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Saturday, April 17, 2010

Thirty Days of Music- Part VII

Before I moved to Dublin it seemed like one of the most exciting, cosmopolitan cities ever. I remember spending one New Years when I was seventeen walking around the deserted streets and it was like a magical glow was emanating from every building. It's bizarre how your first memory of something always remains separate, more romantic than your continued experiences of it. That first, fledgling Dublin seems like a different place to how I know it now. Yesterday, I walked down Henry Street and it was like something out of a Shane Meadows film*, dirty, bleak, people screaming in my face asking me if I wanted hair extensions or if I liked cats and dogs.

When I was seventeen years old I took an A level in Religious Studies. I studied Economics for a week and then realised I couldn't read graphs so I changed subjects. When I walked into the class my teacher asked me if it was a joke, presumably because I'd gained a reputation as a liberal atheist getting into raging arguments with people about homosexuality and abortion. I thought it'd be a doss. It wasn't really, but it was one of the best classes I ever took. I loved my teachers, especially Dr. Keys. She wore tartan waistcoats and jumpers with pictures of dogs on them and would tell us the world was going to end in our lifetime. If we didn't want to do work that day, we'd repeatedly ask her to speak in tongues.

These two stories, incidentally, are interwoven for day seven: a song that reminds you of a certain event.



The first time I ever went to Dublin was for a Religious Studies class trip to a mosque in Dundrum. Our bus driver tried to kill us and the mosque was unstoppably boring, but I loved everything about that day. The weather was beautiful, the mosque building was beautiful. I was just excited to be in Dublin. The streets were cleaner, the fact that signposts were in Irish was a novelty; my mommy had given me some euro to go to the Dundrum shopping centre afterwards. I was so wide-eyed about everything it's laughable now. I'd just starting listening to Ima Robot; schizophrenic, unashamedly hook-laden pop. When I fall in love with a song I will generally play it to death and won't be able to listen to it until years afterwards. I listened to Ima Robot for the first time in three years the other day and it made me smile because it sparked a hilarious, retrospective remembrance of being young and green.



* This will never be intended as a compliment on account of I detest kitchen sink realism. I wish everybody would stop telling me how great Shameless is; I'll never appreciate the humour because I can't get past how depressing it looks.

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