For the Princess’s birthday, I took her and two friends to Milano’s in Temple Bar for pizza. I might digress here and say that I quite like Temple Bar, it’s always full of tourists being cheerful and it feels a bit like being on holidays as there are never any Irish people there. Mr. Waffle and most Dubliners avoid it like the plague. Mr. Waffle always refers to it as “Dublin’s cultural quarter” in sardonic tones. And though, I concede that it is a bit pub heavy for a cultural quarter, I quite like it. So, if you are ever in Temple Bar and meet a real live Irish person it will be me because I am the only one who ever ventures in there.
That was a digression. I just wanted to record my unluckiness in choosing to go there on the day when all of Europe’s finance ministers were meeting in Dublin castle (just adjacent), when an anniversary performance of Handel’s Messiah was taking place around the corner on the site of the original performance (Messiah, first performed in Dublin, you know) and concerned citizens were marching against the new property tax (protest unavailing, it seems to be here to stay). It was bedlam. Alas.