The path to Llacas

Stay out late tonight? That will be a coddle....

We conclude that last night's late meal seemed to have contributed to our inability to keep our eyes open, and so an earlier start tonight might enable us to see some of Dublin's night time festivities.

As we had such a huge breakfast we are both happy about combining lunch and dinner into a mid-afternoon meal which should then leave us clear to go back to the hotel around 5pm to get ready to come back out and hit the pubs, and that way hopefully manage to stay awake past midnight.

We decide that it would be rude to wander through Temple Bar without sampling another Guiness, so we stop off in The Vat Bar (which gets its name from name from the vat house in the Guinness Brewery in St. James Gate where Guinness is stored in large copper vats). He gets very excited when he discovers 'the snug', which seats the two of us very cosily - and we happily while away an hour drinking and listening to a bizarre jukebox of diddly-diddly Irish music interspersed with 80's synthesiser hits.

Around 3.30pm we decide that we could force a meal down, and so the snug gives way to Gallagher’s Boxty House, one of those restaurants that feels so homely I honestly believe I could walk into the kitchen and find my mum cooking merrily away. (Glass of sherry in hand of course....)

After braving the icy wind between the pub and here, sitting by the crackling fire is bliss, and a glass of red wine plus a tureen-full of Murphy's Irish stew leaves me feeling warm and less able to fit into my trousers. He has the Dublin Coddle - a ham, sausage, potato and onion casserole that keeps him quiet for the best part of half an hour. We amuse ourselves by watching a middle-aged woman trying not to be embarrased by her extremely drunk and incomprehensible father, who is abusing the waiter for not having some kind of rare flan on the dessert menu.

So, we're fed and watered, and for the moment warm. Before the 'after-dinner snooze' feeling takes us over we force ourselves outside again, and head back to the hotel. On entering the reception we say hello to a man behind the desk, who informs us that we should stop off at the 'lively' and 'party-like' hotel bar before we go out again. So we do.

It's hard to tell in Ireland what people are celebrating - clothes and atmosphere seem to be the same for weddings and and for wakes. But there are a lot of people in suits in the bar - all who know each other, and all who are switching between solemnity and hilarity in alternate and somewhat disturbing turns.

We sit in the corner with our drinks, listening to how nice a room full of Irish accents sound - can't imagine sitting in a pub in Basingstoke and thinking the same thing somehow...

It is getting close to 7 o'clock, and so far our pub crawl has taken in...the hotel bar. We leave, and walk down the hill towards the city centre - stopping on route at the smallest pub in the world, and one I imagine that is usually home to regulars only. When I order a vodka and lemonade he empties a measure of Smirnoff into a glass, then gives me a litre bottle of lemonade for me to top up as and when. If he had left me the vodka bottle as well, I would see no reason to leave. Ever.

The next place is about as far away from my images of cosy Irish pubs as I could possibly have got. Large and open-plan, I am the only woman in there - not something I normally complain about - but we are the only ones under 65 as well. In my very generalising way, I imagine that the men in there have been sat with a pint of bitter in their hand since opening time, and who use the pub as a male bonding area to escape their tyrannous Irish wives who stand on doorsteps with rolling pins. Or something like that. And everyone was watching Eastenders on the television in the corner.

After spotting my favourite sign of the holiday so far (above the door to the male toilets - 'No prams allowed in here'...) we move on again. Winding our way (increasingly more unsteadily) towards Temple Bar, we stop in various pubs on route, before ending up merrily tapping our feet to an Irish band in a huge pub that still retains all the features of the bank it used to be. Prices have also obviously been kept in line with inflation as well...

We actually manage to stay out until around 1am, before we admit defeat and head back. We agree we have had a great night, but we worry that tomorrow morning won't feel as though we have really been out. Ok, so we might be able to boast a hangover, but with the smoking ban strictly in force over here, our clothes are not going to be infused with that lovely stale tobacco smell....

posted by Liberty Slutzski @ 4:30 pm