On a lovely sunny morning recently I found myself on Dublin’s Capel Street doing some old-fashioned journalism, knocking on doors looking for the office of a group representing an immigrant community from Asia I wanted to make contact with. The building I thought the office was in had a restaurant on the ground floor and an entrance at the side to the upper floors. The door was open so in I went.
My knocking on the first floor elicited no response so I tried the next one up. This time the door opened and there stood a strikingly good-looking young woman wearing very little. I can’t describe her outfit in detail as I tried not to stare, but it was a very narrow band of shiny blue leatherette that just about covered her breasts, with something similar crossing her body at the tops of her legs. Her skin and her eyes were dark brown, and dark hair framed her lovely, open, smiling face.
It was obvious I had not found the office I was looking for, but I stumbled on, partly I think because I thought it would be rude to acknowledge the fact that the woman was near naked. “Hi,” I said, then gave my name, and told her what I was doing. “I’m from The Irish Times.”
“This is massage parlour,” she said in response, stating the obvious (or, perhaps, not quite) in heavily accented English. I said I’d try upstairs, and I said goodbye, sorrowfully in truth because her’s seemed such a lonely station. Sometimes the world can break your heart.
“Put him in to get him out” — Brian Maye on Easter Rising veteran Joe McGuinness
‘I’m from The Irish Times,’ I said. ‘This is massage parlour,’ she replied
War and diplomacy – John Mulqueen on how Anglo-Irish relations deteriorated during the Falklands conflict
Music to our ears – Paul Clements on 150 years of the Belfast Philharmonic Society
A friendly Asian man with very little English opened the door on the next floor. I had the right address, he said, but there was no-one there and, he said, no phone number he could give me. From inside came the voice of a woman shouting. Despite the language being one I didn’t recognise, I felt sure she was telling the man, forcefully: Don’t tell that man anything! Tell him to f**k off! Just shut the door! Reporters can develop a nose for these things.
At least I’d located the office, so, with a feeling of partial success I made my way back outside and up the street to a café run by Brazilians that has outside tables that catch the morning sun. There I had a nice morning Americano in the sunshine outside, a café moment, slightly marred by a massive row that broke out among some older men, from somewhere in Eastern Europe, who were having a drinking session on nearby public benches.
Despite the noise and the threat of violence, I continued to recall a moment from the late 1980s when, as a freelance reporter with the now defunct In Dublin magazine, I did some door-knocking in a flats complex on Buckingham Street, when researching poor housing conditions in Dublin 1. Just as had happened on Capel Street, one of the doors was, to my great surprise, opened by a spectacularly attractive young woman, prompting, as such moments can, an increased appreciation for being alive.
She, too, had been dressed in a way that I could not help but notice, though that time it was an outfit Chanel might design for an upmarket corporate lawyer who liked her clothes. This woman, too, smiled kindly while I explained who I was, but then an angry young man somewhere inside the flat, speaking perfect English, shouted at her to “close the f**king door!” Which she did.
It crossed my mind that I’d been doing this all my professional life, wandering around the city, poking my nose into places where I might or might not be welcome, approaching strangers and telling them I was a reporter, as if my press card was a diplomatic passport that gave me a right of audience. Some days earlier, when my partner was once again being besieged by me with too many details of a story I was hoping to land, she had remarked: “Aren’t you lucky you found a job that suits you so well?”
I thought about this as I hauled my caffeinated self down Capel Street towards the river. I had spent my working life doing a job that suited my personality. Or else, maybe, I had become the person I am because of what I had been doing for so long.
Another of life’s conundrums. And then I thought, maybe it can be said with certainty that spending your days reporting on life in a city enriches your appreciation in a particular way for the place where you live out your days. And then I thought, standing and looking at the sunlight on the water, I could write an diary about that.
