtesy of a beautiful Asian waitress who explained the inner workings of the tea strainer to me as if dealing with someone who might have trouble coming to terms with the information (but then again, I can look pretty gormless in the face of effortless beauty and new technologies). When I lifted out the contraption, having carefully obeyed her instructions, I found a delicate basket of spices with a cardamom pod inside.
I drank my tea, and wondered when all this began. When did we make the change from congregation to population?
Well, hail glorious St Patrick, I hope you had a good weekend too. I hope you were able to look down on Erin’s green valleys, from your mansion above, without too much rancour as some of us, your poor children, kicked back for an hour of sunshine on your big weekend.
I’m sure you can forgive us our designer stubble and our rubber nurse’s outfits and those inky pythons we twist around our limbs. Hey, it’s been a long schlep across the blooming shamrock, pursued by the infidel throng, to get from there to here, but, you know, maybe it was worth it.