a town like alice i mean bray

 

Afternoon in the seaside town of Bray.

I'm here for an unemployment seminar ie a meeting with potential employers hosted by the Department of Social Welfare.

After the meeting I go for a carefree stroll.

The town strikes me as most curious.

Historically it dates from two hundred years ago and was established in its present form by a landlord during the period of colonial rule from Britain.

There are odd lingering mixes of Britishness and Irishness in the layout and style of the buildings. And in the people too maybe.

A yacht club building with cutesy olde worlde railings seems lost in a reverie about the time Bray was a way station in one of the great empires of the world. 

Victorian style houses line the sea front alongside (newer) millionaires' villas.

A somnolent historical fugg lingers over the place even as the brash present day asserts itself more and more.

The streets are thronged with varying ethnicities. Old and new Irish and some very new Irish indeed.

The streetscape undulates.

Finery and a faint seediness juxtaposed everywhere.

An atmospheric church dedicated to Christ The Redeemer thrones on Main Street.

There is a feeling of prosperity in the commercial centre not entirel dissipated by numerous shuttered shops.

A river, a bridge, a park, a railway line, and near the harbour many warehouses with graffiti.

Lovely sylvan fields within the precincts of the town but threatened by modern housing developments as tasteless as they are unnecessary.

Those hills we Irish insist are mountains cluster round the town, including one called the Sugar Loaf and another eyecatching lumpy thing near the ocean promenade whose name no one I met knows.

In a cafe on the promenade I see a characterful weatherbeaten fellow wearing a yachting hat.

What fascinates me is that his bicycle helmet reposes on the table in front of him.

So presumably he cycles to the cafe in the bicycle helmet and then puts on the yachting cap to drink his tea.

I am quite pleased as I leave when he gives me a jaunty sea dog's salute.

At some stage Bray became a holiday resort for the city of Dublin and it has all the poignant tacky glamour of places that at a certain time in Summer come alive and then go back to sleep again for the rest of the year.

I resist the urge to enter the casino.

It has to be said: the mountainy bits are really nice in close proximity to the urban area.

And of course the sea.

The ghost of John Keats appears beside me on the promenande and declaims conspiratorially:

"Oh ye who have your eyeballs vexed and tired, feast them upon the wildness of the sea."

He's right too.

The sea, the sea, the mystic sea...

God made the sea for healing.

The wildness and serenity of the sea.

What balm to the soul.

A lot of swans here too.

No disresepect to the other birds who tried manfully to get my attention.

But the swans are emblems of heaven.

I'm told the swans of Bray started with a single pair twenty years ago.

Now there's hundreds.

The beauty of the creation is not diminished by abundance.

Walking back to my car I see some striking graffiti on the external cladding of an ugly metal railway bridge.

Whoever put it there had to risk their lives to do it.

Fifty feet above concrete and river.

I'm trying to figure out how they managed it.

The graffiti reads:

"KLAUS SCHWB CAN KISS MY ASS"

The spelling of Schwab omits a required "a" but otherwise it's quite an impressive piece of draftsmanship.

I smile wondering did the garaffiti artist leave out the "a" in Schwab on purpose or did he get to the end of his scrolling blissfully unware of the omission, climb over the perilous gantryway back to safety, struggle through the thorny underbrush, bruised, scratched and bleeding, all the way back down to the riverside and only then from the clear vantage point of the walkway, risk a satisfied contemplative look back at his handiwork and realise, with all the angst of a frustrated Leonardo after putting an extra testicle on David, that he'd left out the "a" in Schwab?

(If Leonardo had actually put on extra testicle on David, Michaelangelo would have killed him. Because Michaelangelo sculpted David. - Ed note)

(Shuh up. - Heelers note)

The enigmas endure.

This wry speculation about the graffiti artist's true intent appeals to me mightily.

The thought behind the graffiti is quite appealing too.

For the eponymous Schwab is chairman of a group of super rich individuals and their attendant corporate entities who are reputed to exercise improper influence over governments and the fate of nations.

He's also famous because the commentator Mark Steyn does a rather engaging impression of him as a James Bond villain.

So.

At last some some graffiti I can actually approve of.

It actually makes the railway bridge look good.

I'm really beginning to like Bray.

Back in the car park my car has been clamped by a company styling itself APCOA.

It's an above ground carpark beside a supermarket where parking might be expected to be free. But I should have checked.

Early onset dementia is not generally accepted by clampers as a reason to release the cars they have mugged.

By mobile phone I contact the clampers who inform me they will not cancel the fine and they will not accept cash if I wish to pay it.

Well here's larks.

Refusing the legal currency of the State used to be illegal in the Republic of Ireland

In any case I don't have any cash for APCOA to refuse.

Certainly not the 125 Euro they're demanding I pay them in non cash form.

Nor do I have a credit card.

Nor do I have a friend to ask for help.

I ring someone who might pass for a friend on a dark night and ask her to pay it for me which she does using her own credit card.