Cork

In which good craic obscures the pain of unfulfilled Gothic longings

I did not know I harbored Quasimodo fantasies until I learned, partway through dinner on my first night in Cork, that I could satisfy them.

I learned this from Celeste and Dave. They were deep to the wine list when I was seated next to them at what would quickly prove to be a great little Italian restaurant, but no sooner had I ordered and pulled out my book, than I could feel their gaze on me. I lifted my eyes, and we embarked on a dinner-long conversation that veered from first dates to Mormonism to cheese to the Black and Tans, before finally rounding on what I should do with my three days in Cork. Celeste ticked off a few ideas, then made the suggestion almost as an afterthought: ‘And of course you can go ring the bells at Shandon church.”

Are you kidding me? I was on it like white on rice. Early the next morning I stopped briefly for coffee at a café languid with the ennui of the teenage girls in green school blazers and miniskirts who huddled in the corner. Properly caffeinated, I then headed up the hill and through a pelting rain toward the church, guided by a vision of myself gazing out over the city from high in the belfry, maybe even pulled gently into the air by the weight of the heavy ropes, as I coaxed a deafening but surely melodic peal from medieval bells. I was thoroughly soaked by the time I reached the top of the hill. Where I was promptly greeted by a boarded-up entryway, and a sign announcing the church and its belltower were closed indefinitely for restoration.

The belfry in question

So, it turned out, was the Crawford gallery that is the city’s main art museum. When I went to the Hi-B, which Celeste had promised was an iconic pub where I could happily while away an afternoon with my book and a pint so long as I didn’t at any point pull out my phone, I discovered three bartenders busily putting down placemats. After one rather rudely demanded to know who I was, she quickly realized my confusion, and apologetically told me the bar was closed for a whisky tasting. A tasting that, she quickly interjected before I could even form the question, had been fully booked since September.

The bar in question

On top of that, the city is not especially attractive, its famed English Market doesn’t hold a candle to counterparts in southern Europe, and the weather, if I’m being diplomatic, was absolute shit.

And yet, I could not have loved Cork more.

As an introvert who needs long stretches of time to herself in a way that feels biological, I’ve long been fascinated by the way that different cultures teach social engagement. Here in Scandinavia, where I live, people are reserved in a way that runs from mildly-averse-to-small-talk (Danes) to practically catatonic. (How do you tell when a Finn really likes you? He looks at your feet when he talks to you.)

In Spain, where I lived before moving to Copenhagen, it was the opposite. There, I was always struck by how easy it was for strangers to talk with one another–waiting in line at the market, standing at the bar for coffee, sitting next to someone on the train. These weren’t the superficial niceties of Americans–the “have a nice days” and “Sure is hot, isn’t it?” that I grew up with. Rather, they were real conversations, about politics or sports or whether tortilla should or should not have onion in it. It was as if there was some secret school in social fluency that everyone attended.

You spend enough time around people like that, and even an introvert like me acquires some skills. Once, after I had moved to Denmark, I went back to Spain for a story that would have me flying into Malaga and taking a taxi from there to Gibraltar. Initially, I panicked, imagining the awkwardness that would ensue as I tried to keep a conversation going with a stranger over 134 kilometers. It took about two minutes in the taxi for me to realize I needn’t have worried: the driver was Spanish, after all, and I just had to follow his lead. We talked nonstop for the two hours it took to make the journey.

And yet, Ireland–or at least the part of it I encountered in Cork—has even Spain beat.

Admittedly, my first conversation was with a Spaniard. Daniel worked at the hotel I found about a hundred meters from where the bus from the Dublin airport let me off, and it turned out that everyone else working there was Spanish too (thank you very much, Brexit). But we had a fine conversation about what brought him to Cork, and when I asked him what I should do while I was in town, he told me I definitely wanted to go hear some Irish music, and he recommended a place down the street called Sin é, which he said means “that’s that” in Irish–”like ‘se acabó.”. Which is funny, he chortled, because it’s right next door to a funeral parlor.

Daniel also recommended a restaurant across the river that turned out to be fully booked, as were the next two places I tried. I was resigning myself to a snack in the hotel winebar and had crossed back, over water that tides and rain had brought suspiciously close to the bridge, when I passed the Italian restaurant. It wouldn’t have been my first choice–Italian food in a non-Italian city always feels like a bit of a cheat to me–but pasta sounded better than a bowl of salted almonds, so when I spied what was was clearly an empty table in the corner by the window, I made an exception. It was there that, as an opening gambit, Dave asked me how the book was, and I tried to summarize On The Calculation of Volume in a way that didn’t make it and me sound ridiculous. And we were off.

He was from Cork and worked in IT; she was a chef from Provo, Utah. They met on Tinder, but she had been looking for a guide, not a date. “I was traveling around Ireland and wanted someone to show me around Cork,” Celeste explained. “Good thing I didn’t go to Galway, or we wouldn’t be here.”

When her new guide invited her to dinner at the very place she had eaten the night before, she figured he at least had good taste, and decided it might be worth re-evaluating his status. Within a year they were married. That was eight years ago.

I learned a lot during dinner. That Celeste had left her Mormon family to travel, working first in Alaska, and then in some Michelin-starred places in Australia; that Dave had been just as adventuresome, living in San Francisco and Dubai before deciding he belonged back in the land of his roots. That they had first lived together in Kinsale, which is adorable but too touristy in summer, so they moved. That the couple’s first argument was over the cheese platter Celeste once served as the centerpiece of a dinner for friends. “In some ways, I’m not a good Irishman,” Dave explained. “I don’t drink and I hate cheese.”

He seemed a very good Irishman to me. Dave volunteered as a lifeboat rescuer. He told me about how the Black and Tans had burnt huge swaths of Cork in 1920, and how he was an Army reservist whose unit was based out of the very same barracks (albeit renamed after Michael Collins rather than Queen Victoria) from which they and the Auxiliaries had launched their attacks.

Today, the couple own a catering business called Spoon and Scallop that puts on dinners and special events primarily for visitors–families in Ireland for a reunion, couples traveling to celebrate an anniversary, that sort of thing. “I’m the chef,” Celeste explained. “And he’s the charm.”

She was pretty charming herself, but I knew what she meant: Dave was in a twinkly-eyed, conversationally-gifted class of his own. I had felt awkward intruding on their date night, and tried on a couple of occasions to politely give them an off-ramp, but the conversation continued through their mains and mine, dessert, and even the limoncellos at the end.

By the time they left, the restaurant was almost empty. Which is when Mirco, the owner of the restaurant who, I learned, had moved to Cork from Italy 30 years ago, came over for a chat. After another 30 minutes or so, and a thorough discussion of American politics and why Italians didn’t want to work in hospitality anymore, I realized that, in Cork, I was going to have to pace myself.

Yet the conversations kept coming. At the fast-food salad place I ducked into to avoid a downpour, I sat next to two men who would almost certainly describe themselves as ‘blokes,” and got pulled into their conversation about how, after one bloke’s wedding at “the poor man’s Ballymaloe,” his bride got sick on the first night of their Spanish honeymoon; we all agreed it was the stress that did it. At a matchbox-sized coffee shop I joined the banter between the moon-faced barista and a clearly smitten customer with an equally smitten terrier over why she hadn’t given him a taste of the day’s special brew, considering how good it was.

At one pub I talked with a retired train mechanic who was glad he got out when he did because “the AI is going to make slaves of us all.” At another, after watching a Goth couple lug a massive suitcase up to the bar and onto a stool, and begin extracting from it some witchy-looking paintings that they then hung around the pub, we talked about artistic inspiration. (“It’s my inner Goddess who speaks to me,” the artist explained, while her boyfriend nodded his man-bun appreciatively). I followed that with a chat with the owner about how both Guinness and Beamish had recently raised their prices, and how he was trying to not pass that on to customers by convincing them to drink more.

I went to a lunchtime concert in the Dark Academia-looking Aula Maxima of the University, and sat next to Pat, who was there primarily because her husband wanted to be. “Music’s not really my thing,” she confessed. But she liked being back in the Aula, a long hall lined with appropriately heavy bookcases on one wall, and portraits of severe-looking former rectors on another, because it was where she sat her exams when she was a university student studying chemistry some 50 years earlier. When she learned I was from the U.S. she told me about her grandmother, who had moved to Boston in 1890 with her two sisters, until their dad insisted they come home. One of the girls had already met someone, though, so she stayed on, working as a maid. The family had split apart after that, and Pat didn’t know what had become of her great-aunt and her children.

All this in the roughly five minutes between when I sat down, and the fiddle player stepped on stage.

Not all the conversations touched on the personal. At dinner in an open-kitchen restaurant that same night, the couple seated next to me apparently felt self-conscious about leaving early, so they turned to me and explained that they were going to watch the rugby; Ireland was playing France. A server overheard us.

“On a Thursday?” she interrupted.

The man nodded. “Yeah, because of the Olympics.”

The server turned to the chef behind the pass. “Did you know Ireland’s playing the rugby tonight?|

“What, on a Thursday?”

It wasn’t long before the whole restaurant was murmuring at this apparent glitch in the time/space continuum.

Look, I know that this is a cliché: the good craic for which Ireland is famous. And there were other things that I loved about Cork, from the abundance of live music pubs and good restaurants, to the sunlight that finally burst through just as I sweatily reached the top of Patrick’s Hill. I loved the case in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel that displays the walking stick Michael Collins left behind in his room on the day he was assassinated, and the flea market that was a) named after native daughter and renowned labor organizer Mother Jones and b) doing a sturdy business in holy water and ecstatic mermaids. I loved the unabashedly working-class vibes, and the city’s underdog pride.

Holy water; mermaids in ecstasy

But I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to know that simply by sitting still and looking open to it, I could find myself in meaningful conversation with strangers. It seemed to me the antidote to so much that ails us, and I say that as one of those people who now prefers texts to phone calls. Technology–everything from the proliferating delivery apps that keep us from having to speak to waiters to the AI that we use as therapists–is actively eroding our social interaction skills. But this, I reckon, is where we can resist.

A few days in Cork is a good way to remember how.

The Addresses

Normally, what follows is where paid subscribers find a list of the places where I stayed, ate, and otherwise entertained myself on this trip. But we’re going to try something new. Since these posts are already on the long side, I’m going to separate the information on hotels, restaurants, etc. into its own post for paid subscribers, and will send that out in the next week or so. Let me know if like this approach, or prefer to go back to the way it was.