As the plane descends into the grey gloop that passes for weather from October to May in Berlin, it’s easy to feel wistful for the sunny bluster two hours away in Dublin.
Berlin has a short spring and a glorious summer and, beyond that, an autumn and winter as bleak as a disillusioned Le Carré spy.
Dublin, on good autumn days like we’ve had recently, recalls the flower sellers on Grafton Street: sunny and bright, though prone to dramatic mood swings.
Dublin can be heaven, but even then it is a two-stage love affair: a nostalgia pint with an estrangement chaser.
Like donning an old pair of slippers, it’s a relief to enjoy the playful banter among friends in the pub. Or walk the streets and watch the quiet consideration of people towards each other. Banter and consideration: two Irish specialities yet to be imported to Berlin alongside the ever-popular Kerrygold butter.
If you’re lucky in Dublin, as I was twice this week, you’ll be chauffeured around by Dublin’s unsung heroes: our gentlemen taxi drivers. These are the fresh-faced older men we all know, in sweaters and ties, who are often forgotten thanks to their mouthy, cab-driving cousins.
On one trip, the driver regaled me with tales of Dublin's many underground rivers. On another journey, the driver absent-mindedly whistled two notes – the distinctive opening hook of Irving Berlin's Blue Skies – sparking a discussion about why good songs work.
Dublin can be heaven, sitting in Simon’s Place coffee shop on South Great George’s Street. Leave that familiar refuge in an utterly changed city, though, and the returnee glow begins to wear off again.
Perhaps it begins to fade as you trudge 25 minutes through town, yet again, because often the simplest of journeys from A to B by bus in inner-city Dublin is pointless.
A last flicker of emigrant nostalgia extinguishes at news of a tax break for builders that, in a flash of Orwellian genius, is labelled a first-time buyer's grant although, in a nod to Animal Farm, some first-time buyers are more equal than others.
The boom is back but it seems, at least to this returning emigrant, that property is passé.
The new fetish is food. Food columnists and cooks are inexplicable celebrities, pursuing edible novelty with a relentless focus, and all to distinguish them from their many rivals. Restaurants have supplanted churches as Ireland’s preferred place of pilgrimage and spiritual enlightenment. Dublin chefs – posing in pristine white aprons, tattooed arms folded – have elbowed out priests as agents of transubstantiation.
The opiate of the masses is no longer religion but food, and the fatted calf of old is now a yellow fin, line-caught tuna in an amaranth crust.
Where does this leave the returning Dub who wants to eat out? After a pleasant crisis interlude – of moderate prices, sensible food and well-balanced service staff – the dispiriting Dublin restaurant experience is back.
Dining out is once more an Irish kabuki theatre, where the main priority of self-serving staff – either jarringly over-familiar or mentally absent – is to convince you that the main course that should have cost €15 was actually worth the €30 you’ve been charged.
Side dishes, once seasonal vegetables included in the price of your main course, are now €5-a-pop fashionable add-ons like quinoa, freekeh and brown butter corn. Chefs insist they are different and “passionate”, promising “carefully curated”, “bespoke” meals. Why, after simultaneous crab-cake outbreaks some years back, is every Dublin restaurant now gripped by a pork-belly plague?
As before 2008, Dublin diners stumble back onto the street, convincing themselves they have just had an “Experience”. Failing to do so would leave only one alternative: they have been fleeced. Again.
Dublin’s inward food focus is no surprise in these uncertain times, and dining diversity is always welcome. Other European diners accept food diversity as part of a multicultural society, so why are Dublin’s masticating middle classes still the same insecure, obsessive, credulous teens, happy to embrace the latest fad – food – as a bringer of transcendence?
Perhaps their obsessive-compulsive food fetish is an attempt to cover up the value-free vacuum that is modern Dublin life. If Joyce’s Ireland was an old sow that eats its farrow, today’s Dublin is a place where the sow is sold back her own farrow on a bed of crunchy kale for €28. And we need the trough back by 9pm.