There’s just certain things Dubliners, both native and adopted, should know about this city. Lets start with an obvious one.
The cafe on the top floor of Easons is like a 1913 soup kitchen, only it’s not lines of starving workers before you but shoppers on the verge of collapse. It’s midday, but clearly some of these people have been on the go since the shop doors opened at 9am, and they’re probably a few dodgy jumpers off finishing their Christmas shopping. Stuck for time, we make the call to head elsewhere. The better-half has a bus to catch soon from Parnell Street, but there’s time for a quick coffee. The bus is just too soon to enable a trip to the likes of the Lovinspoon up by Parnell Square, but just long enough to allow for a coffee on O’Connell Street.
Cafe Kylemore is much the same. It’s not really an option to settle on this place with crowds out the door. Town is absolutely mental, it’s like the yanks on what they term ‘Black Friday’, where frenzied showdowns for toasters and DVD players and all sorts of goodies make it to YouTube, showing that mankind isn’t as far removed from the animal kingdom as we sometimes think. People push by and head down Talbot Street carrying more bags than you’d think possible, and across the street at the GPO the preachers continue to preach like this was any other Saturday, everything from repression in China to the word of God, from the need for socialism to the Hare Krishna mantra spouted into megaphones at uncaring shoppers.
The Gresham, we’ll pop in there. Two coffees. They drop them down too, how fancy. There’s two lovely biccies on the side too. Toddy’s Bar and Brasserie, how often I’ve passed it and never walked in. We chat happy, sip the hot goodness and with ten minutes to go until the departing bus, decide it’s time to make a move.
I head back to the barcounter (“You can pay at the end”) and hand over a tenner. She gives me back a single Euro. I instantly feel like a gobshite. At €4.50 a coffee, perhaps this one is best avoided. Yet being told The Gresham is expensive is as unsurprising as being told Copper Face Jacks attracts off-duty Guards and schoolteachers. It’s my own fault. We’ve all heard the little old ladies on Liveline giving out about their lunch in The Gresham, folks take it from me. Just get into the line at Easons and hope for the best.
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
