Hotels, Pubs and CD's........

My weekend was up and down. On Saturday I had, loosely admittedly, arranged to meet a lady of my acquaintance in Bloom's Hotel located in Dublin's Temple Bar district. Well you would probably have heard the cockney accents in Mars. Yes, I know for the last decade, at least, there has been an exodus from the land of John Bull to the isle of Bullshit every weekend and somehow I naively thought that it didn't include Bloom's. How wrong I was. English stags/hens are as common as pints in that part of Dublin on Saturday nights and it is less than charming. No, no more Temple Bar at weekends for me - especially Bloom's Hotel. You'd be lucky to hear yourself think between all the roaring and singing (?). Maybe I need a hearing aid fitted.

So I ended an early evening in a lovely pub going towards Parliament Street (for those in need of a Sat nav: opposite Dublin Castle). Thomas Read's is a really nice pub. I'd heard it had a good atmosphere and so it proved. I had a pint and texted my female acquaintance. She might have felt the same about Bloom's, I thought. When I looked around that hotel I couldn't see (nevermind hear) her. Thomas Read's would be a more appropriate place to meet in and so I sat back, like a passenger, and enjoyed the ambience. A good pub, I always think, is dependent on it's clientele and TR's certainly fits the bill in that regard anyway. No cockney accents here!

But what of my aquaintance? Having stated, several weeks previously, of my desire to meet her at 8pm at Bloom's my hopes of a meeting were growing thin. By about 10pm, having had no contact, I decided to leave TR's, alone, and subsequently I left that non 'occupied' part of town ( God, I am starting to sound like a Sinn Féin councillor/ community worker here). No to Bloom's Yes to Thomas Read's.

On Sunday I went back into town (as I usually do of a Sunday). Grafton Street was its usual annoying self and, after coffee, I strolled around for a bit. I ended my nomadic travels by paying a visit to a regular haunt: Freebird Records. The Wicklow Street shop is one of the few outlets where there are no paranoid store detectives to unsettle you. Anyway I got talking to the guy behind the counter and we started talking the usual shite you only get in Record Shops. I left after a while with about 4 CD's stuffed into my bag. My favorite is a HALF MAN HALF BISCUIT CD which, I think is quite a recent release. The other purchases included a few Reggae CD's (Trojan) one of them being a compilation of Jamaican Steel Drums.

When I was a child going to the annual Saint Patrick's Day parade (c. 1980's) was a real treat and part of the fun, for me, was witnessing the British Airways float. It always featured Carribean Steel drumming and so getting the CD, mentioned above was wonderful. It seems that the main record stores in Dublin are now selling Reggae CD's (specifically Trojan Records releases) at a lower price than was previously the case. Why, though, weren't they at that price a few years ago when they first came out???

Well there's not much more I can say about the weekend just gone except to state that it was mixed. Just like the CD's I bought. August will be a busy month: ZION TRAIN, Cultural festivals, Pro-Burmese marchs and hopefully, NO RAIN!