There were a couple of fine days in the wake of storm Ashley, and I rode out on Tuesday morning under blue skies. For reasons opaque in retrospect, I decided to take on Cupidstown Hill en route to Naas, crawling up its 18% ramp in a minuscule gear. Barry O’Driscoll used Cupidstown for an Everesting, climbing it 75 times over the course of thirteen hours, which surely earned him a plenary indulgence…my modest single ascent merited nothing more indulgent than an espresso and a flapjack at PS Coffee Roasters. The barista regaled me with his childhood memories of going mountain biking with his dad, but admitted that surfing was his sport these days. Evidently lugging a surfboard to Sligo is more fun than climbing Ticknock on a full suspension mountain bike.
By Thursday the wind was picking up again. Feeling lazy, I took the road south along the Dublin coast to examine Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown’s latest “innovations” in cycling infrastructure. I took the morning cafe stop at Hatch Coffee in Glasthule where they squandered points by checking whether I wanted my espresso “for here”, then handing it to me in a paper cup regardless. I sat outside, watching mourners streaming out of the church across the road, thinking back to my grandmother’s funeral and carrying her coffin from Quinn’s funeral home up the street to that same church.
I grew up in Sandycove: the poles of my book-obsessed childhood were the library at the bottom of York Road in Dun Laoghaire to the north, my grandmother’s bookshop in Bray to the south. The equator was Eamonn’s Bookshop in Sandycove village, which I visited any time I had ten or twenty pence to my name, in the hopes that a hitherto unknown Famous Five or Biggles book might have appeared on its shelves. I was pleased to see that it still endures, and Eamonn himself too, if the white-haired gentleman sitting at the front of the shop was he.
Despite the bookish tone of my reminiscences, I bypassed the Martello tower that was home to Buck Mulligan and Stephen Daedalus in favour of a straight run through Dalkey and up the Vico Road to Killiney, the vaunted resemblance to the Bay of Naples diminished by the grey skies and choppy water. The wind was at my back as I cut inland to Kilternan and Tibradden before dropping back down into the city.