Ode to the Christmas Pub

– A seasonal riff on the opening paragraph of Moby Dick –

Call me Andy. Not long ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me amongst mortal company, I tended to sail about a little in Dublin City, brought hither and thither on impulsive winds to see the more ignored though not necessarily unexplored taverns of this dirty old town. It’s a way I have of driving off the spleen, of regulating apathy, of cracking through the thin yet heavy crust of my autopilot’s baked-in habits. Whenever I feel myself grown grim about the spiritual loins; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; when I find myself involuntarily pausing before a coffin warehouse, or randomly bringing up the rear of every Stag or Hen party I meet (before being politely asked to leave); and especially when my temper gets such an upper hand of me, that it requires a Herculean moral effort to prevent myself from deliberately stepping out into a road of oncoming traffic, or to move myself on from idling beneath a city crane’s precariously borne weight of 50 tonnes of devastating concrete, or methodically pushing people’s children into the street – then, I account it high time to retire to the nearest, most obscenely and prematurely festively decorated Irish pub, as soon as I can: least I be, gentle reader, the tragic cause of some senseless tragedy done. The Christmas pub is my substitution for the poison and the noose. With a philosophical flourish I can throw myself upon the white rails, on the mirror and the razor-blade. And I quietly take to the drink. For I hunger and I thirst not for the brittle unconsecrated words of the Living but for the grave-bitten guidance and the admonitions of the Dead; for those same words with their different sense are only spoken to me from the lipless mouths of the ghosts of my Christmases past, future and present. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men, in their degree, sometime or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the fairy-lit darkness of this time of year.

Feature Image: Daniele Idini