the wild swans at bray

I know, I know, I'm sorry. So, since last time I updated, I have: finished my summer work (hurrah); turned 28 (no comment); been to see the Dali exhibition at the Tate Modern with Flavio (did you know that Dali and Disney collaborated on a short film? I didn't. It was abandoned in Disney's lifetime because it was too controversial, then finished with the help of Dali's sketches a couple of years ago. It looks like... well, it looks like a collaboration between Disney and Dali.); seen, admired and stayed in Lil's new apartment; and got bit by bedbugs in a cheap hotel (Gross. Swelling and lesions. I must be a backpacker again).

I'm in Ireland now, staying with Nik, of somanystuff comments fame. We went south of Dublin on the weekend, following the coast, took a walk from Bray to Greystones. The terrain was kind of an Irish (greyer, flatter, more haystacks) Cinque Terre. We saw dozens of white swans in a peaceful bay, doing a complicated Esther Williams synchronised swimming routine. We went to Dun Laoghaire and looked out across the bay at Joyce's tower, where stately plump Buck Mulligan harangues poor Dedalus for the whole first chapter of Ulysses. But it's Dublin itself that has made the biggest impression on me.

The inhabitants of Dublin are urban civility personified: too busy for nosy over-friendliness, but very happy to show you how dialing codes work, or where to get the bus from. There is decent public transport. There are museums with informative plaques and local designers who are nifty with a pintuck. In short, it looks like the most tranquil, ordered modern city you can imagine. Dublin is, nevertheless, and I would stand up and say so in court, completely class-a off-the-deep-end mental. It's got the lunacy of a new money financial centre imposed like a sketch on rice paper over another lunacy so primal it's impossible to define. There's a scream of mingled passion and rage tearing through the white noise of traffic and modems. I don't claim to know why. Maybe it's the very recent collective memory of poverty and civil strife, maybe it's older than all that. Maybe this patch of earth has had this spirit in it since before the first humans arrived here.

On my first day here it struck me so hard I felt I was going to fall over. It was the more disorientating for the fact that I wasn't expecting it and couldn't see any concrete evidence around me for it. The only thing in the posh, polished centre of town to make you realise that you're not in a familiar world is the Gaelic on all the signs. At first it seemed almost perverse to me to bother finding a translation for a street name, for example. I mean, in Paris you don't direct an English speaker to Green Path Street, but to Rue du Chemin Vert. Or why translate simple daily language into Gaelic which appears to have been developed in modern times to supply a gap in the original, ancient language? Like 'As seirbheis' written under 'Out of service' on buses. But the answer is obvious enough once you become aware of the question: this is how you bring a language back from the dead. So every time something is written in Gaelic, you are making a statement. A political statement, yes, but also something more fundamental, to do with where this culture came from and what it values.

Please don't think I'm claiming that modern Irish people are obsessed with past injury or even past glory at the expense of the present. On the evidence of a week's visit, Irish people are obviously individuals like any others, pursuing their daily interests, doing their thing. But there is something rumbling under the streets here that is bigger and older than any individual. No matter how carefully I studied the map, I kept finding myself walking in the opposite direction to the one I had intended, like Alice in the garden. Little children in the street kept calling out disconcerting messages to me: 'What are you doing?' 'Go back!' before their words resolved into baby German or Spanish. People speaking quite clearly and slowly, with a slight Dublin lilt, had to repeat themselves to me, as if their words were being whipped away by a strong wind. By the time I met Nik in the pub at six o'clock, I felt battered and confused. I tried to explain, thinking he'd call me an idiot. He sipped at his pint. 'Well, what do you think the leprechaun is? Was originally, I mean, before the cartoony image of it. Or the banshee? They're shape-shifters, deceivers, they're out to show you that things aren't as they look. There's something here...' But what? 'Buggered if I know, mate. I've sort of just got used to it.'