A shot in the dark
At a Dublin bar counter on Saturday night, I watched yet another group of young tourists order a round of “Baby Guinnesses” and wondered how the all-powerful brewery thereby referenced had ever allowed this phenomenon to take off.
And all right, Baileys is part of the Diageo stable now, so big beer is getting some of the action here. Even so, three quarters of this ever-more lucrative trade is going elsewhere than the direction advertised in the name.Pushing the envelope – Alison Healy on the heroes and eccentrics of the Irish postal service
With a somewhat different sense, the expression also featured in the headline of a 1907 Dublin court case in which a pub on Francis Street was charged with a breach of Sunday closing. By an impure coincidence, the London Times ran a feature recently on the continuing success of actual Guinness , which has since inspired a series of nostalgic letters.“Guinness used to send crates of small bottles for nursing mothers at the maternity hospital in Dublin in 1963. Every evening we resident junior doctors went round the wards collecting the many unused bottles. A very welcome perk.”
If this is true, the success of a cocktail named for but not benefiting the brewery may be posterity’s revenge on the era when stout was promoted as a health drink, even in maternity hospitals. As with many unplanned offspring, perhaps, Guinness’s wild oats have come back to haunt it.A Writer’s City by Chris Morash is a geographically arranged survey of the capital’s literature.
Maybe even the precocious Joyce would have recalled how they used to pass on the footpath and throw soothers at each other. The grotesque spectacle of a pre-teen Synge in a pram might have lent new meaning to the term A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
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