After a night of hearty merriment in a city centre tavern last night, I was horrified to find that the taxi drivers racing past me, roof lights ablaze, didn't seem to appreciate my drunken Saltelero. So I tacked my way up to the rank on The Green, only to be faced with a queue that stetched for what must have been a thousand miles.
My attention was then drawn to the charming gathering of hacks just beside the rank.
While I like a good carriage ride as much as the next man, the problem with them in Dublin is that they are driven by the worst kinds of tracksuited ruffians and ne'er-do-wells. I've always thought it curious that they should go to such splendid lengths with their choice of vehicle and then dress like something that crawled out of a hooligan's arse.
I took up the odds: I could either be set upon by a gurrier on my way home, or borne home by one in my employ.
Tentatively I approached the carriages and decided that only a barouche would do. Next came the difficult part - trying to explain to the driver in the few words of Gaelic I have that I wanted to be taken to Rathgar.
"I say, can you take me as far as Rathgar...Amm, craic, ceol, Eire?" I asked, my voice trembling not a little.
The chap then launched into a barrage of guttural squawking.
I persisted, "Ammm, ah, amm...Rath-gar. Me want go to Rath-gar."
He then said something to one of the other drivers in Gaelic and started chortling. Perhaps he doesn't know of Rathgar, I thought, it's possible.
There's very little in life that you can't fix by throwing money at it. I extracted my coin pouch and shook it, indicating it was heavy. I then offered it up to the blackguard.
He seemed to raise his crop at this. I cowered back. He said something I could just make out as "sixty Euro". By God they're well able to speak English when it comes to money! I handed him a hundred and instructed him not to spare the horse...and to stop at Abrakebabra en route.
Another Crisis In Foptown
Showing posts with label Dublin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dublin. Show all posts
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Yet Another Crisis in Foptown for Party Jack
I awoke this morning with La Marseillaise trumpeting in my ears. I shook the violent anthem from my porcelaine pumpkin only to find that sounds of an angry mob still railled in the heating system of my soft suburban abode.
Curious indeed, I thought to myself as I scrolled through last night’s recovered doc in search of traces of Absinthe or other such head-soupers.
Gradually the bawdy cries became clear, and as they did, so dawned my panic. They weren’t in fact the cries of hungry French peasants weilding syphilitic pitchforks, but salt of the earth Irishmen. And though I don’t speak their particular dialect of Hiberno-English, I gathetred from their accents and their braying that they wanted middle-class blood. I remember their rioting in O'Connell Street...that was just an amuse bouche.
I dived under my bed, shivering in my Peter Panesque nightgown and cap, cluthing my David MacWilliams action figure, petrified quite out of my wits...
Helas, it’s finally happened, I thought, tired of their staple of batch bread and brown sauce, they’ve risen up against their cruel bourgeois masters to take back what The Celtic Tiger has denied them for so long. They’ve most likely stormed Mount Joy Prison and are at present pillaging and burning The Southside assunder.
With taximen and bus drivers at the eye of their rage, surely no graduate will be spared. I’m not ashamed to tell you that I peed myself a little when their roaringing machinery of murderous revolution started up. Terrible sounds–God, they must’ve enlisted the help of Polish builders and are going to bulldoze my stucco-clad walls. They’ll drag me from my Egyptian cotton bed, pour Linden Village on me and eat me alive. Oh the humanity–Bertie, Bertie! What have you done? What have we done? Fools, fools, debonaire fools every man Jack of us!
Then a drill started up; it seemed to be on the other side of the street. Are they going to ravish my neighbours first? Oh joy! My chance to escape...to some bastion of middle-classdom. Surely they’ll have walled off Killiney and Dalkey, possibly Fox Rock. And from there I can escape to Denmark where they have no working classes. I could become an abstract artist and have boring smug children.
I crawled to the window and peeked out...
To my surprise I was faced with a small group of burly men in yellow reflector jackets standing around watching one other of their kind drill the road. They were just laying cable for the ESB.
Yet another CRISIS IN FOPTOWN.
Tune in tomorrow for another of Party Jack’s Crises in Foptown
Curious indeed, I thought to myself as I scrolled through last night’s recovered doc in search of traces of Absinthe or other such head-soupers.
Gradually the bawdy cries became clear, and as they did, so dawned my panic. They weren’t in fact the cries of hungry French peasants weilding syphilitic pitchforks, but salt of the earth Irishmen. And though I don’t speak their particular dialect of Hiberno-English, I gathetred from their accents and their braying that they wanted middle-class blood. I remember their rioting in O'Connell Street...that was just an amuse bouche.
I dived under my bed, shivering in my Peter Panesque nightgown and cap, cluthing my David MacWilliams action figure, petrified quite out of my wits...
Helas, it’s finally happened, I thought, tired of their staple of batch bread and brown sauce, they’ve risen up against their cruel bourgeois masters to take back what The Celtic Tiger has denied them for so long. They’ve most likely stormed Mount Joy Prison and are at present pillaging and burning The Southside assunder.
With taximen and bus drivers at the eye of their rage, surely no graduate will be spared. I’m not ashamed to tell you that I peed myself a little when their roaringing machinery of murderous revolution started up. Terrible sounds–God, they must’ve enlisted the help of Polish builders and are going to bulldoze my stucco-clad walls. They’ll drag me from my Egyptian cotton bed, pour Linden Village on me and eat me alive. Oh the humanity–Bertie, Bertie! What have you done? What have we done? Fools, fools, debonaire fools every man Jack of us!
Then a drill started up; it seemed to be on the other side of the street. Are they going to ravish my neighbours first? Oh joy! My chance to escape...to some bastion of middle-classdom. Surely they’ll have walled off Killiney and Dalkey, possibly Fox Rock. And from there I can escape to Denmark where they have no working classes. I could become an abstract artist and have boring smug children.
I crawled to the window and peeked out...
To my surprise I was faced with a small group of burly men in yellow reflector jackets standing around watching one other of their kind drill the road. They were just laying cable for the ESB.
Yet another CRISIS IN FOPTOWN.
Tune in tomorrow for another of Party Jack’s Crises in Foptown
Monday, December 17, 2007
Crisis In Foptown
Okay, so me and the chaps decided to go into The Morgan last week for tapas in the bamboo smoking garden.
We sat down gingerly spouting Wildean witticisms, pereusing the menus while we smoked our cigarettes foppishly. Naturally we were tickled pink; the tapas is always top drawer in The Morgan. Boots on the street say they've captured a real live Spanish chef, most likely named Fulgencio, who possibly sports a pencil moustache.
When the excessively attractive Italian waitress came to take our drinks orders, the chaps were much dismayed as she didn't seem to be au fait with the beers requested. I smiled avuncularly at her cute ignorance and mouthed out, "Du-vel or Chim-ay Blue," confident that The Moragn would, as always, deliver the goods. Nevertheless, the chaps were rattled.
We waited in deathly silence, drowning in the wildly inappropriate House music they insist on pumping into the place 24/7. And though I assured the chaps it would be okay, the morale of the men was low. So, I thought a misogynistic joke might lighten things. "I wouldn't mind a messy drawn out invasion by her if I were Abbysinia just prior to WWII." But it was no good, the men were already afraid...afraid they'd have to drink Irish beer.
It took her ages to come back; the kind of ages that means bad info on a reconnaissance mission. We'd seen it before...before The Celtic Tiger delivered us from damp provinciality and Smithwicks.
She evantually arrived back smiling apologetically. "The barman he say we don't do anymore."
The news forced me to resist the compulsion to say, "We'll if you two don't do anymore, then I'll do!" It was no laughing matter. T'was as we feared- a dark dark day in Temple Bar. The day The Morgan lost its lustre; what had made it a fop's oasis in a sea of vulgar hen parties and stag nights. We shuffled heads down to Les Freres Jacques to drown our sorrows in champagne and rub caviar into our wounds.
A little petal on the delicate flower of my youth died in that smoking garden.
Just another CRISIS IN FOPTOWN
Tune in tomorrow for another of Party Jack's crises in foptown.
We sat down gingerly spouting Wildean witticisms, pereusing the menus while we smoked our cigarettes foppishly. Naturally we were tickled pink; the tapas is always top drawer in The Morgan. Boots on the street say they've captured a real live Spanish chef, most likely named Fulgencio, who possibly sports a pencil moustache.
When the excessively attractive Italian waitress came to take our drinks orders, the chaps were much dismayed as she didn't seem to be au fait with the beers requested. I smiled avuncularly at her cute ignorance and mouthed out, "Du-vel or Chim-ay Blue," confident that The Moragn would, as always, deliver the goods. Nevertheless, the chaps were rattled.
We waited in deathly silence, drowning in the wildly inappropriate House music they insist on pumping into the place 24/7. And though I assured the chaps it would be okay, the morale of the men was low. So, I thought a misogynistic joke might lighten things. "I wouldn't mind a messy drawn out invasion by her if I were Abbysinia just prior to WWII." But it was no good, the men were already afraid...afraid they'd have to drink Irish beer.
It took her ages to come back; the kind of ages that means bad info on a reconnaissance mission. We'd seen it before...before The Celtic Tiger delivered us from damp provinciality and Smithwicks.
She evantually arrived back smiling apologetically. "The barman he say we don't do anymore."
The news forced me to resist the compulsion to say, "We'll if you two don't do anymore, then I'll do!" It was no laughing matter. T'was as we feared- a dark dark day in Temple Bar. The day The Morgan lost its lustre; what had made it a fop's oasis in a sea of vulgar hen parties and stag nights. We shuffled heads down to Les Freres Jacques to drown our sorrows in champagne and rub caviar into our wounds.
A little petal on the delicate flower of my youth died in that smoking garden.
Just another CRISIS IN FOPTOWN
Tune in tomorrow for another of Party Jack's crises in foptown.
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