Coming from a family who lived in a remote wooded area, far from civilisation, is perhaps one of the reasons why I find the sounds at night one of the most attractive aspects of life in this modern village.

You can lie in your bed all night long just listening to a non-stop cacophony of sound and noise – and sometimes, if you’re lucky, even feel vibrations . It reminds me of the part in that Beatles song (a highly overrated band if you ask me) where the orchestra keeps climbing higher before reaching it’s chaotic climax.

Sometimes I amuse myself trying to decipher the source of each sound ~

- high-pitched, prolonged screaming that could be a little girl being tickled or beaten beyond reasonable limits
.
- gruff voices shouting guttural grunts and phlegmy wheezes – workmen communicating as they work on the Luas line?
.
- stranger, strangulated voices: heroin addicts disconnected screeches hard to make out where they’re coming from, all going at once, emitting noise that makes you think you’re in Jurassic Park where hungry dinosaurs fight over food
.
- the rhythmic thump of bass blasting from an open balcony door across the yard: the European Disco sound Polish people sing along to as they selflessly keep it alive
.
- high-pitched ear-splitting sighs and yells: the bow-legged Chinese girl in the apartment just above ours, being made love to by her boyfriend or Rampant Rabbit, until, like the Beatles’ song, eventually climaxes in a frenzy of moaning multiple-orgasms.

Of course, there are other sounds, too: 

- squawking insomniac seagulls
.
- somebody whistling an unrecognisable tune
.
- the plastic sound of luggage wheels going out or coming in punctuated by high-heel clicking
.
- souped-up exhausts on boy-racer cars
.
- Nigerians standing out in the yard talking incessantly on mobiles to people who are either slightly deaf or extremely far away
.
- the snoring of the three guys with whom I share this bedroom
.
- sirens ~ ambulances, police cars, fire-engines
.
- alarms ~ car, apartment, shop, digital clock, mobile phones ~ serve as punctuation marks to the mellifluous symphony. 

As you can imagine, I can hardly wait to get into bed at night.

And if the whole thing wasn’t entertaining enough, the back and forth sounds coming from police helicopters overhead (the likes of which I’ve never seen) add to the sense of wonder and excitement and the knowledge that you are living in the clot-ridden pumping heart of Dublin.

Most nights this song of the Pale comes to an end just as the dawn begins to break, the bells of the Luas peal, and my weary body falls asleep.

© 2010 ORP

One of the few correct stereotypes of Dublin is that it’s a magical place.

Whenever I’m out and about I am filled with a sense of wonder and jaw-slack awe. Here in Custom House Square, on the rare occasion when clouds peel back, the whole place sparkles and glows with the sun’s rays dancing a jig on all the steel, chrome, glass and shiny stone that is the internationally admired International Financial Services Centre: the splendiferous jewel in the crown of the capital’s central showpiece.

Bob the Bouncer likes to complain that there’s hardly any trees or shrubbery or green anywhere, but I can deduce from the excellent, cutting-edge design and workmanship that’s gone into the awe-inspiring IFSC (as its fondly called by the natives), that the planners and architects deliberately chose to leave out nature. Why? Well, for one thing, to avoid the ‘green’ stereotype (although they did doff their hat to it when they built the amazing AIB building near Connolly Station – it’s all glass – bargain-basement wine-bottle green), and for another, to not detract from the glint and glare shooting like laser-beams down Mayor Street when the constant cover of cloud breaks momentarily.

Sure there’s been a number of accidents as a result of people being suddenly blinded ~

• an almost impossibly fat pre-pubescent girl in a too tight school uniform was hit by a car, but was fortunately unhurt as she bounced a few times down
  the Luas track, before getting up as though she’d merely tripped and fallen over
  .
• an Indian man wearing sandals had his foot stigmatised by a very long and sharp heel of another unfeasibly obese woman who stepped suddenly backwards when her boyfriend playfully swung a whiskey bottle at her face
  .
• a mangy stray dog who’d been jumping at one particular ray of reflected light caused by a crystal hanging from a window of a dorm-room in the National College of Ireland, hurled himself at it when it landed momentarily on the penis of a man who was reliving himself up against a concrete structure where people sit out and eat their lunch on pleasant days (the newspapers reported that even though the technology exists to sew it back on, they couldn’t, as the dog ate it, ran away whimpering, and then threw up in the middle of the street whereupon he was a jeep crushed him and smushed him right into his own mess)

But, hey, everyone knows you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette, right? Accidents will happen. Especially when so many people so much of the time are in full party mode and are intoxicated with either alcohol, illegal drugs, legal drugs, cough syrup, shoe polish, or all the above.

People here sure can party and are proud of it, too. Whoooh!

© 2010 ORP

I Love Dublin – by a Non-National

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT? WHICH CUSTOMER?

Strangely enough, the queues in the shop were not as long as they would usually be on a late Saturday afternoon. Maybe it was due to the sunshine, or maybe it was just sheer luck that I happened to go into the store to buy a head of broccoli during a momentary slump in traffic.

There is a choice of two queues in this particular store: you can join the one on the left that leads to a row of 5 or 6 payment points, or you can line up on the right where people with only a few items, or the desire to purchase cigarettes, normally go. With just my broccoli, I chose the left and patiently awaited my turn.

I was third in line when a woman (who displayed all the characteristics of a person under the influence of heroin or methadone), said something incoherent to the young girl at the top of the queue. Before receiving a reply, the woman went straight to the staff member behind the now ready for business pay point, made her purchase and stumbled out of the store. Nobody in the line, it seemed, noticed what had happened, looking absent-mindedly at their feet or gazing vaguely into the middle distance.

When my turn came, I approached the desk with a smile, and placing broccoli on counter, asked the staff member if the rules had been changed.

“What rule’s that?” she wanted to know.

“Well,” I said as casually as I could, “the rule about getting in line and waiting your turn like everyone else. Why did that woman just now get to skip the queue?”

The staff member looked at me as though I had two heads.

“Ah, her? That was all right ‘cause she asked the girl who was next if she could go before her.”

“That may be, but for one thing, she didn’t get an answer, and for another, even if the girl had said it was okay with her, what about the rest of us in line, do we have no say in the matter?”

Ignoring my question, she told me the price of my item and held out an impatient hand.

“So, just so I know the rules for next time I’m in, are you saying that if I get permission from the person at the head of the queue I can skip it?”

“Ah, jaysus – I didn’t want to cause any trouble, you know?”

I didn’t know, but thought she may have been referring to the trouble she thought may have ensued if she had challenged the drugged-up woman.

“Are you saying that because she was a potential trouble-maker, you thought it best to let her go ahead of everyone else?”

She repeated the price of the broccoli and pushed her hand closer.

Handing over the money, I asked if I could speak with a manager.

She said she was the manager.

I asked her if she thought it was worth losing a long-time customer to keep a customer – with no regard for rules – satisfied.

She handed me my change and said, looking over my shoulder: Next!

© 2011 ORP

Ugliness abounds and echoes through this chrome and concrete place as viscerally as the sounds. In hindsight I see that this hard, dry district on the docks grows more offensive to my sight the more depressed I get. Let me explain.

At first glance, I admit, I was taken with the whole area. Firstly, I thought it was bigger and much cleaner than it turned out to be (I mean the IFSC, which for all intent and purpose has one street – Mayor, upper and lower). A sunny workday afternoon, I was meeting a client in the Excise Bar (which has the thickest stone walls I’ve ever seen) and I was fooled into thinking the place was hygienic and bacteria-free because of all the glint and shine twinkling off the buildings’ glass and metal (and the giant chrome orchid standing like an erect alien-weed in front of the National College of Ireland, like a kitchen in a TV ad), sparkling.

Some old sayings manage to stay alive because they’re true. Here’s one: All that glitters isn’t gold. On a bad day (a hot day in summer as opposed to a snowy day in winter), walking down the footpaths of Mayor Street is like walking on a footpath of filth: sloppy, sticky, smelly. On Talbot Street nearby, one has to slalom one’s way through the heroin addicts – like playing a zombie computer game. It is useful to have the slaloming skill on Mayor Street, too, as you try to manoeuvre your away over and around things on the path and road – from freshly spat out chewing-gum all the way through to horizontal bodies foaming at the mouth like rabid dogs.

I lived in the country for a period of time and often wore wellies or some other type of boot, and outside my front door was one of those fixed in place wire brush doohicky thingamabobs that you could rub the bottom of your heel and sole against to dislodge the clumps of dirt and muck that’s sole-purpose is to adhere at all costs. Residents of the IFSC don’t need one of those here as sludgy earthy muck isn’t on the radar too often. What we need when we get to the front and only door to our apartment is some kind of high-pressure nozzle spraying scalding-hot antiseptic before allowing our shoes into our confined and not very well ventilated living quarters. It’s a pipe dream… when I pipe dream.

I kick myself now for my misplaced lack of scepticism back in 2004 when I signed my life (or at least the life of my sight and hearing) away on the dotted line. The shock of loudly layered sound surrounded by never ending levels of noise, like an audible but invisible Pied-Piper, led me down a dark and twisted path, into the forest of frustration at first, and then, deeper into the wood-lined coffin-like walls of depression. By adding to that fact another – namely that it was all new to me… well, I can just about redeem myself… forgive myself for missing what was eventually going to become obvious as the years began to blur.

KEEP YOUR CHIN UP!

I had been unknowingly or unwittingly selective with my sight, blotting out what didn’t fit in with my preconceived notion of this neck of the woods here in Dublin 1. The layers got peeled away like a veil, and with each revolution, more was revealed. They say if you put a frog into boiling water he’ll jump out of the pot. But if you put him in a pot full of cold water with the heat on, he’ll stay in there, not noticing the temperature rising by degree, until he boils to death. (The number one American Idiot – Glenn Beck – demonstrated live on his TV show a frog being dropped into a pot of boiling water. It disappeared momentarily beneath the steaming bubbles, only in the next moment, not to jump out… or the next… and so on. Beck, unfazed, continued to manically talk his own demented mixture of jive and gibberish.)

Depressed. I’m in need of some deep rest. Depression, you may have noticed if you do any people watching (and aren’t all the time staring above people’s heads as some are prone to do), requires a certain posture: slumped to some degree, shoulders down and rounded inward, head bowed and gaze down, as though gravity’s hand is pushing harder, heavier.

Upon moving in I possessed a posture any person could have been proud of, standing erect, up straight, spine free of slump or sag. Depression came along, and with all the gravity it had in tow, caused me, over time (which is why I didn’t notice… it being so gradual and all) to let my vision fall lower and lower until I began to see for the first time the paths and streets my feet were walking on.

My eyes smarted as though slapped: rods and cones tingled as if suddenly thoroughly coming out of a coma. They still smart as they continue acclimatising – seeing what they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see before. Things don’t look too bad around here if you look up most of the time. Although, it must be said, even looking up is revealing more and more. And I wonder with a shudder – what the hell have I been looking at for the past five years? Was it always a dirty little eye-sore and I had just deleted it? Or was it relatively clean when I first moved in and has grown worse at a similar pace to my depression?

The violent visuals that cause one’s eyeballs to feel like they’ve got a bastard of a headache mainly consist of, but are not limited to, the following:

- on the eye-line – this is the least worst of all the three angles and does not offer anything too remarkable. Except for the one example of graffiti, written in what looks like… oh, you can make that call for yourself.

- above the eye-line – there are supposedly rules in the apartment block I live in, which include: not hanging your laundry out to dry on your balcony, and not erecting satellite dishes. These rules are ignored and you don’t have to imagine the visuals because you can look at these actual pictures instead. I wish I could say it was getting better and there is less and less of it. Either it was always so, or its getting worse and worse, which is a scary thought because one can only imagine, with a little mathematics, that the IFSC will, within less than five years, become invisible to the naked eye, buried beneath piles of… well, you pick the word that resonates with you the most: garbage, rubbish, trash, waste, human excrement, bodily functions, filth.

- below the eye-line – I suppose, if you were a garbage collector (and I don’t mean bin man), you’d be impressed with all the kinds of detritus you’ll find –

- greasy food wrappers

- fresh green pavement-oysters (almost as likely as to have been hawked-up by a female as a male – let’s not be sexist!)

- faeces (both animal and human)

- urine (same again)

- vomit (you guessed it – and yes, resplendent with diced carrots!)

- melting ice-cream

- spilled beverages turning tacky

- chips and crisps and hula-hoops

- beer bottle caps

- a large dead chicken

- drink cans

- drink can tabs

- broken beer bottles

- pint glasses (from pubs)

- broken glasses (from pints and eye-glasses)

- used undies (with skid-marks that could have been made by a tyre)

- an old crusty sock

- a rusty nail

- a shiny shoe with a broken heel

- pages of The Sun flapping like dying birds

- a small pool of blood congealing beneath a cloud of flies

- an unidentified small animal dying in the shadowy corner of the doorway to another recently closed-down shop

- a used condom

- a bent fork

- a twisted tyre from a stolen bike

- a far-flung and once full diaper like an unblinking muddy eye

- cigarette butts carpeting the concrete

- cigarette packets crushed and torn

- WildCat packs

- a used tampon hanging like a ripe fruit from the snapped limb of a sickly tree

- something on the ground covered by ants… could be a salted slug… could be a dried out severed lower lip…

If you have a strong stomach (or are just not very good at making pictures in your head) and are still reading this, you may be thinking that I’m exaggerating, and that’s perfectly understandable. You should be sceptical of what I say… just as you should be sceptical of what the glossy brochures produced by the estate agents say, or what the landlord of some apartment says… be sceptical and get evidence for yourself. I will be posting video soon of the streets of the IFSC and you can see as judge then whether my descriptive prose (purple as it may be) is also accurate.

As Oscar Wilde (who had never had the pleasure to frequent the IFSC) once said: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’

Now that I’ve seen what’s on the ground, I realise that it’s okay to be looking at the stars… but not while walking down Mayor Street. For that, you need to pay attention to where you’re feet are landing. What with the non-stop road works, you could disappear down a black hole.

And for those of you who are in need of a visual antidote to the sickness I’ve just shared with you… here, let me introduce my dog, Doug!

I’m his master and he loves me…

© 2010 ORPS6

The noise. The relentless, wall-to-wall, layered like an onion NOISE!

How bad is it? Well, the cacophony of sound that makes it’s way in from outside – where the wild things are – has gotten so bad over the years, that a couple on the top floor of my building (Custom Square House), where the noise is supposed to be a lot less than here on the ground, have just spent over €20,000 on soundproofing. Goodness knows how much they purchased their apartment for… and now they’ve got to inject another €20k? What next?

On hot days, when one is forced to open doors and windows on account of the forgetful architects failing to include air-conditioning in Ireland’s most modern (at the time) apartment buildings, I cross my fingers and hope that my top floor neighbours forked out for air-conditioning, too (because heat rises and its as hot as hell up there in the hallway) or on hot days, their investment in sound-proofing will be in vain. What then? We’ll probably bump into each other out in my hallway on the ground floor late at night as its cool out there with bare walls and floors.

The nightly noise (that usually carries us, like dawn, into morning) consists, but is not limited to, the following:

• people who live here – babies crying, adults partying with music thump-thump-thumping loudly but not strongly enough to drown out the voices of the party-goers talking, conversing loudly on mobile phones, singing, shouting, screaming, yelling, shrieking, laughing, cackling, howling, and crying! It’s hard to tell sometimes… whether a young lady is being made love to or just being murdered… whether a young child is being beaten or tickled… whether a man is screaming for joy because he’s just heard great news or he’s just found out someone swiped his last fix of heroin… whether an animal is being raped or sacrificed at the stake… and that’s just from within.

• people outside the apartment block - for some reason I am not privvy to, people (mainly young, which is to say, less than 40) pass by here all night, either on the Guild Street side or the Mayor Street side. Sure, some pass by silently, heads bowed hurrying home, but they are the minority. Most seem intent on making as much noise as they pass, leaving as much aural-trauma in their wake as possible. From gangs of boys with powdered nostrils in hoodies and tucked in track-suit bottoms (which, if you’re interested, itinerant girls find very attractive) to love-sick couples, awash in alcohol and unable to balance, sick of love and all they’ve consumed earlier, splashing it up here and there along the way, reminiscent of the way dogs like to pee in spurts, marking their territory as they go. From gaggles of witch-like cacklers, voices like dying dinosaurs competing with the hollow clicking of their heels as they lurch this way and that trying to find the party, to groups of deep-voiced foreign-men, bodies-dumbbell-built and domes of bumpy, scarred skin, polishing off bottles of vodka that are then tossed into the street, like used tissue paper, as many of the women will be later, pulling their wheely-cases behind them.

• traffic, boy-racer cars with extra-loud exhaust pipes, traffic lights beep-beep-beeping, luas (the light-rail system that runs from 5:30am to 12:30am), alarms, bad European disco, barking, seagulls, drilling, hammering, engines revving in the car park, kids learning to roller-blade, the pounding of a football, hovering helicoptors (that make you feel like you’re in Apocolypse Now!).

If you think that’s bad, you’d be mistaken. All of that would be like a silent night if it weren’t for this mind-boggling fact: In the Custom House Square area of the IFSC, the blocks of buildings (and maybe lack of greenery – trees, bushes, grass) conspire together to take every sound that’s made, and before sending it off to echo around the place, it somehow manages to magnify each noise. A couple in a bedroom making love over on the other side of the atrium can sound like a porno movie is playing right inside your bedroom. To some of you, this may be a good reason to consider moving in. If you want the visuals too, you can invest in a good pair of binoculars. You’ll get an eyefull. I’ve been told.

I remember asking when I first moved in about the noise level as my hearing is fairly acute and I wanted as much quiet as I could get. I was assured it was. Very. Well, I can hear the baby in the apartment to my left when she sneezes. To my right – well, the sounds that come from there at the strangest times of night, leave me to wonder in concern. It sounds like a sweat-shop where dozens of people are making things… dresses, small bird-houses, miniature tools… I don’t know what. Every night I wonder: What are they building in there?

And every night I wonder, as I lay my head down, will I fall asleep before the nocturnal symphony begins? In case I’m still awake when the bluish light of dawn creeps through the cracks in the curtains, I wear an eye-mask if I remember. Sometimes I win, and beat the noise to it… but it’s less and less. The dark bags under my eyes attest to this fact. Earplugs? I’ve tried, but they only lessen it a little. If I do manage to sleep, the built-up stress of waiting for it to arrive, expresses itself through drooling mastication and heavy-duty teeth-grinding. I’ve chewed my way through a half-dozen teeth-guards so far, and they ain’t cheap! And speaking of making love, well, without giving too much away or being graphic, suffice to say that my wife and I used to, when we first moved in, prefer the morning time. Not any more. My wife takes one look at me – like a dribbling Zorro with spuds sticking out of ears and upper lip jutting out as though I’ve been punched hard – and, well… I guess the mood passes. Who’d have thought that moving into the IFSC could have such a negative effect on ones lovelife? Uh… not me.

So, is there a lesson here? Maybe. If I ever get out of this hell-hole, I know one thing I’m going to do different next time. Listen: If you were going to buy a car, you’d be considered somewhat credulous if you did so without test-driving it first, right? If I were to move into an apartment again, and I’d recommend you do the same – I’ll not make my decision to ‘buy’ until I’ve spent a Saturday night there. If the landlord didn’t want to do that, I’d say, fair enough, that’s all I need to know, before walking away.

If you are thinking of moving into the IFSC I cannot advise you, no – urge you -  strongly enough to spend a night first. And maybe you should do it now: it’s an extra special time here in the hell-hole now the World Cup is on.

If you already live here and have any ‘noise stories’ you’d like to tell us about, we’re listening.