On a back street in Dublin 2 on Thursday morning, I saw a middle-aged man running urgently in my direction shouting “Steve! Steve!”. The pedestrianised street was busy at the time. And of the several possible candidates to be Steve, the most plausible was a younger man speeding past me on a bicycle.
I almost put a hand out to stop the cyclist and let him know his friend was calling him back. But doubt delayed me and he flashed by before I could. The running man, meanwhile, unable to sustain his sprint, stopped to catch breath, then resumed jogging until he too passed me, followed at walking pace by a concerned-looking woman, presumably his wife.
That’s when it had belatedly dawned on me that he was a tourist who had just been mugged. He probably had no friends in this town, named Steve or otherwise. What had really been shouting – in a foreign accent – was “Thief!”
His pursuit had by now reached the corner of the even busier South Great George’s Street. But the cyclist, having snatched the man’s phone, was long gone, disappearing into the traffic, his high-speed getaway unimpeded by red lights.
The Dromcollogher cinema fire disaster – Frank McNally on a fateful day in 1926
The spirit of 1965 – Kevin Rafter on Ireland’s first television election
Grief and remembrance – Ronan McGreevy on Dublin’s Armistice Day in 1924
The Night Mayor – Oliver O’Hanlon on Jimmy Walker, New York’s colourful political kingpin
Would I have tried to stop him had the situation been immediately clear? I don’t know. But it struck me that the tourist had not been helped by his English phrase books. Nobody shouts “Stop thief!” in real-world Dublin anymore, if they ever did. He might have increased his chances of an intervention with something more idiomatic, along the lines of: “Ye robbin’ bastard!”
***
On a street in Cork last weekend, by complete contrast, a man walking in my direction suddenly gestured towards me and, smiling, said: “What a soul!”
He too was a middle-aged stranger, of Indian accent and appearance. So at first I presumed he was talking to somebody else. But as we passed each other, he looked me in the eye unmistakably and, still beaming, added: “You have a great personality.” I laughed as if in on whatever joke this was. Then he was gone, leaving me to wonder what it could possibly have meant.
Perhaps this was the sort of thing that happened in Cork all the time? Perhaps the man was a practitioner of some kind of yoga, which involves conferring compliments on random strangers, especially sad cases who look like they need cheering up, to increase the store of good feeling in the world?
Or was it really possible that I was exuding an aura, invisible to most people, but clear to a man of advanced spiritual sensitivity?
For some reason, I was reminded of a scene in I Claudius where the crazed Caligula asks the hero if he’s noticed anything strange about him lately and Claudius, who has noticed only that Caligula is even madder than before, guesses diplomatically: “You’ve become a god?”
It’s still a bit premature for that in my case, obviously. But while awaiting enlightenment about what that Indian man meant, I will try not to lose the run of myself.
***
While in Cork, I finally got to see Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, a play that had hitherto escaped me elsewhere.
It was also my first time in the city’s lovely old Everyman Theatre, with its proscenium arch and ornate boxes. Although, sad to say, the venue was barely half full the night I was there – a sunny evening outside not helping.
One slight problem with the production was that Natalie Radmall-Quirke seemed a bit young for the part of Amanda, the fading southern belle trying to fix her misfit daughter up with a “gentleman caller”. I feared at one point that it would be the mother who took off with him instead.
Still, the play was beautifully staged and never less than absorbing. And as a possible bonus, in my case, Williams’s text also touches on the subject of fleeting auras, via the tragic heroine Laura, who was based on the playwright’s real-life sister.
Lame of leg and cripplingly shy, she flinches from the date arranged by her scheming mother, until briefly transcending her limitations in Act 2, scene 7.
There the narrator, her brother Tom, comments: “A fragile, unearthly presence comes out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting.”
Perhaps this is what, thanks to a trick of the southern sun as I walked along Cork’s Grand Parade on Saturday, that gentleman passer-by saw in me.