I see that poor Bristol City Council has made it into Private Eye magazine's latest "Pseuds Corner" compilation. Its crime, committed in the city plan, was to boast of Bristol's extraordinary "connectivity", as follows: "Whether our people connect in person or in virtual spaces, whether they connect in their physical communities or their global communities, our city infrastructure helps bring them together. Bristol connectivity means multimodal connectivity – we designed our infrastructure around the human condition."
I haven’t been to Bristol to see how that works. But even so, it sounds like a model for Dublin, and for Ireland in general. While we continue to struggle with infrastructural shortcomings, planners here could also plausibly claim that our existing system was designed around the human condition, Irish-style.
We are, after all, a garrulous and gregarious people, who delight in stories, especially long complicated ones. And not only does the public transport system mirror this perfectly, it encourages it.
This is nowhere truer than on my beloved Luas Red Line, as it winds its way northeastwards from Saggart and Tallaght daily, through multiple twists, turns, and junctions. Like so many Irish people, it can take ages to get to The Point. But if the physical connections along the way are not great, the metaphysical ones are endless. Thanks to the human condition – which is especially intense along the Red Line – the journey is nearly always educational.
Hung, Thrawn, and Quartered – Frank NcNally on Westminster’s Brexit crisis, as seen through Ulster-Scots
Come Again Eileen – Frank McNally on an overdue revival of Irish-American composer Victor Herbert
Automated Yeats – Frank McNally discovers the joys of computerised poetry reading
ID Required: An old cartoon causes the Irishman’s Diarist to question his identity
In the spirit of physical and mental connectivity, Bristol-style, that brings me to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which will be 80 years old in May. Not for the first time, I'm wondering whether the famously difficult book's latest milestone might inspire me to join the select group of humanity who can claim to have read it. But I had the same ambition for its 75th birthday, so I won't make any promises.
A wise Joycean once gave me useful advice on the subject: that you shouldn't start FW on Page 1. That's a common mistake, he said, and unnecessary, given the book's circularity.
Like a conversation eavesdropped on, it begins in the middle of a sentence: “riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Then it takes 600-odd (in some cases very odd) pages before you reach the “end”, which is in fact the opening of the same sentence: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”.
So you could just as well begin at chapter 6 or chapter 12. And I'm told that those two are indeed more accessible entry points. Ever since that advice, I have been less intimated by FW, because I now think of it as a literary version of those open-top Dublin tour buses. Their routes too are circuitous: with a day ticket, you can get on and off at any stop. Unfortunately, this excellent metaphor has not been sufficient to persuade me to buy a ticket for Finnegans Wake yet. But between now and May, I might.
Speaking of Howth Castle, and still making Bristol-style connections, this reminds me of another impending anniversary, and a poignant coincidence. For the newer parts of Howth Castle were among the Irish works of the great British architect Edwin Lutyens (1869 to 1944), born 150 years ago this March 29th. And what else is scheduled to happen on March 29th? Yes, of course, Brexit Day – unless the architects of that folly seek planning permission for an extension.
There must be a moral somewhere here. Remainers, for example, might note sadly that Lutyens was the product of a European union. His mother was Irish (a Gallwey from Kerry, confusingly), and his father English of Dutch ancestry. So like an imaginative multi-arch bridge, Lutyens’s parentage spanned three countries: one more than the imaginative bridge Boris Johnson envisages between post-Brexit Britain and Ireland.
But of course Lutyens created actual bridges too, transcending the virtual and physical worlds, just like Bristol’s connectivity. Indeed, his Irish masterpiece – the War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge – was originally intended to include a footbridge over the Liffey: a link to Phoenix Park. Alas this never happened until, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, the Office of Public Works revived the idea last autumn.
A new competition for the footbridge was announced, with a deadline of the architect’s 150th birthday. So on the very day Britain sunders itself from the EU, Lutyens will be inspiring a small but important piece of connectivity between two other mutually-hostile entities: the north and south sides of Dublin.