Dublin

The Fates in St. Stephen's Green. Please don't look at the children. No, really! Photo by David Lansing.

Should really try and stay awake, despite no sleep for a day or so, or tonight will be hell. Shower and a fresh shirt. Throw open the window to my stuffy room. Fresh air. A little misty rain. Lovely. Maybe go for a stroll. Back down Earlsfort to St. Stephen’s Green. Stop for a breakfast of fresh lamb’s liver and bacon should the opportunity arise.

Bono and The Edge are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they’re tucking in to a full Irish breakfast and a pot of tea. Tea sounds good. But first a walk around the Green.

Just inside the gate, looking sinister and cold, bronzed versions of the Fates. Moirae. Unmerciful crones deciding what’s to happen to me. In the back is Clotho, the spinner, and in front of her Lachesis, who doles out the lots, but the most terrible is the eldest, Atropus—like atropy?—who snips life short.

A plaque on the edge of the pond says the three sisters were a gift from the German people in thanks for Irish help to refugees after World War II.

An odd thank-you gift: three unmerciful women.

Still, worth a picture. Stand back a few feet and take in the lovely green hedges and lawn and big-leafed trees to soften the nasty women. But someone is yelling at me. Coming up the path. A yellow-vested toddler in each hand and more dancing around her, like small yellow chicks.

Stop! she screams. No pictures! Do you hear me! No pictures.

Odd. Is this woman a living representation of the Fates? Scurrying up to me she places a hand in front of my camera. No pictures! she shrilly screams for the umpteenth time.

Is it not allowed to take photos in the park? I ask.

You’re taking pictures of the children! she says. You can’t take pictures of the children!

I’m not interested in the children, I tell her. I’m taking a photo of the Fates.

Well, the children are in it. No pictures of the children. It’s against the law!

Really? It’s against the law in Ireland to take photos with children in them?

Not yet. But it will be shortly, she says. Because of the priests, she says angrily.

I’m not a priest.

No matter! No photos!

So I put my camera away and the shrill sister to the Fates moves along with her brood of yellow chicks. Which have been accidentally but inevitably captured a minute earlier. And here’s the photo for all to see, children and all. Please, just concentrate on the Fates. Pay no attention to the toddlers coming up the path. None at all. Look away. As are the Fates. Because, you know, the priests!

Bono and The Edge greet me in front of the Conrad Hotel in Dublin. Photo by David Lansing.

Shortly after my flight touched down in Dublin a little after 7 in the morning (just love those red-eye flights, don’t you?), I got a text message from Bernard (who pronounces his name BER-nerd) saying he wouldn’t be picking me up at the airport and taking me to the hotel. “The options are a taxi or an airbus service which will take you to the city centre. But I have some special guests waiting for you at the hotel.”

Damn.

Up and over the traffic lanes to the other side of the airport, dragging my duffel behind me, and down the stairs, bumpety, bumpety, bump, swollen sleepy head looking for the taxi queue in a fine Irish misty morn when right in front of me just getting ready to depart is the AirCoach bus.

“Do you go anywhere near the Conrad?” I asked the driver as he was closing the baggage hold.

“Block away,” he said.

Fine, then. City centre and return, please. “Fourteen euros.”

Climb aboard and drag my tired carcass to the back of the bus and with head pressed against the cool glass, count the stops: Quinns Pub, O’Connell Street, Trinity College, Kildare, and finally me: St. Stephens Green. Raining, lightly, but I’m bushed and prefer a damp head to digging through my duffel for an umbrella. Besides, didn’t the fella say it was just a block away?

Up Earlsfort and past a lovely little café—I can smell the buttered toast and sweet scent of tea, but no time for that now; what I need is a bed, and sure enough, there’s the Conrad, flags hanging limp in the rain, and two figures smiling and pointing at me as if they’ve been waiting all morning for my arrival. It’s Bono with bee-eye sunglasses and a jaw that juts out from his chin like a diving platform, and The Edge, all perplexed and moody-eyed. Bigger than life. Really bigger than life.

“Hey, Dave!” they call as I walk by, stunned.

“How do you know my name?”

“BER-nerd,” says Bono. “BER-nerd said to say hello.”

Greetings from U2. And so begins my stay in Ireland.