Deadly Dublin

Having been given a few days off from work for good behaviour and not being allowed to transfer them, I was scraping around for something to do for a bit when I arrived at the idea of going to Dublin for a short trip to cover the Aylesburys there. I looked around for someone to go with, thinking that a Dublin trip might be an attractive proposition for someone with a love of beer and up for a good time, but this proved to be not a good time so I headed across the sea alone.

Travel to Dublin proved to be uneventful as BMI and BAA did their jobs well and I even got to sit in business class as there were so many spare seats in the plane. Arriving at Dublin airport was easy and having no luggage to collect I strolled out of the airport and onto a coach that went down to O Connell Street in the centre of Dublin where I was staying. Having sorted out my room from a disinterested hotel staff member, who I later discovered was the manager, I wandered down O Connell street and into the Temple bar district for a pint and some food and get my bearings.

Having wondered around the hectic city centre totally lost and quite tired I found a good chip shop called Malones and a lively Irish pub called 4 Dame Lane to have a pint and a chat to some businessmen out for a Christmas Drink.

Lots of places give you free maps in Dublin, they are all of the town centre and don’t include the important places of Dublin, so I wandered over to the tourist information centre to buy a proper map complete with Aylesburys and set off on a walk out of the town centre and out to the Aylesbury district of Dublin. On the way I passed this rather worrying coffee shop with some interesting characteristics and a statue of Oscar Wilde sitting on a rock.

He once said, “Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.” I wondered how noble this quest for Aylesburys was as it certainly was a truly stupid quest. How Oscar Wilde would view this journey I think it would be with disdain and tell me to find something productive to do.

After a swift walk, I ended up in the Ailesbury district which is a very nice well to do area with lots of embassies and nice houses. The embassies seem to tell a tale of how rocky the home country’s relationship is with the Irish. For example the UK’s embassy is behind blast walls with security cameras and a military style gateway, given the way that the UK has acted in Ireland in the past, this is not surprising. The Norwegian embassy is totally open with almost an invitation to wander round and bounce on the sofas. Most weirdly, the US embassy, home of the Americans, best friends of the Irish, have a Martello tower type blast wall concrete bunker, cowering against all newcomers.

Amongst this embassy district are a number of streets names after British lords, lord Pembroke, and Lord Ailesbury. The first Ailesbury I arrived at was Bothar Aelsbaire or Ailesbury Road.

This has the Spanish embassy at the end and is a lovely street with large houses of well to do people and embassies all over.

Also on the right was the Ailesbury Clinic, a private clinic for well to do people and embassies.

I strolled down the street and passed Aylesbury Villa, home to the Pakistan embassy and on to Ailesbury Way so, a gated road, a bit strange, given that the houses behind the gate were much less extravagant than those out on the ungated Ailesbury Road. I turned right down past Ailesbury house and to Ailesbury Park, knocking off Aylesburys left right and centre, you have got to love unoriginal place naming from developers.



Ailesbury Gardens next to the tram stop soon followed, and I was off to find Ailesbury Mews soon after, getting thoroughly lost and ending up on the sea front before back tracking and returning to Ailesbury Mews another way.




I headed back down Ailesbury Road and past Ailesbury Oaks and Ailesbury Wood, more embassies and nice houses, Ailesbury Grove and Ailesbury Drive were perpendicular to each other and I strolled back down and along to Ailesbury Court, home to the Austrian Embassy and then off to find some lunch, a morning’s stroll successfully completed.










I wandered off to St Patrick’s cathedral in the afternoon and was especially taken with the history of Jonathan Swift and his religious and political writings. Then off to a comedy night at The International Bar called the Comedy Cellar. It is held in a room above the bar which is comically bad in design and facilities but was a great atmosphere. I found an IT programmer who had a girlfriend in Barton, not more than a mile to where I lived, an Argentinean Harry Potter fan and an American whose surname was Jameson, which provided some comedy ammunition for the comedians. I did not fit the comedy stereotype of an English tourist as I was not there on a stag night, had not flown Ryan Air and had not visited the Guiness Brewery at St James’s gate. They were left making general anti English jokes and left it at that. Everyone in the bar was very friendly and I had a great night.

The next morning I was off up the airport road to another Ailesbury, this time in a much less nice part of town, rather, I had to go through a much less pleasant part of Dublin to get to it, so I made sure I knew where I was going and kept my head down and walked up the road, past the anti British slogans and the pub celebrating the IRA heroes, hoping to avoid trouble. It was a pleasant walk and didn’t take much time to arrive the area this Ailesbury was in was nice enough but I didn’t want to linger too long and headed back down in to Dublin for the rest of the holiday, mission complete.