EPT
![[image loading]](http://www.dublin-attractions.com/images/guinness_storehouse_dublin.jpg)
Today being saint Patrick’s day, and I being a man who doesn’t generally do well when out and about immersed in the strange embrace of stage-Irishness that seems to sometimes accompany the whole affair, usually tend to stay at home. Of course, I’m no stranger to the little things that being Irish entails, the appreciation of a good fry or a solid gripe about the weather included, it’s just that living in a version of Ireland normally seen only through some kind of mad stereotype lens is a little disorienting.
This year was different though; this year I had somewhere to be. An appointment had been made, and damned if I wasn’t going to lumber into it, a little late, confused and probably tired out. So it was that, at around three this afternoon, myself and Colin made our way to the Guinness Storehouse. For all my simple pleasure with the general Irishness of things, I’ve never been to the storehouse before, and finally getting there was both pleasant and, in a way I’m sure doesn’t quite make sense, a touch unsettling.
The day was sunny in patches, but, for the most part, a fitting overcast Irish afternoon. We’d walked for about forty minutes to get to the storehouse itself, and things had been strange enough as it was. The quays were, essentially closed off entirely, and empty enough that we were basically just a change of colour palette away from being in a strangely slutty zombie movie, groups of people shambling about, apparently without any kind of objectives in mind.
It wasn’t until we hit the storehouse itself that things started to get strange. The whole thing seems to have been built around the same time as the office buildings and houses around the house I grew up in. These are, at their simplest, places built on a size, scale and style I can only guess went out with the closing of the eighteen hundreds. The walls are rough, stone bricks sheared flat on every side except the outward facing one, which is left with erratic ridges and troughs, rough enough to have grazed my arms on as a child, but too smooth to reasonably consider climbable.
There’s no easy or clever way to describe the experience… I walked the length of the storehouse approach with the fingers of my left hand stretched a little to brush the wall. The feeling is of being near home, but knowing absolutely nothing about where you are, the textures are all right, the look is solidly one of “home,” but I feel shaken and out of place.
Within the storehouse, that feeling of a fundamental and somehow essential disconnect. The bricks are white, layered either with repeated paintings or with some deliberately gloss-smooth coating that reflects the brightness of lighting far newer than the walls themselves. The corners as they lead to windows are smoothed off into rounded curves, managing somehow to communicate the impression of the building having once been a hospital, but I’m keenly aware that I’ve never been in a hospital with brick walls, much less such specific features.
By now, I’ve been feeling as though I’m somewhere I’ve both never been and been often in equal measure for about twenty minutes, and the strangeness of my response to the walls and piped ceilings has managed to introduce a third element of not-quite-recognition to the party. It’s a clamour of mixed memories and senses that don’t quite match up with my own experiences.
The light is right, the windows are where they should be, the walls are identical and the ground underfoot is familiar, but there are tram tracks here where never there were at home. The ceilings are high and the windows broad, single glazed affairs that open outwards, but the brickwork is jarring.
I spent the whole day on a strange rotation of having an absolutely fantastic time and getting kicked in the face by nostalgia that, somehow, didn’t quite feel like it was my own. It’s like alien hand syndrome, only for your brain.
