Myles Away From Dublin Read Online Free PDF Page B

necks, going to bed early, and being respectful? These procedures can have a disastrous consequence; now myself approaching middle age, I think I can truthfully say that I have not properly washed my neck since 1931.
    But the most critical disaster was surely the discovery about a century ago of the sea by the land-bound British. They found the sea was very good for you, not in its ancient sense as an occasion of empire and world conquest but as something to get into on mild strands and let it cover you up to the oxters and maybe higher. The ‘resorts’ then came to the fore, the ‘bathing machines’, the sand, the buckets, the unbelievable seaside lodgings and ultimately the pier with its band, phoney negroes, ice cream, and that most marvellous of all atrocities – Sundays when absolutely nothing was permitted.
    Naturally Ireland was slow in following this cross-channel opulence of expansion to the letter, yet not a few good men and true still alive here are innocent of a youth which did not have some of that terrifying quality. Skerries, for instance. I have carried around in my juvenile socks more of the sand of that place than would rebuild the Four Courts, again and again I have fallen on the weedy slime of its rocks to the extent of splitting my sconce, and once spent two months every summer in a house which, though two-storeyed, slated and fine, had no running water or sewerage. (To be just, I think arrangements are a bit better now.)
    Do people still go in for this lunacy? Well, I suppose they do. But why? That’s a big question.
Some New Ideas
    Yet all is not bleakness. I think the main boon for a person going away for a while is to make it crystal-clear to himself and all others that he is not going on his holidays. The person who uses that horrible phrase is bunched. A business-trip, perhaps? To Istanbul?
    I do think the seaside holiday is largely discredited. But take care that something worse does not take its place, for something far worse nearly happened to my good self just before Easter. Two chaps I know were good enough to ask me whether I would care to join them on three or four days away from it all? The idea sounded good but I was suspicious. A quick trip by air to Tunis? Nice enough, but surely expensive; even a bit dangerous, perhaps, with all those gun-happy characters in Morocco. I gave a tentative three cheers but modestly asked where they were going. Oh, Galway – Kerry, maybe. Fine – but how?
By Caravan!
    I did not back down on the spot. This, I said, was a new thing and terribly interesting. I would see them, I explained, the following night for a further talk. And so I did, bringing a loose but commodious waterproof bag reasonably filled for the novel trip the day after. I was asked what was in it? Just a few essentials, I explained – a few clean shirts, pyjamas, change of pants and jackets, soap, shaving gear, a few towels, a raincoat, some elementary medical stores, and a bottle of whiskey.
    I can only report that the row was appalling. Did I think I was going on safari to darkest Africa? Who did I think I was? What did I mean by shaving? Surely I knew what it was for a few fellows to knock about together for a few days in the land of their birth? Towels?
    I didn’t know much about a few fellows knocking about a few days – and don’t. I didn’t go. But I brought that whiskey safely home.

Manners also maketh the boy
    My business, varied and mysterious as some may judge it, frequently brings me to Dublin city and entails bus trips about the suburbs. I have encountered one startling thing so often in the early afternoon and in different localities that I think I might mention it here.
    The bus is nearly empty and I am on the top deck, peaceably trying to read a paper. It pulls up at a stop and presently all bedlam breaks out. Shouts and shrieks fill the air and the vehicle shudders as it is assailed apparently by a horde of redskins. There is a clattering on the stairs and