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Back in Dublin with my Londoner children, I tried out my old tour guide routine in the one place they begged us to visit
Back in Dublin with my Londoner children, I tried out my old tour guide routine in the one place they begged us to visitaving kids is a little like having friends in from out of town, in that they force you to do things you’d never do as a local.
For the first 12 years we lived in London, my wife and I only ever saw things like Big Ben or the London Eye a couple of times; once when we had visitors over from home, and then again when our kids started to realise the images of London they saw in films and books were vastly different from their experience of our east London home. It was hard for our kids to reconcile the place they lived in, nice as it was, with the conveyor belt of famous landmarks and incredible monuments that, say, Paddington seemed to inhabit.
He lived in London, whereas Walthamstow felt 10,000 miles away, albeit somehow sharing its tube line. At home, too, this feeling is present. Ninety-nine per cent of their time in Ireland has been in either rural Derry or suburban south Dublin, where famous landmarks are thin on the ground. It’s telling that when we stay at my dad’s house, my kids routinely ask if we can walk to “the tree”.
More telling still, we all know exactly which tree they mean.
‘I’ve lived away for a while, that’s all,’ I said, defending my weakened Derry accentI have yet to be convinced that the current zeal for AI is anything more than a bubble But this week, seized with sightseeing fervour, I stepped back within the touristy trappings of Dublin for the first time in nearly 20 years. Between 2009 and 2010, I was part of those trappings myself.
Fresh out of college, I worked as a guide on one of those free walking tours you may have seen clomping around the city centre. I can’t speak for how such businesses are run today, but back then I’d pay €2 per person who signed up for my tour, and it would then be my responsibility to make it back via tips.
If people didn’t tip or, as often happened, a stag or hen do simply decamped halfway because their hangovers were overbearing, I was still on the hook for their fees. Meaning it was not just possible but occasionally highly probable that I’d finish a three-hour tour around Dublin to discover I’d lost money to my employers.
This experience left me with two things: a great deal of resentment towards capitalism and a bizarrely long list of tourist-friendly soundbites about Irish history. Actually, it did gave me a third thing – my next job, working at the National Leprechaun Museum, a year of my life which I cannot conceivably condense into a few pithy sentences, so will have to return to another time.
Fresh with touristic zeal, we tramped into town with the kids, walking through St Stephen’s Green and Trinity College, screaming back at the Viking Splash Tour, and passing Leinster House and College Green. Each were mere distractions, since the only thing my kids wanted, in factus, to visit, was the Wax Museum. This had surprised us, not least since most of the figures in the brochure were not people my kids had any hope of recognising.
To be honest, we had a hard time ourselves but, seized by their enthusiasm, we beat a path for its simulacral charms. Taylor Swift fan Ellie Rainey from Dublin reacts to the Taylor Swift waxwork at the National Wax Museum, Dublin. Photograph: Sam Boal/Collins Photos For an hour they gawped and cheered at variably passable renderings of figures from Irish and international celebrity. Tina Turner and Taylor Swift.
Jedward and Ronan Keating. Brendan O’Carroll’s Mrs Brown spitting a jet of water from her mouth while farting on a toilet. An imperious Eamon Dunphy squaring off with Fr Dougal in a makeshift Craggy Island parochial house – to which Gay Byrne and Pope Francis were paying a similarly unlikely visit. I tried to offer supplementary context to this bewildering cast of characters – the old tour guide’s habits die hard – but found my exegeses falling on deaf ears.
They simply launched themselves towards the next incongruous, wonky grouping of indifferently sculpted celebs, ignoring my history lessons on Behan and Beckett, or the history of the Rising.
“It’s fine,” I said, on each occasion that my little tourists rejected these pearls of insight, and escaped from me at insultingly high speed. Mik Pyro and Republic of Loose will go down in history as Irish musical legendsPatrick Bergin, co-star of Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy, seeks buyer for Offaly castleLoneliness: There’s a reason why we use the term ‘power of connection’Carla Ward keeping her eye on WSL merry-go-round as Irish players switch clubs
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