Hieronymus Blog

Don’t ask me why, but I feel like boring you first of all with a few little musings of mine.

When moving into a new place, it’s always good to establish some little routines. Finding a café or bar nearby where the staff are usually friendly, a bakery that sells nice bread, getting to recognize faces that you see seem to see very other day on the street. These are all little pleasures that make a new place familiar and somewhere that you are least a little more comfortable in living. When I moved up to Dublin at first, it took me a while to get used to the place, and to be completely honest, I don’t know if I could ever see myself living here permanently. I have very itchy feet. Still, wherever the wind takes me over the next few years, it could and probably will set me back down again here in Dublin. So I may as well get used to it.

After an extended and confusing period of readjustment over the Summer months, I faltered initially when it came to adapting to Dublin and the whole student life thing again. I had an interesting month or so, wallowing in loneliness and self-pity at times, developing a tolerant co-existence with my flatmate and endeavouring to make my new bedroom seem like somewhere where I wouldn’t mind having to spend a good deal of the immediate future. In the meantime, I noticed certain things about where I live.

Wherever you happen to call your home, walking along a street in the morning is completely different from passing along the same street in the evening. There is a different feel to the place. Now that the evenings are darker, I usually set out for home in varying degrees of twilight, and sometimes under the yellow light of the street lamps. In the morning, its bright and frosty, with huddles of suited workers scurrying along to work. By evening, there are shadows everywhere and everything has a rougher, more exciting edge. When it is grey and overcast, the entire street lowers its head in gloom and manages to look like its suffering from some world-crushing hangover. The whole character of the street changes during the day and even the people begging seem to move on, only to be replaced by others.

It sickens me to see so many homeless and poverty stricken people on the streets of Dublin. So much affluence and wealth in the country, and nothing to spare for the unfortunate. There is this guy who sits everyday on the steps of Avalon house, with his head bowed down over his knees. He has his hand out, holding some kind of paper cup. He has whitish blonde hair and the palest of faces. Sometimes when his head is raised, I think he has Japanese features, but I could be wrong. Wherever he’s from, something awful must have happened to have brought him there, to where he now sits everyday, his head bent, all alone. It’s tragic.


I joined Laser video club a couple of weeks ago and boy am I having a ball, all by my little old self, watching good movies. How many years did I waste in Galway pacing up and down on the faded blue carpet of x-travision, scrutinising the rows of shite for the occasional worthwhile movie, or a comedy that didn’t have a pair of tits on the cover (okay, so i've exaggerated a little)? As I’m sure ye are fully aware, Laser is great.

I don’t mean to be a heaper of gloom, but unfortunately this blog entry could not come to an end without some reference to what happened across the road from the DIT yesterday evening. The laundry just down the road caught on fire and much of it burned down. I tend to carry a list of things I have to do (which only ever grows bigger) with me, and one of the things marked down for yesterday was to leave clothes into the laundry to be washed. Of course in a selfish way I’m glad I didn’t get round to it now, but I feel so sorry for the guys who run the place. I drop my stuff off there all the time, and it’s the fastest and cheapest laundry I’ve seen up here. The two guys who work there always smile when they’re talking to me and in a friendly way exchange the few words it takes to do our business. We’ve probably never had a proper conversation, but I like them.

Sometimes when I went in there, after giving them the ticket and asking for my bag, I would look at a stone tablet they had cellotaped to the side of the counter.
The writing looked Arabic, with beautiful characters that made swirling curves in the stone. One day, I asked the guy what it meant and he told me, “this is the name of God” and smiled at me. I am not religious and I don’t believe in any God, but I liked the way he said it and kind of admired the way he was so clear in his belief. For some reason I really enjoyed the short exchange, and left the place feeling reassured. It was a nice human connection. Which brings me back to all the talk of routines. Once a little connection is made with a place, it becomes part of your daily life, and whenever I passed the laundry, I had a pleasant association with the place.


I’m a damn rambler I tell ye, so ye’ll have to forgive me! Recently I heard or read something, somewhere, along the lines of,
“ask, and be embarrassed for a moment, don’t ask, and be embarrassed for the rest of your life.”
I know I probably have it arse-ways but I like that saying, or quote, or whatever the hell it is. The worst thing in the world is being too afraid to say you don’t know something and ask about it.


Another day I went in to drop off some laundry and the other guy, who always has a slightly more serious expression, was down towards the back of the laundry. He was dancing around, swinging his hips in a very feminine manner, with a short white apron held up to his waist. I could hear bursts of men’s laughter coming from back there. A long rack of plastic sheathed garments hid the laughers from my view. With a huge grin on his face, he whipped away the apron when he saw me at the counter, and ran up to take my bag off me.

I don’t know if these guys owned the place or were just running it, but it saddens me to think that they may have lost their jobs or even their business in the fire. Hopefully they have insurance and they’ll be back on their feet soon. As for all that clothing lost to the cruel flames, the customers are in for one hell of a shock in the morning.