Gone to America

I have returned from Dublin. I threw out a lot of stuff. My parent’s new house is great. It would be fantastic for parties, but I feel that this will be wasted on them. Not that they won’t have parties, but there’s a great spot for a DJ booth I feel they won’t take advantage of. This was, I imagine, the last time I’ll spend in the house I grew up in (from the age of 11) and that my Dad grew up in (from the age of 5). I don’t really feel anything about it, but I suppose that may change.

As usual, it was a hectic week. Trips to Dublin are fun, but they aren’t relaxing. In retrospect, it was probably good for my liver that a few of my friends were away. Ivan, Zaini, Deirdre, Felim I’ll get you next time.

I touched down very early on Saturday morning. My parents came to pick me up, which I wasn’t expecting due to the ridiculous earliness of the hour. I slept for a while. Then I made a lot of phone calls, determining who was about…

I’m going to catalogue more or less what I did each day while I remember. This may not be incredibly interesting to you. That is not incredibly interesting to me. Most days I also spent a little while going through boxes of stuff with my mother.

On Sunday morning(ish) I went into town and bought a few books, which was precisely the opposite of what my parents had bought me over to accomplish. In my defense, these were books that it might be hard to get here. My old colleague Claire Kilroy had published her second novel, Tenderwire, and I wanted to give it a whirl. It has been published in America, but I thought it would be easier to pick up a copy in Dublin. I also got Iain M. Banks new novel, The Algebraist. For some reason you don’t find much Iain Banks in US bookshops, and I’m a big fan. That evening we had a family dinner – grandmother, cousin, aunt, uncle.

On Monday I went to see the new Ardmore Sound facility in Lad Lane. I was trained at and worked largely for Ardmore Sound out in Bray, Co. Wicklow, from about 1997 until I left Dublin in 2003, and now they’re “leveraging the brand” with some new rooms closer to the rest of Irish TV production. Alan and Paul showed me around, and I met Stephen O’Connel(IMDb Link)l with whom I had worked on Borstal Boy. He was working in one of the other rooms in the building. He told me he used to be a regular reader of the blog, although I’m not quite sure when he stopped – probably around the time I started letting it go a month between posts (ahem). I went for a drink with James (or JIMI) and Daragh afterwards, and Michael Lemass showed up too. It wasn’t too late a night. I tried raking Daragh over the coals for his inappropriate commenting, but it was good to see him so I probably didn’t employ as much moral force as perhaps I might.

On Tuesday… Tuesday… Wow, it’s all slipping away. On Tuesday I met up in the afternoon with Dave O’Sullivan. He recently won the prize for best short film at the Galway Film Fleadh with a film he directed called “Nun More Deadly” which he produced with his partner Bonnie Dempsey. He showed me around his and Bonnie’s base in town. Their production company Dyehouse Films seems to be doing well. There I also met Rodney Lee who wrote the short. Myself and Dave headed back to his and Bonnie’s flat, where I met their roommate Marius, a Polish construction worker. Dublin is full of Poles these days – Ireland is to Poland as America was to Ireland, I guess. I fully expect that next time I visit all of my friends will have been replaced with their Polish counterparts. We had some rum and a few beers, and then we went to a bar where we had some more beers with Bonnie and Rodney. These are all guys I was in college with – Dave was the first person on the film course I spoke to when I started.

On Wednesday I had lunch with Deirdre’s siter Sioban, and then I went to see my parents new house. The artist they had bought it from had very thoughtfully left a couple of dead ducks in the freezer, recently dead and fully feathered. I assume this was some kind of welcome gesture. Ok, technically my parents don’t actually own the house and it’s still his freezer for another week or so, but still – he moved everything else out! After that I had a coffee with my mother, and then another with Dave who wanted to give me a CD. Then Dean (or Skeezbag Dirty Bones). Again, I tried to upbraid him for some of his more off colour comments but it was hard to be too angry – I hadn’t seen him for a while. When we we were leaving the bar I ran into various film industry people, but I didn’t hang around and chat to them.

Thursday morning my Godfather Sean and his son Tommy came by to say hello and rifle through some of my discarded electronics. After that I headed into town again to do some pick up shopping, for a CD case to bring all my CDs back here with me. After that I headed out to Dun Laoighaire to see Hugh’s new apartment – very nice. It actually has a view of my old college. And the sea. We hung out for a while – he makes excellent soup – and then I headed back into town to have dinner with Thomas and his partner Cathal. Thomas easily qualifies as my oldest friend. We met in primary school at the age of ten or eleven. We don’t see each other that often, even before I moved over here, but when we do we always get ery, very drunk. I suppose we drank until about 1am, and he tried very hard to get me to go back to his apartment and keep going, but I had promised Friday to my parents, and anyway he had work in the morning! They’ll be coming over in October, so we can make up for it then.

Friday, I slept it off, and then finished off the destruction of my property. I am a pack rat by nature, so this went against all of my instincts. But I’m not as bad as my mother. On more than one occasion I had been in the act of dumping some childhood momento only for her to cry “Oh no, you can’t get rid of that!” I visited my grandmother, who at 81 now says she is only just coming to realise how young 60 really is. My parents took me to an incredibly fancy new restaurant hidden behind some houses in Donnybrook, Poulot’s. It was fantastic. I had an all duck, all the time selection.

Saturday, well Saturday I packed and left. I made a few mop up phone calls. If I didn’t contact you, it doesn’t mean I don’t like you. It just means I like you less than the people I did contact. No. It just means that, while I don’t regret it, in some ways emigration sucks. And the fact that US companies don’t give many holiday days to their employees sucks. And you know what else sucks? The Shannon stopover. Man, I hate that. I see they’re stopping the requirement in 2007 – about damn time! If I’d wanted to spend an hour and a half on the tarmac in the middle of nowhere I would have specified it while buying my ticket!

Other than the trip I haven’t been doing much that I would write about. It’s been a frantically busy time in work. I would like to apologise to everybody who’s expecting an email or something from me, but I’ve really been swamped. Late nights and weekends and stuff. This should come to an end in the next couple of weeks (touch wood). I’m sorry for having been a little off the radar, but hey. That’s this working life.