Tim Bradford - Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

Further up, a small bald man tries to start his car, which sounds like an old asthmatic, or a faulty chainsaw. Or a car that won’t start. In the newsagents I ask the fat guy with the shaved head and ’tache behind the counter if there are any Guardians left. No, he says. It’s the Irish Times again. He’s got a few odds and ends of food, soup, mouldy fruit, packets of cereal. Like the old grocers I used to frequent, who stocked only a few tins of Oxtail soup, a couple of bread rolls, Quaker Oats (not Scotch Porridge Oats, only Quaker) and a Battenburg cake. Is that from the house of Battenburg, I wonder? Were they like the Hapsburgs? Perhaps that’s why the Hapsburgs declined, because they hadn’t got a fancy cake named after them.

I pop into an Internet café on O’Connell Street to pick up my e-mails and send some stuff back to Andy, Editor at When Saturday Comes . It’s run by a posse of young cybervixens (the cafe, not WSC – more’s the pity), equally adept at making espressos and using Internet Explorer. There’s a queue so I get a cappuccino and flick through the Irish Times . Five minutes later one of the girls shouts my name and I’m on. I have an Internet e-mail account with Hotmail – irishtim@hotmail.com. It means you can pick up messages on any machine wherever you are in the world. It’s busy, so I tap in a number that I remember saving. I get in. A dopey-looking guy with a goatee beard wearing shorts is sitting next to me, cursing. He looks over.

‘Hey meean, like how dja git inta hartmayerl?’

I tell him.

‘Coooooool!’

The place is full of young Americans, Spanish, Germans, Italians and Australians. I appear to be the oldest person there by at least five years. I think of Dublin changing, then I get an image in my head of the singer from last night appearing on one of the computer screens singing ‘Ring a ring a roses, on my ISDN line, I remember Dublin in the rare old times’. Really coooooooool!

The Dublin sky is a milky yellow grey. Drizzle dashes against my cheeks as I stand at a street corner near the Liffey, watching a gaggle of schoolgirls in bright blue uniforms next to the Pádraig ō Síoláin (Patrick Sheehan) monument as they chatter excitedly about ‘stuff’. As the rain comes down harder I stand near the window of the Virgin Megastore and listen to the ‘Real Ibiza’ trance house CD while staring out at the clouds and the water hitting the glass.

I wander, inevitably, towards Temple Bar. When I first came over to Dublin with my Lincolnshire mates Plendy, Dukey and Ruey (Mad Relation: ‘If you take them out first, they can’t hurt you, Tim. Through that window – SMASH – then buddabuddabuddabuddabudda. Arm round the neck, block the windpipe with the blade of the hand, push head forward. Snap. It’s the only way.’), we’d stumbled across Temple Bar, a ramshackle haunt full of scaffolding and secondhand clothes shops. We got caught up in a demo for the Birmingham Six. It was 1989 – they were heady days. The world seemed to be changing so quickly.

Things have changed, but not necessarily in the way we thought back then. Temple Bar has altered out of all recognition. Glitzy restaurants, themed superpubs, trendy clothes shops, designer tat emporiums. The Dublin Viking Experience Museum – a tourist attraction for the worst kind of heritage junky saddos – money changes everything, like love. Like those ecstatic lottery winners who share tales of house extensions and bright red sports cars, the jealousies of friends and ruined love lives and values gone haywire, Ireland has, since the mid-nineties, undergone an upheaval the like of which it’s never experienced before. A country transformed. Have we seen the last of the old Ireland, Dev’s Ireland? Ireland is letting go of the past, in the way that Britain did in the sixties and the US in the fifties.

In the little square, flocks of dark-haired Euroteentourists are sitting on the steps in their brightly coloured waterproof gear, staring down balefully at maps of the city. Short-haired trendy buggers loll around the tables outside trendy cafés, not caring a jot for anything except being trendy. Thick-armed bald boyos in corporate polo shirts stand guard outside the grand and glitzy looking superboozers which are the new temples, turning away non-believers and large English stag parties. Skinny, frowning girls wearing too much make-up rush about with carrier bags full of shopping.

I sit down next to a mapless Euroteentourist who, due to the absence of props, is simply staring balefully into the middle distance. I get out my notepad. Just at this moment a mad, hard-faced pensioner in black zip-up flying jacket, flared jeans and trainers hoves into view, spitting expletives. He sees me watching him and shouts across the cobbled street ‘Ye bollix!’ I avert my gaze, but he walks (no – not quite the right word – he lurches and sways) right up to me and shouts again ‘Ye bollix!’ I look up at him and say ‘Sorry?’

‘Bollix. Yer book is bollix!’ If this is meant to be some kind of sign it’s not a very auspicious one. He crawls off in the direction of the Viking museum.

When I first met Annie and her Irish friends ten or more years ago they said there was something typically English about me. No there isn’t, I said. What is it? Tell me, tell me. There was something placid about me, they said. You could see it in the eyes. Irish blokes, they said, have mad eyes. I can do mad, I said. I can have mad eyes. Look. Arrrgh. I’m mad, me. Grrrr. Yeaaah suuuuuuuuuure, they said. I took to practising in my shaving mirror, having mad eyes. (You have to make them a bit slanty as well as wide.) Arrrrrrrghhhhh … I’m maaaaaaaaad. I had always equated mad eyes with the actor Malcolm McDowell. 3 You can easily do a Malcolm McDowell – just pull the corners of your eyes until you look like one of those crappy 1970s comedians doing a version of a Chinese person. Go on, it’s easy. One minute you’re you, the next, your nearest and dearest is screaming blue murder that Malcolm McDowell has got into bed with them. I had my floppy hair cut shorter and started wearing contact lenses which made me stare a lot without blinking. But keeping my eyes wide open like that was hard work. My eyes are sensitive and get dry very easily. This would make me blink a lot. This is a sort of mad look, the blinking thing, but it’s more Anthony Perkins in Psycho rather than the ‘sexy’ mad look I was aiming for.

Irish women’s eyes are not so much mad as soulful. I tried soulful but it’s much more difficult than mad. Soulful made me look like a soppy kids’ TV presenter, or sort of David Cassidyish. I decided to stick with mad. I carried this mad thing a bit far on my first meeting with some real Irish parents. They’re Irish, I thought, they’ll appreciate that I’m a madcap lad. At Sunday lunch I asked for the bone from a shoulder of lamb 4 and started to gnaw away at it like a frenzied puppy, grunting quietly to myself and now and then looking up to check the admiring glances. This didn’t seem too outrageous an act of madness. I’d done it for years in my parents’ house, where the ability to eat like a dog, drink like a fish, piss like a horse and shit like a bull elephant was positively encouraged and seen as a sign of manliness in me and two brothers.

Father, in a put-on voice, said ‘You have the manners of a Viking.’ I acted mock hurt, but took it as a compliment. The Viking thing gave me a little niche, especially as the Parents lived near Waterford, an area of continuous Norse invasion in the ninth and tenth centuries. I saw myself as a one-man rape-and-pillage unit, though without the rape. A sort of sensitive Viking, who would only pillage after asking nicely first. And, being a nice English lad, I’d queue for it, of course.