We set sail from that grim non-space, which I suppose now should be referred to as Holyhead International into a thick haar with the ship's fog horn blaring. As we crossed the Irish Sea the gloom lifted. A ham Hollywood screen-writer couldn't have scripted a better visual metaphor for passing from ignorance to enlightenment—by the time we were on the approach to the fair city of Dublin the skies were cloudless.

It was obviously rude not to have a pint of Guinness to hand to drink to stately, plump Buck Mulligan and Stephen Daedalus as we passed Joyce's Martello Tower on the approach to Dublin Harbour on such a morning as this. And good stout is probably, when all is said and done, at least as healthy a breakfast option as ro-ro ferry scrambled eggs

As the skies cleared the conversation shifted from depressing political shit that we the people have no real agency in¹ to how best to get through a Saint Paddy's day off in Dublin.

So pints were purchased and the the day was embraced for what it was.

Footnotes

¹ The Northern Ireland Protocol that the Conservative Government came up with never made any sense to me. I think I understand that it means that there is no sea border between England and Scotland and Northern Ireland—but is there actually an Irish Sea Border between Wales and England and The Republic of Ireland? I realise now that I don't even know. It's a dumb and controversial thought, but it occurred to me that there is something in the strangeness and contrariness of the practicalities of all of this that is disturbingly reminiscent of the bizarre cultural and political arrangements that existed between the Federal Democratic Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic in the second half of the twentieth century.