Dublin, through a haze of opiates

Dublin was good fun, hurrah hurrah, but I think I may have to go there again some time when I am not cheerfully swigging lightly fizzy soluble codeine every four hours. Having had a mild cold that turned into sinusitis that was nicely coupled with epic and awful insomnia (I keep composing mental letters that begin "Dear People of the World Who Do Not Suffer From Chronic Sleep Disorders"; this is not a good sign) it's maybe not surprising that I spent the weekend suffering from the sort of headache that makes you think lovingly of pitchforks and brimstone. And, er, low-fare airlines really don't help. They play jingly music and don't feed you.

Anyway! I did say that I would not complain about anything, because this was my mum's holiday. She is halfway through a two-year hospital rotation, she has been doing a lot of twelve-hour shifts lately, she is overworked. I knew this, and I knew she needed a holiday, but I started to worry when she got to the point where she was incapable of using any nouns to refer to collective groups of people save "patients".

(That is to say, flying out on Friday morning, she started a conversation with, "The patients on the aeroplane..."

"Er," I said. "The passengers on the aeroplane?"

And then, later: "The patients who brought the manuscript over to Ireland...." / "Er, the monks?")

She is now mostly recovered, although there was a hairy moment where she strode into a chemist's and demanded codeine phosphate, 30mg, while I whimpered into the floor.

The man there was very nice and carefully explained the twin concepts of prescriptions and over-the-counter medications, and how if she gave me sixty miligrams of the stuff in the cocodamol formulation I would probably die, while all the while ignoring me stumbling about clutching at my head. She gave him her qualified-to-practice-in-twenty-six-countries face, and I eventually got my minor-league opiates. (I am occasionally very glad my mother is on my side.)

But when I was not stumbling around yelping, it was a lovely weekend. Dublin was beautiful and sunny and I spent a lot of time sitting by the river reading Midnight's Children (which jacinthsong gave me a couple of months ago, having tried to get me to read it for years), and it turns out it's the perfect thing to read when you're sitting by a river in the sunshine and out of your head on painkillers. The only thing by Salman Rushdie I'd read before was Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and I like the echoes of that prose style, the sticky neologisms and run-on-sentences and cheerful Hindustani, it's all very comforting. He has that very Kipling habit of names that are all multilingual puns, and is mildly insulting to Muslims and Hindus and Bengalis and Punjabis and Gujuratis and Delhiites and Anglo-Indians alike. Three hundred pages in, I'm enjoying it - and it's quite nice to read something that has that easy-to-read North Indian polyglot presented not as gimmick, but as conscious evocation of how people think and speak.

(Especially as my own prose style seems to have taken a turn for the non-existent. Dear self: interesting sentence structure, remember that? Narrative voice, that thing that comes in quite handy? I'm not sure what's wrong with me at the moment. Boredom and sleep-deprivation, most likely. I used to be able to write, honest.)

Moving on, yes, Dublin is a lovely city. Other things of note besides sunshine and books: Trinity College is beautiful; I am the surprised owner of a bright green dress; sometimes, my life has thematic cohesion. Not quite two weeks ago, gamesiplay and I got ourselves by dint of much concentrated effort to Palo Alto, and thus to Stanford, to see a play by Brian Friel. Because I am a literary Philistine, all I knew about Brian Friel was that he existed and was probably Irish. The play, Translations, was an unexpected delight. It's set in a rural Irish village in the early nineteenth century, where a band of English cartographers are trying their best to map, and anglicise, the landscape. It's an exploration of colonialism, language and meaning, and it ought to be very depressing, but isn't - it's witty and charming and plays with a myriad of classical themes - and quotes extensively from the Aeneid, cementing its place in my heart forever - and ends on just the right note of poignance. (gamesiplay said at the time that it was a very good play for us to see: we spent the days before and after unravelling such delightful transatlantic cultural differences as meat thermometers, skillets, first-class honours and Orangemen.) We had a very good day that day, I remember - as well as succeeding at Stanford and theatre-going, we also succeeded at public transport, Mediterranean food and randomly discovering Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto.

Anyway! Leafing through the programme at the time, I noted that the play had been put on at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. So when I found myself wandering past the same theatre on Friday, I went inside to see what they had on. And, again, Brian Friel. Brian Friel's version of Chekhov's Three Sisters. And that would all have been very thematically cohesive, yes, but it seemed to me that taking my somewhat overworked and stressed-out mother to see an Irish playwright's version of a Russian play might not be the sanest idea I'd ever had. So I tried for something else.

We eventually ended up seeing something called Big Love, a play based on Aeschylus, The Suppliant Women, and much to my surprise, my mother enjoyed it as much as I did. The basic premise: fifty women are being forced to marry fifty men against their will. The night before the wedding, forty-nine of them kill the men - and one gets married. It sounds silly and isn't at all. I really liked it. It ends, as such things do, with a bloodbath and a wedding, and just before it ends, the last remaining bride throws a bouquet into the audience.

...which I caught. I was as surprised as everyone else. Everyone around me had to be reminded to applaud, while I sat there eclipsed by roses. It was one of those lovely, perfect surreal moments.

And then we went away, and ate Chinese food, and I put up with a lot of teasing, but, yes. I went to a play and caught a bouquet. I left Dublin this afternoon, landed after a half-hour flight in beautiful bright sunshine, and now I am here for a week and will maybe, I don't know, do some work and write things and be paid actual money for actual gainful employment. I can only hope.