Adam & Eve

Where do you start in Dublin? I start somewhere along Temple Bar in the Bushmills whiskey light of an overcast Thursday morning in April. This part of town is redolent of Dublin past and Dublin new, with its crowded terraces and its milling crowds. When I first came to the city, in 1981, there seemed — compared with London — to be hardly any street lighting at night, and although my memory may be playing tricks with me, I recall a fair number of horse-drawn carts clip-clopping along O’Connell Street. Dublin felt less like a capital then than a country town. With my girlfriend I went to see the first theatre run of Ridley Scott’s now iconic movie ‘Alien’. In retrospect, this horror tale of a spaceship crew that inadvertently acquires a vicious predator, that then plunges out of the stomach of one of their number, before running amok and slaughtering almost all the rest, could be interpreted as a twisted allegory of modern Ireland. Not that the old Ireland was a spaceship, but it was still isolated from the rest of the archipelago by its Catholicism and its constitution. Now the alien of modernity, fed initially by European Community inward investment, and latterly by generous tax breaks, has burst from the Guinness belly. People used to come to Dublin for its old world charm, and its literary associations, now they come — in great drunken phalanxes — for hen and stag nights. People used to come for the Georgian squares, with their famously elegant townhouses, and the smoky pubs, with their engraved glass windows — now they come for the nightclubs and the tapas bars, the luxury shops and the whole gallimaufry of a swaggering, alien metropolitan culture. On that 1981 trip we put up at an ‘umble bed and breakfast, costing a handful of punts, and naturally, we had to pretend to be married. Nowadays, modern Ireland has scuttled from the skirts of the Church’s roomy soutane, and you can stay - blatantly unwed, same-sex partnered, even - in upmarket hotels to rival the chi-chiest anywhere else in the galaxy has to offer, as long as you have a sack full of Euros, that is. I stayed at the Clarence on Wellington Quay, a Celtic skip from where you’ve joined me, in Temple Bar. I’d stayed at the Clarence before, four years previously, and to be frank I hadn’t liked it that much. In truth, I’m no great fan of hotels at all; in my view they’ve all got only one of two shticks, either they try and convince you you’re at home with chintz and knick-knacks (none of which are to be found in my actual home), or else they go for grandeur, imposing on you with their dramatic uplights and plumbing gimmickry, the insidious philosophy that taking a shit is a theatrical event.

The Clarence is part owned by U2’s leader, Bono, and the Edge, the band’s guitarist, and subscribes to theatrical evacuation school of hotel design. Its dér is a kind of minimalist Arts & Crafts: acres of deeply grooved blond wood, on the walls, the floors, the ceilings — anywhere you look. It’s light on art — a good thing — and its Octagonal Bar and restaurant feel like off-cuts from a medieval cathedral run by a brotherhood of gay monks. I don’t have anything against Bono and the Edge — except their music, and the former’s Saviour Complex — but the first time I stayed at the Clarence I found it at once deeply claustrophobic and curiously chilly. Perhaps it’s because the old nineteenth century building is now under threat — by the stadium-rockers themselves, who want to all but tear it down and whack up a far bigger hotel — but on this visit I felt distinctly nostalgic about the Clarence. The new hotel will be far larger, the work of ‘starchitect’ Norman Foster — responsible for London’s signature ‘Gherkin’, and the Reichstag, and oodles more glass ‘n steel — and boast a huge atrium and a ‘skycatcher’ roof. While I was actually in Dublin the duo were appearing before the planning board to advance their development plans — which are meeting stiff local resistance. Maybe it was this sense of vanishing recency, or possibly it’s the miserable fact that, if I’m honest, I’ve stayed in far more pretentious hotels than the Clarence, that made me cleave to it. I liked my top floor suite, with its balcony looking down on to the Liffey. I could see the Sean O’Casey Bridge, I could see the James Joyce Bridge — I could see all the writerly bridges that cross its scrawled-upon waters. I could see the Four Courts on the far side, the epicentre of the unsuccessful IRA rising against the Free State in 1922. I could see, in short, as much as I wanted to.

But the Devil is in the detail when it comes to hotels. The Devil is in the shower curtains and the down lights, the toilet roll holders and bathroom requisitories. I’ve had entire days ruined by having to contemplate an innocuous sign asking me to help save the planet by putting my dirty towels in the bath. I don’t know what it was — although I have my suspicions, and I’ll share them with you shortly — but on this trip to the Clarence, the details seemed quite pure and angelic. Yes, it could’ve been that although the Clarence has boasted a fair few rock star guests in its time, from David Bowie to Bill Clinton and back (and yes, please, let’s go back), when I was there, there was a palpable sense that the establishment was on the skids: you may need a door key to operate the lift, and the front door is zealously guarded, but the truth is, nobody much wants to go in. But on balance I think it was to do with what happened to me in Temple Bar that morning when a ghost accosted me from the past. ‘Is it you, Will?’ Said the man. He was white-haired and his elfin face was deeply scored with lines. ‘It’s me, Callum.’ And it was, Callum, the bongo player with the student band I’d had when I was at university, when, in fact, I first visited Dublin. He still had late dreams of pop stardom, and despite having been living in Barcelona for the past decade or so, burbled on about a video he’d posted on YouTube. I left him after a few minutes a little shaken, and turning to my bemused companion, taxed him: ‘Just tell reassure me on one thing — I don’t look as old as that guy?’

Yes, with scary doppelgangers like that wandering the streets, the Clarence was the acceptably young-old Dublin.