I walked home from work the other night, and the experience was such a a pleasant one I found myself wondering why I don't do it more often. It was a lovely, balmy evening in the city. Temple Bar was en fete, as always - the streets alive with so many cheerful Latin voices that if you closed your eyes for a moment you could have been at a staff meeting in Bewleys. Or somewhere in Spain, even.
Away from the bustling streets of the city's cultural quarter, by contrast, calm had descended; and I strolled home along the quays with only the Liffey for company, neither of us in much of a hurry.
The moon (fresh from its critically-acclaimed performance in last week's eclipse) hung above Heuston Station like a big grapefruit segment; its light playing softly on the river, where herons dug for worms - or whatever herons dig for - in the low-tide.
The smell of hops drifted out from Guinness's: slightly pungent, like a shirt you've been wearing for three days, but surprisingly agreeable (as the shirt can be, so long as you don't have visitors) and as quintessentially Dublin as the smell of pretzels in New York. And I thought to myself, as I went along, isn't it just grand?
I live in the west of the city, as you've probably guessed, so the Garda car pound at Parkgate Street was on the way home; which is just as well, or I would have forgotten why I was walking. I hadn't actually checked with anyone there; but this is where I collected the car the last time it got towed, almost exactly a year ago, so I just sort-of assumed.
Nothing stays the same for long in Dublin these days, however, and because of the nature of my offences - (1) Forgetting to move a parked vehicle off a clearway at 4 p.m. and (2) writing a column several weeks ago describing the relaxing effect of sitting outside a cafe watching someone else get towed - my punishment was to be a greater one.
The car was in the freshly-opened Dublin Corporation pound at New Wapping Street - about three miles back in the direction whence I had come. And if you think the last part of that sentence was a bit stiff, you haven't seen the fine. I had assumed this was still £100, like last year, and had reconciled myself to it on the basis that when you deduct the free parking, the figure drops to a stern-faced but affable ninety-something quid. Wrong again. The fine was a new (and, indeed, Wapping) £130; for which, in fairness, the Corpo now provides a more customer-friendly service, including 24-hour opening, as they told me when I rang. I told them I'd leave the car with them till morning, if it was all the same, because walking around the city at night is a thing you can get too much of, however pleasant; and they said that was grand, so long as I collected it by the following midnight. Beyond that, the penalty would start increasing until, after about a week, according to my calculations, it would exceed the car's insurance value.
So then I walked the rest of the way home, too. The night had lost a little of its balminess, I thought; and maybe it was imagination, but the moon seemed to have taken on the appearance of a lop-sided, sneering grin.
MentioN of a certain brewery there brings me to the campaign against cold Guinness, for which - let's be honest - this has not been a good summer.
On top of the split in the movement caused by (excuse me while I spit, again) a lunatic moderate fringe which objects only to the new "extra-cold" fad, ignoring the fact that the ordinary stuff was too cold already, the all-powerful Guinness marketing department has somehow organised Ireland's hottest summer in a decade, temporarily silencing us all.
It's not fair. For years the beer companies have been running ads here emphasising the superior coldness and thirst-quenching qualities of their products, as if we were all living in Death Valley, California. But as soon as somebody tries to point out the absurdity of this, a major climate-shift suddenly occurs: cactus starts sprouting in city gardens and the thermometers climb so high that people dance naked in the street around burst water-mains (where I live, anyway).
There is some good news, however, and it comes in the form of a letter from Ultan O Broin - in San Francisco, of all places. Ultan read about the movement on the Internet, and has written to say: "Keep up the good work. I'm starting a campaign here against the scourge." He also includes a cutting from the San Francisco Examiner which he suggests "more of less confirms the contention that this whole `chilled' fad is for the Americans, or the MacPaddys, as I like to call them".
The article focuses on the work of one of Guinness's "draft specialists" whose job it is to check standards in US pubs, and who, among other things, tells the SFE that stout should be served "in the traditional way . . . chilled to 39-45 degrees (fahrenheit)". Which is of course about as traditional as the car pound in New Wapping Street. But it's a happy coincidence that the campaign should gain a foothold in San Francisco, because that city is apparently the setting for one of the brewery's latest mad series of TV ads, the one in which a man cycles down a hill and off a jetty, followed by dogs. The series aims to associate Guinness with sex and other dangerous forms of exercise: a second ad has people bare-back riding on (and off, if they're not careful) the Cliffs of Moher; while a third has a couple sharing oysters and frolics on the beach (equally reckless - believe me, that sand gets everywhere).
In general, the ads portray activities more normally associated with the use of prohibited substances, and what they have to do with drinking stout is anyone's guess.
They certainly don't speak to people like you and me (stop me if I'm being too familiar), whose idea of adventure is walking home from work at night; although they are in keeping with the virtual hot climate that the marketing people are trying to convince us we live in, and which has become briefly a reality.
But we have to look on the bright side. There's a long, bitter winter ahead of us, I'm sure. And we in the campaign against cold Guinness are looking forward to it.
