Dublin

and the Cotswolds, where I brake for butterflies, and toads.

This morning I nearly spilled a full cup of coffee on my laptop.

Reflexes and dexterity aren’t what they once were. Forty looms large.

Joel took delivery of replacement razors for his shaving implement. After years of being, shall we say, pogonotrophically challenged, he now needs to shave every day.

Puberty finally harpooned him at the ripe old age of 32.

I told him if he starts growing chest hair, it’s game over, so watch this space.

Anyway, back to the razors.

I was at my desk, AirPods in, and sensed a disturbance in the hallway. Joel was flapping around looking for something.

I popped out my AirPods.

“What’s up?”

“Can’t find my ID.”

I wandered out of the office. A delivery man stood at our front door, much more on top of the situation than I was.

He spoke briskly, a man who has places to go and people to see.

“Oh good, mum’s home. What year were you born?”

I stood very still, failing to grasp what was happening. Joel looked uncomfortable but stayed nice and quiet so he wouldn’t have to continue the hunt for his ID.

The delivery man looked expectantly at me, thumbing his tablet, all business.

“1985,” I whispered to the hallway.

“Great, here you go, thanks.” He thrust a parcel at me with a warning label: “Contains bladed implement. Over 18 only”.

Then he was gone and, with him, every scrap of peace and dignity I had gently cultivated that morning.

That was when I nearly destroyed my laptop.

An hour later, after the near miss with the coffee, after a brief consolatory hug from my much smoother-skinned companion, I thought about the years writ so evidently on my face.

Time heals all wounds, I’ve heard. A cheap nonsense peddled by people who have never been wounded.

Turn the other cheek, to err is human, to forgive divine. I’ve heard that too.

To paraphrase one of the characters in the latest episode of The Last of Us: what a bunch of victims.

Who but an irredeemable victim would forgive the unforgivable?

I choose not to forgive.

The past, Hilary Mantel says, belongs to those who have suffered in it. A little girl, punished years ago for lying, owns the past and reminds her father who the liar really is.

There was a lot hiding in my Notes, when I sat down this morning to write, behind both glasses and sunnies. England is awash in spring sunshine and I can’t bear to be inside.

There was a bit about my recent trip to Dublin.

Dublin is where I was schooled, where my parents still live, one of them lapsing into demented decrepitude.

It’s been a long time since I went back.

I’m not a real Dub, there’s nothing that could ever fool you into thinking I am. Doesn’t matter that “feck” starts flying out of my mouth as soon as I roll down the gangplank from the Stena ferry. That I can name every DART station from Dalkey to town. That an article about an Eddie Rockets closure due to rodent faeces contamination brings a nostalgic tear to my eye.

Dublin is a marvel these days, with her startled, monied internationalism.

Google’s European HQ in the old tarted-up docklands. More Silicon Valley than Joyce around the 40 Foot, where everyone is after a selfie in the spot Sharon Horgan and her sisters took a dip on Christmas morning (in the sunshine?!? Wearing pedal pushers and a light jumper?!?).

This is not Christmas Day in Dublin. This is high summer or I’ll eat my hat. Photo by Christopher Barr for GQ.

Ah Dublin.

In the sun, there’s none can touch you—but the sun scarcely ever touches you.

The tide curls around Bulloch Harbour and seals heave themselves onto the rocks in Scotsman’s Bay. No sign of the mail ship scudding out to sea from Dún Laoghaire but if you go into Fitzie’s, the benchettes still bear the faint imprint of Joyce’s arse.

There’s a fancy new bike lane that’ll whizz you up along the seafront towards town, where the shuffle of shops along Nassau Street is altered for the first time in living memory.

House of Names, with its heraldic plates? Gone.

Celtic Music? Gone. Who buys CDs these days? Enya is on Spotify.

Knobs and Knockers, the nautical antiques place with the best name ever? Also gone.

Molly is still here though, tits rubbed raw for luck at the bottom of Grafton Street.

Dublin feels a bit raw alright. Or is that me?

The houses are tarted up like an uncomfortable facelift or lapsing gently into disrepair. I prefer the latter but I’m alone in that, it seems. At least the toasted coconut smell of gorse, piña colada on the hillsides of Killiney, hasn’t changed, nor the wych elm, sporting pale green clusters of seed heads like cherry blossom.

Ahead of the return, a quick trip to Irish Tesco for as many cans of Beamish as I can carry.

That’s a request from my carpenter friend back home in Oxfordshire. They don’t sell Beamish outside of Ireland anymore, who knows why.

The cans on the shelves offer a “creamier head”. Keep them away from yer maiden aunts.

I ping his missus a pic and ask is there anything else she would like from Ireland?

Access to the single market please.

I don’t think Tesco stocks that.

Not in this day and age anyway. Never have free market economics been less of-the-moment.

I left Dublin, pleased to have made my peace with it, even if some things will never be forgiven.

—

Back on this side of the Irish Sea pond, spring was in full thrust.

The trees wear a filmy negligee of blossoms after the end of March and all of middle England exudes moisture, a long held exhalation of winter’s dampness.

Roots stretch and the ground dries. The woods fill in.

There are hardly any woods worthy of the name. Meagre clumps dot the fields—polite little tree villages—but, by April, the days are long and full of bees and blossom.

And now it’s May, which means I will be 40 in a month. I feel as if I’m straddling some significant isthmus: Corinth, say, en route to the riches of the Peloponnese, before I finally end up in the sea.

I hope that I keep my wits, even if dexterity departs.

—

On the way to the gym, two butterflies circled each other in the road, spinning upwards. I slowed the car to a crawl to let them spin away.

At the gym, I crossed the lawn to the stream in my bathing suit, carrying a pair of mating toads that got lost by the shower stalls.

At first, I thought it was a mama toad, carrying her baby on her back, but Google told me it’s the much smaller male astride his mate.

I left them in a patch of sun at the edge of the stream, still motionless, still going for it. Nettles swished luxuriantly against my ankles and calves.

The terror and pity I feel for small helpless creatures in the face of a great, impersonal animosity leaves me crushed and breathless.

Not caring would be much easier.

Just like not loving would be much easier, when you have ample evidence of man’s faithlessness.

Choosing to love is the harder road.

In my garden, a patch of speedwell encroaches on the lawn. The apple tree explodes into frothy white blossom and the cherry tree too, pink and perfect: the Platonic ideal of cherry blossom in spring.

The water level in the river drops and drops to gently burbling. In November, in thrall to an autumn storm, it was a torrent that swamped the bridge. Now, it barely tickles the roots of a gasping sycamore.

So go the seasons, charted in this small patch of river.

—

A month ago, I went down to London to meet an editor.

Almost missed the train but after a full sprint, I was on, chest heaving. It was one of the rare nice trains. Comfortable seats facing forward with padded armrests and ample legroom. [Chiltern Railways, is that you? You ok, hun?]

My head clanged. No time to stop at the kiosk.

I would commit seven kinds of sin for a coffee, I thought to myself.

The guy next to me was on a serious, boring call. Seriously boring.

“Yeah, we should almost threaten to pull the team.”

Almost threaten is the most British thing I can think of.

“It’s not what we can do about it, it’s what we can do in the absence of it.”

I wonder what it is. Probably money.

Cold, grey and misty in Oxfordshire but sun splitting the sky in London, altogether a different country. No sunglasses because who grabs sunglasses when it’s cold, grey and misty?

A man carried a shoulderful of bouquets past me, looking like he’d gone missing from a production of My Fair Lady. I willed him to tip his cap, say “guv’nor” and break into song and dance. (He did not.)

In the coffee shop (coffee! finally!) the girl behind the counter was American. We bonded for a moment over California and then I was lost in a wash of when I too worked in a coffee shop at her age: the stress-excitement and performance of calling out names and orders with confidence, turning out a stream of hot custom drinks.

Brief euphoria: all these people depending on me to get their morning beverage just right.

In London, the shops were forthright, named for what they sell: Eggs and Bacon in Marylebone, Rice and Peas in East Dulwich.

In the charity shop where I purchased an emergency pair of sunnies, the woman next to me was carrying a bag that said “Medjugorje” on it.

I exclaimed, I just went to Bosnia last year. She looked at me with disdain.

“Medjugorje is in Herzegovina.” I felt a fool.

“Oh, same thing,” I said, compounding the error.

“That’s like saying to someone from Wales they’re from England.”

Consider me appropriately chastened.

For some reason, we kept talking. I liked her, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the prickliness. I told her I’m here in London to meet with an editor about a book I’m writing.

What’s it about, she wanted to know.

Something vague about Vienna, I mumbled.

“Oh Vienna! I’m half Viennese.”

We talked for several more minutes and I told her about the book, in more detail.

She listened with interest, looking increasingly concerned and eventually cut me off.

“But let me ask you.”

She laid a hand on my forearm and seemed deeply troubled.

“Will it inspire people to love?”

“Yes,” I said. “At all costs.”