Thursday 15th August
The day started badly. Woke up with a
raging hangover, worst I'd had in years. Given the amount of
socialising (cough, drinking) I had in front of me for the next five
or so days, this was not a good way to start at all.
Luckily I didn't have anything pressing
at the convention on the first day. My main order of business was
getting the car back to the rental depot.
Justin was gone before I even got up,
and the others gradually left over the next few hours as I attempted
to fortify myself with coffee and get some toast down. By the time I
was ready to face the day at 10am Lucy was the only one left. I gathered
all of my stuff together, including a water bottle that I was sure I
would need, and then went looking for the car keys. Having little
memory of what I had done the night before I assumed that I had put
them in a safe place. All well and good. Trouble is I couldn't find
it.
Lucy left and I turned the house over, opened all the drawers and checked under the bed. Nothing. By the time I had given
up the chase and left the house I was resigned to making a serious
dent in my credit card. I reckon over the past 30 years I have hired
cars interstate and overseas about 60 times and I had never
previously lost the keys. I left them on a park bench in Queensland
once, realised 10 minutes later and went back and found them exactly
where I'd left them. And in Adelaide the electronic key came apart in
my hand one day, which necessitated a lot of stuffing about for most of
an afternoon, but never an actual key loss.
I still felt way less that 100% when I
set off to the car park; I had a faint hope that I might just have
left the keys in the car. After wandering around a bit searching for
the actual building where the park was located I got to the car to
find it locked, which meant I had used the keys to lock it and had
then walked away.
Things weren't looking good.
Twenty-five minutes walk and copious swearing later I was
stopped at a set of traffic lights about 100 metres from the car
rental drop-off point, when the vague notion of checking my day-pack
again came to me. I was certain I had already checked it. Surely I
had done that. Even though I had dropped it off with Robyn the first
time past the house the previous evening, surely I hadn't put the keys into there when I'd made
it to the house the previous evening.
And yes, as suspected I had. The keys
were exactly where they should have been all along. More swearing,
but this time with a great deal of relief.
So another hike back to the car, a
drive over to the depot and the car was dropped off. And in answer to
the question of how much it might have cost me if I had really lost
the keys, the answer came back as: “A lot”. Disaster averted.
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| Convention Centre main entrance |
A ten-minute walk later I was at the
Dublin Convention Centre and registered. A quick look around the
dealers' room and a call to the Harveys got me to the Gibson Hotel
down the river from the convention centre. A few chips and a few
beers later and I started to feel vaguely human again.
I took a wander around the convention,
spoke to a few old friends, checked in with some of the other
Australians floating around and dropped into Martin's, the main
convention bar for a few quiet ones.
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| Martin's Bar |
Dinner was a rushed affair with Rose,
Lucy and Julian before we caught up with Robyn for the night's
Literary Pub Walking Tour. Starting at Duke's we meandered around the
edges of Trinity College, dropping into a series of four or five
pubs. Our tour guides were two Irish actors who interspersed the pub
stops with talks on various Irish authors – Joyce, Wilde, O'Brian,
and Beckett among others – including excerpts from their works. We
had a pretty good time though a smaller group might have helped speed
the walk up a bit.
 |
| A tour guide declaims, while Lucy listens |
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| O'Neill's |
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| Julian waits |
And then to bed.
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