Matadoru writing assignment 2
The sky is grey, flat and unremarkable, as if badly erased to dirty off-white, leaving grubby trails of cloud. I can see from the kitchen table that it’s hailing lightly. Not even the luxury of snow. Its not the kind of weather that welcomes a Sunday walk, but walk I shall, if only to raise a proverbial middle finger to the fickle winter gods.
I live in the Liberties, an area that tourists wander through only occasionally, doggedly hunting out the Guinness brewery with their wits close about them, and their handbags zipped tight. Its Sunday, and there’s a market on. In fact, down in the Combe where I’m heading there’s a different market on every Sunday. Today’s just happens to be the Brocante vintage furniture fair. As good an excuse as any for a writing assignment.
I pull the front door closed, and double lock it. Crossing the road I round the corner onto Thomas Street, and find myself in front of St Catherine’s Church. Across the street, the Hill Top Pub promises ‘craic agus ceol’. Its just before lunch, and young woman with a tatty faux fur jacket stands at the front door, sucking a cigarette, smoke curling up around her lip. Litter drifts slowly along the road, eddies forming in the gutter.
I’m walking toward Meath Street, through habit more than desire. The footpaths are curiously barren, in contrast to Saturdays down here where everything bustles with life. I wander past Lidl; past the boarded up eurosaver store and the lurid painted ‘Miami Sun’ self tanning studio. Glancing up through the rusting scaffold of a building project gone sour, there’s a hairline break in the clouds. I skirt the dog shit; down here you learn to watch your step.
On Saturdays this area is packed with the kind of people my grandmother would have called ‘the salt of the Earth’. Rowdy, bawdy, brash and colorful, this is my home turf: Where the grocer calls me ‘hen’ while slipping an extra onion and some kale in my shopping bag; where lamb chops cost one euro a pop, stew bones one a kilo. Not that anything is weighed in kilos down here, its imperial or naught on Meath St.
Come Sunday though, the streets are empty, save pensioners in groups of two and three, filing out of the various churches and into pubs to take their second Sunday communion. Guinness is the glue of this town.
I cross Carmen Hall, where a blue-hooded teenager is harnessing a horse to one of the ubiquitous open top carriages that tourists charter. Just last week I glanced down an alley and saw a man brushing one down. How many other city centres boast an equine population, I wonder. The staccato clip of hooves on asphalt pierces the air as we both walk on.
The slow decay of brick buildings heralds the entrance to Newmarket, crumbling facades hidden behind riotous posters; everything from Alica Keys in concert, a James Joyce production at the Abby Theatre, workshops on Buddhism in the New World. I turn left at Grey’s of Newmarket, boarded-up and seemingly abandoned, like the majority of buildings in this cul-de-sac. The market is signaled only by the presence of white vans on the street, and the comings and goings of Dublin’s hip urbites; all uniformly unique in their black-rimmed spectacles and duffel jackets. I draw a breath and step into the fray.
