Dreadful Nonsense

One of the truly, truly, truly great things about Ireland is our ridiculous ability to adapt to any old thing that life throws our way. We take invasion on the chin, for the most part, and get on with things. We take famine, financial depression and political instability in our stride, and write splendid songs about each of them with which to taunt tourists and sing at weddings and funerals. We drink ourselves in to the ground, and manage to have a fine old time doing it. And now, the creation of beer gardens which, up until about three months ago, didn't exist, purely for the sake of being able to smoke while drinking.

I spent this evening in a pub with my little sister. Little in age, mark you, and not in any means stature, as she'll be the first to tell you (she refers to me, in turn, as her 'little' sister, cos I'm quite small in comparison). We went to a pub that is mere moments away from my house, a pub that Edel (the aforementioned sibling) used to work in in days gone by, and a pub I've been frequenting, mainly in the winter months, for at least the last five years. A pub, in short, that never once in the existence of all time, had a beer garden.

This pub now has a beer garden.

The beer garden has been hastily assembled from what can only be explained away as 'garden furniture', some gas lamps that don't work all that convincingly well, some plastic covering that to all intents and purposes keeps out no rain whatever, and something akin to a song and a smile. It's brilliant.

I've been brought to various beer gardens in and around the Dublin area a few times in the last few months, seeing as how I've been out with big bad smokers, who smoke and are big and bad as a result. I myself do not, as you'll well know, smoke, although some people may have been fooled by the convincing show I put on tonight while sparking up fags and inhaling the noxious smoke that resulted. I still remain an anti-smoker, and I think that's the most important thing, and also the thing that counts.

Again though, I'm impressed by the sheer bloody mindedness that's allowing these beer gardens to arrive unannounced. The "beer" "garden" in Whelans is the most impressive thing I've seen to date, mark you. It's an alleyway in which they used to keep kegs, and now keep smokers, piled up one on top of each other. It's a master stroke of wizardry and cunning, and one that I applaud wholeheartedly while coughing and tutting.

People of foreign lands - on your next visit to Ireland, you must keep an eye out for the Beer Gardens tours. It's truly a work of genius.

(Drunk blogging, mark 2. Will I ever learn?)

This entry was posted on 28 September 2004 at 1:54 am. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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